Branding to Community*

Do your profile in Hyves.nl (the Dutch look alike of MySpace and extremely popular among – mainly – teens with around 5 million users). Fill in all questions including the one about your favorite brands. When done, a universe of new friends unfolds. For instance, if you are into Vespa, you will find that over 12.000 other Hyves users share your passion. You can pick your choice to share your brand passion with those you choose. That’s nice!It is also nice for Vespa, the company. Vespa can target its dedicated followers to present them a suitable proposition and anchor the brand in the lives of teens.What more can a brand whish for than such a loyal community of fans? Hyves, as a prime brand, in this case facilitates the relationship between a brand and the brand user(s). And exactly that seems to be an emerging role certain brands appropriate; facilitation of relationships between brands and brand users in social media. Such a facilitating brand must bear certain requirements in mind, specifically those of trust and transparency. The Hyves user knows that personal data appear in the public domain of the social network. So, Hyves must create a framework of trust. Hyves does so by offering a package of options and services that limit the level of publicity of personal data. Only by allowing others (friends) specific rights, one may read personal data at different levels.A propos, the true power of a facilitating brand like Hyves does not necessarily lie in the relative trust of the site but more in the role of social brand. A social brand facilitates contacts between people in text, audio and video, both directly (synchronic, with one push of the button) or per tiding (posting, email, voice mail; a-synchronic). A brand is social if it promotes the dialogue, the participation and the relevance of usage for its users. Many of these facilitating social brands have a crossmedial strategy because they, for instance, incorporate chat, instant messaging and email, thus turning these media into social (sharing) media.Social media marketing, when done the right way, has an enormous impact on brand awareness and popularity. This impact can be brought about by inserting dialogue and participation promotional tools and by offering tailor made and therefore relevant propositions to the users. Not many brands make use of this relatively cheap method of marketing. If we analyze social media and compare the results with mainstream (traditional) media, we can convert the brands that make use of social media. With this type of research we can also conclude the effectiveness of social media. This effectiveness is called ‘share of voice’ (SOV).In SOV research we measure how many times brands are mentioned by users of social media and how they are mentioned (sentiment; negative, neutral, positive). Apart from this, we also measure the success rate with which the brands have incorporated different social media and vice versa (users making use of the facilitating social brand in social media.The parameters that are used in such research are dividend in different categories, i.e.:
·         The blogosphere with YouTube as latitude for online video
·         Popularity of social network site with MySpace and Bebo as latitudes for photo sites
·         Popularity of social bookmarking, user generated content and other content with Digg, Magnolia and Delicious as latitudes[1]Content is the key word. It is, when talking about social media as a communication tool for users, generated by those users (user generated content). On the other side, social media techniques (and technologies) become a communication tool from brands as well. So we can say that brands that provide content create social media. Some nice examples are Dell’s http://direct2dell.com/, the Disney-related blog http://blog.mousekingdom.com/ and Starbuck’s http://www.itsredagain.com/. Social media do have a considerable impact on brand awareness and popularity. For the brand user, the emphasis is not on overall attribution of brand value as such, but more on the product itself, the applicability and the buzz environment. Also, most social media are niche products, primarily adapted by early adapters. Traditional media focus mainly on the final financial effect (brand equity) of the investments in the brand. Social brands understand that by being a ‘friend’ who is talked about, the value not only increases in terms of economic capital but also in terms of social capital.

Kees

* Harry van Vliet (Harry’s site) has invented the term “Branding to Community”. He first used the term in the text for his public lecture, upcoming January 10, 2008.

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[1] This design of research is taken from Immediate Future’s Share of Voice ranking (2007)

Tagtopia

Training back to Amsterdam, the evening sun filled the sky with perfect orange, reflected in the greys, blues and whites of the Dutch autumn clouds. A perfect picture. I returned from Utrecht, the city where I teach stuff. I had attended a workshop organized by SurfNet on social tagging. Can we tag the sun? What’s the use?

Earlier that day, the organizers asked the group of soulfully engaged cross-media innovators to come up with a creative idea on how to use social tagging. Harry van Vliet, my lector, and I came up with a pretty nice idea. We called it “Tagtopia”. Here it is.

We are with the Research Center Cross-media Content at the university of applied sciences in Utrecht. We study topics like social tagging and many others, as long as these topics fit into the domain of cross-media. Our school has an intranet (Sharepoint). There’s a lot of criticism about this Sharepoint and for us, the main point of interest is building an e-learning environment, momentarily not supported by that intranet. We will build a tag-engine that will give the user, in this case students, all contents related to a subject, person and activities (in relation to that specific subject). Simple and efficient. And, probably, useful.

What’s the use of tagging? We live in a world in which we want to know. Public annotation is a big thing. The Internet is our door to knowledge. It provides us with all we always wanted to know but never were able to find. At least, we are able to find information easily and rapidly. But being informed is not the same as knowing.

Clouds and the sun always enlighten me. They remind me of Utopia, the perfect state (or status). Combine that with curiosity and what do you get? Hunger for information. And I believe that tagging things help.

During the workshop, Harry remarked that there is no such thing as social tagging. Tagging is typically a-social. That’s a good point. Social implies an activity done to serve more than one. It is me giving something to somebody else. Tagging is something you do for yourself. Social tagging is a tool to recall; I want to find back what interested me yesterday and quite franckly, I don’t really care wether others are helped with my tags or not. Social tagging is not about sharing. It can be used as such but what you tag depends on your own private semantics and ontologies. Therefor, in the pure sence of the word, there is no social tagging. There’s just tagging.

It’s like me tagging the sun. I got fasinated by the brilliance of the momentum and tried to describe it; orange, blue, grey, white. And also Dutch, perfect. Others may have enjoyed the scene as well but they have seen it from their prespective. They are not me and I am not theme. Phisically, even the angles of approach were different. So they have actually seen something else at the same moment in time. So they must have tagged the moment differently. Interesting.

Brand to community by using hubs in social networks

The days marketers could target audiences through planning, developing products and executing advertising campaigns and smart media strategies are coming to an end. More and more this marketer must share his market control with global production networks, powerful retailers and the Crossmedia industry. And above all, he must share his market control with the empowered consumer who influences his peer group and social network, the so called hub. Hubs provide social networks content, advice, news, opinion and entertainment through social media like Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and many others. According to Forrester Research, these social media double their impact and reach every six months. Innovative brands like Dove, Adidas and Tampax have been offering, and will continue increasingly, engaged and influential consumers tailored propositions and images online.Brands increasingly mix user generated content with professional content thus creating integrated platforms where brands and consumers meet. The question for marketers raises how to do this right. Perhaps the solution is publish control. This is the marketer’s control over what is published. This way, the brand becomes a facilitator, not a dictator. Support hubs and reward them through social network tailored reward systems.Also support the development of so called Rapid Response Methods for the value web of the brand, retailers, manufacturers, Crossmedia organisations and other actors in what was formerly known as the value chain. Have these actors participate actively and interactively with all, including of course the consumers.Also develop customer care programs (these are more than CRM) and crossmedial interaction models based on trust and transparency by means of personalized experience possibilities. Traditional marketing tools like reach and frequency and traditional target audience segmentation models (social and wealth classes, gender, geo market profiles, etc.) are becoming less relevant. Consumers are tormented by the overkill of information and will not be dictated any more. Along side, consumers claim more and more power in the process of question and demand. The innovative marketer will have to come up with new measuring tools like share of voice measurements and rankings in social networks (how many times is your brand mentioned and with what sentiment?), NetPromotor and Buzz tracking to measure the effect of marketing investments in social networks. These monitoring systems provide possibilities for all actors to hook into the communication of all actors in order to actualize and keep the relationship alive.  One main issue of attention in this is the mentality of the consumers; what their attitude (philosophy) towards life is in general and the brand specifically. It is in fact the kernel of the marketer’s investment in such value webs. This raises some questions that need further research.

1. What is the change in consumer behavior and mentality regarding brands, content and interaction?
2. How have innovative brands tapped in social networks and their dynamics?
3. What are the dynamics and communication patterns in social networks and how do we tap in?
4. Under which conditions are consumers prepared to have a social media facilitated relationship with a brand?
5. What are examples of the mix of UGC and brand content and what is their impact on the behavior of the actors?
6. How do we develop innovative target audience segmentation models to successfully tap in with social networks?
7. What are the innovative Crossmedia interaction models and formats (that need to be developed)?
8. How can we identify hubs in social networks?
9. What are the requirements in developing interactive Crossmedia platforms?

 I’d apreciate input on these issue.

Kees