Unless you are Osama bin Laden’s roommate, you’ll know that 2009 is the year Twitter took off. It has grown by over 1,000 percent and the phrase “tweet it” has become part of the popular lexicon. While many people still “don’t get it“, it has become incredibly powerful. How did this happen?
A bit of background
The development of modern civilisation is marked by big changes arising from new communication technologies. The creation of the mail system, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, the internet and mobile phones have all been incredibly powerful influencers. They have made the world a smaller place and every step has allowed information to be passed along at a progressively faster rate.
The impact of these technologies has been all about their rate of uptake and penetration into societies. The more people were using the technologies, the more people could be influenced. Once a critical mass is created you begin to get powerful ‘network’ effects and then ubiquity.
Today we couldn’t imagine life without a mobile phone. It has achieved ‘ubiquity’. Yet it is worth remembering that the first five years or so of mobile phone technology was met with a lot of resistance from the general public. The technology was confusing for many and the price to many was prohibitive. Less than 15 years ago, penetration rates among retail consumers was relatively low.
The rise and penetration of social media has been meteoric compared to the adoption of the ‘new’ communication technologies that preceded it. Assuming you have the hardware to connect, the cost is practically free and the collective minds of all the users work to create ever-easier ways to use it. Facebook’s massive population of nearly 250 million is a great example of how this can happen if all of the elements are right. Social media is seeing the development of “The New Socialism“, as Wired magazine put it.
Enter Twitter
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey in 2006. It was designed as a micro-blogging service that could be updated by computer or mobile phone. As more and more people began using Twitter, new ways of using it were discovered, and the service started to take off.
Today it is estimated that there are about eight million Twitter users worldwide. High profile users like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher give its popularity added momentum. Many people now turn to Twitter’s real-time search engine first to find out what is happening in the world.
There are new applications changing almost every day that allow account holders to use Twitter in new ways. You can connect to Twitter via any technology that can access the internet, which means you can connect your network too. The momentum it is experiencing suggests that it has reached the ‘tipping point’.
Changing the world
It wasn’t until June this year that it became apparent how powerful Twitter had become. The owners of Twitter had scheduled a standard maintenance outage. It was set for the middle of the night in the USA, Twitter’s biggest market. Then Twitter was approached by the US State Department. The Iranian election and subsequent protests were getting a huge amount of international coverage. The State Department determined that Twitter was the most important communication tool for the protesters to communicate and organise. As a result, Twitter was persuaded to delay the outage to fit with Iranian usage. As events unfolded in Iran, Twitter was buzzing with protests, including an attempt to shut down the Iranian state websites.
Looking ahead
The future of specific platforms like Twitter is far from certain. What is a safe bet is that people will demand the real-time information flow these platforms enable. Social media will grow and spread until it reaches complete ubiquity and we will all wonder how we ever lived without it. It will affect how people from different cultures communicate, how governments are chosen and constrained, and how brands reach markets.
The sooner you and your company get on board, the better you will be placed to take advantage of the wealth of information being made available by this transformation.
Customers are very publicly talking back and it is making the management teams of some brands very nervous.
Not so long ago the relationship that brands had with their customers was a one way street. The brand was the boss. They told their customers what they liked and how to like it. The only say the customer had was the decision to buy. This is no longer the case, customers are very publicly talking back and it is making the management teams of some brands very nervous. Web based social networking platforms give customers power never seen before. Now one voice can be heard by thousands of people. Brands need to learn to deal with this evolution, so here is a primer.
First, some background on how the internet has altered consumer behaviour. The internet, and particularly the rise of social media, has allowed people with similar interests to connect. This is abundantly obvious when one trawls through Twitter where the common social network model of simply connecting with people you know tends to give way to people connecting in groups according to interest. Indeed, people interested in any topic imaginable from all areas of the world are connecting. It’s like subject based forums on steroids. People are forming tribes.
People desperately want to be connected but, even more importantly, they want to be led.
Humans have always formed tribes. Religion, family, sports and fashion are all examples of tribal behaviour. The difference now is that any interest group can form a tribe almost instantly. Social media has allowed any fringe idea to become the basis of a tribe and a movement. People desperately want to be connected but, even more importantly, they want to be led. We are in a time of massive change. This change is driven by everybody’s desire to do things in a new way and to be heard.
Barack Obama’s recent landslide victory is a good example of this. He promised change, he communicated differently and led with integrity. He connected to his audience through social media. He started a movement, formed a tribe and then he and his followers charged to victory. What the world discovered is that you can now make an ad campaign as slick as you want but if the product is poor then it simply doesn’t matter.
So “advertising is dead” in the sense the old methods don’t work the same way they used to. Obama’s opponents didn’t fully understand the impact that social networking has had on society. They continued to use the old and trusted methods of marketing. These apparently transparent methods are diminishing in influence as social networking begins to infiltrate every media touch-point. In two recent articles I wrote for the Anthill blog I talked about how this is already happening to television and how the newspaper industry needs to change to avoid becoming irrelevant (see the end of this article for links).
Brands that don’t adapt to this reality will be left behind.
Social media is much more than a passing phase. Human civilisation is built around social interaction. It’s what the people want and this new media is only going to get bigger. It will eventually become part of everything. Individual social media companies might fade away (MySpace seems to be in that category) as better designed products come onto the market, but the world has spoken and it wants to be connected. Brands that don’t adapt to this reality will be left behind. They will become the guy at the party that nobody wants to sit next to because he just keeps talking about himself.
Tribal behaviour
Blogs have become socially and commercially influential. From what started out as individuals chatting on about their lives, blogs have become business tools and money making ventures. They influence groups, buying patterns and fashion. They are modern tribal leaders.
Now anyone with a camera or a desire to write is ‘the press’.
Not so long ago commentators speculated that blogging was simply a passing fad. What these commentators didn’t realise was that it was yet to achieve maturation and once it had it would signal big trouble for the large media organisations. Now anyone with a camera or a desire to write is ‘the press’. This pattern is being repeated for micro-blogging, a category of which Twitter is the current market leader. Some commentators question the relevance of utilising Twitter to listen to people “drone on about their lives”. But Twitter, and other micro blogs, are in the early stages of their development. They too will mature, most probably much quicker than the original blogs, and enable much bigger tribes to develop around even more specific subject matter.
The tribal leaders of these new social media can be reached and persuaded to support you, no matter what platform they decide to use. Unlike the old ‘one way’ approach however, they need to be interacted with on their own terms. Provided they have a group of true fans, they can influence hundreds of thousands of people – in a matter of hours. This is what gives them such power.
And this is what marketers in the current environment have to understand. The ‘mass-market’ model is on the decline. What is needed now is a pattern of marketing to the ‘early adopters’ – the guys at the front of the bell curve, the ones that have a true interest in what you have to offer – and form a base of evangelists that will market for you. You no longer have to aim to connect with everyone. This really leaves the field wide open for the smaller brands to break through – the ones willing to challenge.
The age of the challenger
In marketing speak a ‘challenger brand’ is code for ‘the small brand’. A challenger brand is one that is meant to be fast, flexible and innovative in its communications. But in my view the word ‘challenger’ should instead be short hand for ‘emerging leader’.
Emerging leaders challenge the status quo, they challenge themselves and they connect with others who have similar ideas – those people who need a leader to show and inspire them what to do. The market leader wants the status quo to remain just that. They want to speak and be heard in a mass market. No discussion thanks. The challenger realises that, in order to create a movement there needs to be systems in place for everybody in that tribe to be heard, and they commit to leading that tribe with everything they’ve got.
Traditional advertising is not about interaction with the individual. It is predominately a one way conversation to a mass audience. But nobody likes to be forced into making decisions. This is why the traditional advertising model is beginning to fail. It relies on mass media, and this media is itself being transformed by social networks.
What can social networking do for your brand
All of this may sound a bit scary for brand managers. It’s true that it does take time and effort to build a community and to be truly effective you have to obey some rules. Even so, it is not a hard thing to do. It takes far more time and resources to build that fan base with traditional advertising. Be honest, be helpful and contribute to the community and you’ll get supporters fast.
Social networking is far more than having a Facebook profile. It is any platform that gives the end user an ability to contribute. Many companies have realised that developing an internal social media platform can aid in communication but have yet to work out how it can help shape their brand personality.
A good social media strategy accepts you can’t do everything at once. A company can employ a social platform to perform customer service, to connect directly with customers thereby humanising the brand, to obtain demographic information on individuals to improve the effectiveness of direct marketing or to harness a mass of surplus cognitive resource to generate new ideas.
You can’t do everything with social media but as long as you are focused you will be able to do much more than you may expect.
Where to start
In the coming months many companies will try to market through social networks and many will fail.
In the coming months many companies will try to market through social networks and many will fail. There are of course ways of dramatically upping the chances of success, not least of which is making sure you hire a company that knows the space well. Making sure you are across the fundamentals will help move things along quickly.
The first thing any company moving into social networking should decide is the overall goal. Knowing what you want to achieve and why you are doing it may seem obvious but is something that is easily overlooked if you rush into a project too quickly.
Like any good marketing activity you need to know how your customers think and behave. Unlike traditional advertising, marketing online is very data rich. It is possible to know exactly what your customers are looking at, how long they spend doing it and who they then talk to about the experience. Make sure you know as much of this information as is possible before you develop a strategy any further.
From there deciding what channels you wish to utilise becomes a very important choice. You should know where your target market is by this stage so deciding if Facebook, Twitter, Bebo or any other platform is right should be easy. Deciding to create your own platform is a bigger step but can be very rewarding if it is done correctly. Again, make sure you are getting good advice and a solid strategy and don’t just assume that if you make something it will get used.
Measurement is important in all areas of business and social networking is no exception. Developing good metric methods should be an early priority. Remember that it is possible to measure everything but not all information has value. Knowing what you are looking at is vital. If you are hiring a marketing firm to build you a social networking campaign it makes sense to have part of the payment tied to the performance of that campaign. If you are building a network to get staff talking to each other and your customers the quality of the content will go down if you assign KPIs to ‘platforms usage’ only.
Most importantly make sure everyone involved knows what your ‘voice’ is. It is wise to develop a policy around social networking usage but if that policy is too tight then you will lose support. This is about people. Learn that it is OK to give up control of your marketing message and become part of the conversation. Be honest, be objective and be involved. And do not leave your community. You have made a promise to these people to listen to them. If you stop participating they will abandon you in an instant!
Start leading
There is no better time to start developing social media strategies.
There is no better time to start developing social media strategies. All market segments are spending a lot more time on social networks (the time spent on Facebook grew by over 500% in the year Dec ‘07 to Dec ‘08) and in this time of economic downturn it may be wise to attract new customers from further afield. In the not too distant future every company will have a social networking policy so getting in early will give you an edge.
If you can hold a conversation you can market in social media
Marketing in social networks is not rocket science. It may involve technology but, at its core, it is what human civilisation is built upon. If you can hold a conversation you can market in social media.
So get good advice and get moving. The world is changing and the challengers are going to come out on top. They will create movements and lead tribes. They will interact and not be afraid of change. They will know how to listen and realise the greatest power they have is to empower their customers.
If you understand that these networks have all been built because it’s what your customers want, then the challenger, the leader, can be you.
“Microblogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year.”
“With celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey helping fuel Twitter mania, the micro-blogging website is soaring to stardom around the world, according to Hitwise.
Twitter’s growth in Australia “has been nothing short of phenomenal,” rocketing 1067 per cent since the start of this year, reported Alan Long, research director at the Internet intelligence gathering firm.”
Recent article from the Chicago Tribune (April 27, 2009)
“While just a few years ago the mediums were associated with the teenage and 20-something sets, that’s changed. Two-thirds of all online users visit social networks and blogs, according to data from Nielsen Online. And the largest growth in social media users last year came from the 35- to 49-year-old group.
With the average age of its readers approaching 40, BradsDeals.com didn’t consider social media the best fit until this year.
“When we started on Facebook a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure we were going to connect with people because our demographic is older,” said Brad Wilson, founder and editor in chief, who also began using Twitter recently.
The company has attracted 2,500 followers through Twitter since March 1 and nabbed 1,200 Facebook users since launching a fan page this month. Now, traffic to BradsDeals.com is streaming in at more than 1 million hits a month, up 150 percent from a year ago, Wilson said, adding that consumers’ focus on frugality also factors into the site’s growth.”
Recently, a London based atheist group called the British Humanist Association set out to raise funds for an ad campaign. The kind of ad campaign that goes on the side of bus to be exact. They had a modest goal, £5,500 for placement of the ad which was to read; “There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life”.
What happened next was a challenger brands dream scenario. The campaign grabbed the attention of some prominent figures, most noticeably Professor Richard Dawkins. The original budget of £5,500 was reached in a matter of hours and by the 7th of Jan 2009 more than £140,000 had been raised.
What’s more, the campaign has received publicity from many major news sources and has generated a huge amount of internet chatter on social sites like Digg and Reddit. This article is adding to that noise of course.
Beliefs, and that includes atheism, are essentially brands. Christianity is to Coca-Cola what Islam is to Pepsi. The difference, of course, is that the pedlars of belief are not selling a temporary sugar and caffeine hit. They are asking for a lifetime of loyalty in exchange for happiness in this life and possibly beyond. Beliefs force you to take sides. To stand up and pledge allegiance to your chosen brand.
In the case of atheism the brand is the new kid on the block, the challenger. Like any good challenger brand it is positioning itself as standing up to the establishment and using a grass roots movement to gain notoriety. It has a much smaller budget than the market leaders but they have learned how to use clever, thought provoking, advertising to develop a campaign with a viral effect. Challengers, unlike their competition, have to be more creative with their messages. They need to create a compelling case.
The atheists have their work cut out for them. The customers in the the belief market are cautious. They are going to think through the options in great detail. They will weigh up all of the pros and cons, ask friends and family and probably try out a couple of options before making a final choice. As they should. After all, it is a high value purchase.
There's probably no god
Further reading:
‘Strategic Marketing Planning’ (Second Edition) by Peter Reed has a good reference in Chapter 4 on pg109
