Why social media is the problem-child you really need to listen to
I recently had the pleasure of attending a creative training session with David Hall, founder of The Ideas Centre. His business elevates the importance of play to drive creativity – ideas that are both novel and useful. His team regularly work with schools and children in order to solve problems through play. Children are a fountain of novel ideas, a lot of them are useless but there-in lies the beauty. These are ideas that adults are almost conditioned to not come up with. We are very good at being useful but our brains have been conditioned to ignore the novel.
Social is definitely no longer novel, yet ever since Facebook hit its 100 millionth user in 2008, marketers have tried to understand what to do with it. Before 2008, putting agencies into a box was easy. Advertising, Media, PR, Shopper and Digital was the typical agency roster. Easy. Then came along the problem child – social.
Social has taken a pretty long road to where it is now in a very short space of time. We all used to be in competition for fans, likes and shares. We at Media Bounty were all too happy to jump in to the race for popularity, running umpteen competitions hidden behind ‘like gates’.
Paid, owned and earned were the buzzwords of the day – labels that again make it easy to divide roles and responsibilities. Paid sat with the media agency, owned with the digital agency. Earned, somewhere between PR and Social. Now it is not that easy.
Social does continue to be the misbehaving child – telling tall tales of video views, the platforms overly competitive , even throwing the odd tantrum. But it is growing up. It is still novel but now, not just useful, but business critical. Harnessing social properly is the first step to a genuine consumer first strategy.
Think about it. Social is your consumer director. Your consumer sitting on the board of directors. Nothing else gives you the brand, category and consumer insights in real time. Nothing else can live test creative in this way.
Tham Khai Meng, Co-Chaiman and Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather recently wrote an article asserting that schooling batters the creativity out of children. On day one, all of a sudden they are on a conveyor belt to conformity. SATs, league tables and Ofsted have conspired to create standards for children that are one size fits all. BUT, if you listen to children, really listen then they will take you to a place that you have not been for a very long time. You will be travelling on the back of a lion, battling dinosaurs and talking to a bishybosh! (Full disclosure – I have a 4 year old and a 1 year old!)
But it got me thinking, the same is true of social. It is basic human interaction. Many brands are hard wired to create a one size fits all approach to communications. A toolkit that has not changed much since we were kids. But if you really listen, get down on the carpet, in amongst the dinosaurs and squashed rice krispies, you will find a world of pure imagination. If you really listen, then your consumers will help shape not just your communications but your business.
Keep an empty chair in the board room. This is your consumer director and every time you talk about business critical decisions, take time to consider their response. You could even bring in a 4 year old every so often to sit in the chair. You never know what you may learn.
Jake Dubbins is managing director of Media Bounty
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