Why are brands so crap at learning the lessons of social media?
There are lessons from the explosion in social media that brands are totally missing. Instead of embracing the broader insights of consumer interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and the rest, brands are instead being boringly literal and thinking a bit of video content and a few thousand followers is a pat on the back and a job well done.
And if we’re all guilty of wanting a bit of icing on the marketing plan cake, we have taken our eyes off the need to drive this across all of our comms – instead chucking a bit of cash at some YouTube video views and conning ourselves into thinking we’ve generated some owned media.
The really interesting, liberating – revolutionary, even – learnings are left to live in the social media space, where the contribution of social activity towards broader brand objectives is often minimal, if present at all.
The primary out-takes we should be applying across our brand and comms strategy can be summarised as:
1. Consumers (audiences or users) love to see ‘behind the curtain’ of a brand, witnessing for themselves brand authenticity in action through action and individuals.
2. Consumers love personality – real and unspun that cut through the sea of bland, shining like a beacon attracting us to them like moths to light.
3. Consumers love to see brands participate in popular culture, reacting quickly in real time to the happenings of the day. Now more than ever we love events that permeate our fragmented media landscape, giving us moments that are shared online as well as at the water coolers, school gates, kitchen tables and pubs across Britain.
Of course, it may be that your brand is already doing this through its social feeds. But there are very few brands that are really bringing this to the fore, using social findings to empower them to be more real, more conversant and more reactive across all of their touchpoints.
But there is one brand that is really winning in these areas – albeit with very little competition. What’s surprising is that it’s a government-run company, and it’s over 100 years old.
It has an incredibly strong visual identity – so good in fact that you’d buy the T-shirt (and plenty of people do every day).
But despite it being iconic and very high profile, it gives its on-the-ground staff the freedom and autonomy to customise its comms with very few (if any) brand guidelines, brand onions, messaging towers or similar.
I am of course talking about the London Underground.
From the whiteboards with quotes, jokes or poetry, to the perky (and not so perky) people on the loudspeaker chivvying us along and asking us to ‘budge up a bit, sharing is caring’, welcoming us to ‘Canary Wharf: where dreams can come true’ or telling us to ‘smile it may never happen’... the tube is jam-packed with spontaneous content creation of such high quality it would make an agency weep.
And more than that, there are stations with plants, a daily trivia question and even a library because someone thought it would be a good idea and was given the freedom to implement it.
Monday 1st August Thought Of The Day From Oval Station pic.twitter.com/zOPbFvGaqr
— Oval Tube Station (@Oval_station) August 1, 2016
The underground is also a great example of a brand that reacts in the real world, in real time, creating physical content that often goes viral of its own accord. Those inspirational quotes are so popular there have even been spoofs created, such is the familiarity of the medium.
This is owned media which is truly optimised, a brand that understands the importance of relationships between its brand, its staff and its customers, and really empowers its people to ‘be’ the brand.
So, if a government-owned transport system can do it, why can’t your brand?
Zoe Harris is group marketing director at Trinity Mirror. Follow her on Twitter @MarketingZoe