Hee-Haw Marketing

The Marriage of Advertising and Social Media

At some point we pit advertising and social media against each other when we should have been marrying those core advertising messages with meaningful social development all along. They’re forbidden lovers, those two.

For most brands, there are limitations to what can be accomplished with no advertising at all. Google advertises. Zappos is hiring an ad agency. We know when we advertise sales go up, and when we stop, it’s much more difficult to reach expectations.

This is why we need to get better at wedding these two worlds. Developing and evolving brands to help them become more conversational, meaningful and culturally able to cope with this new landscape, but still using that core of interestingness to focus a brand’s appeal.

The idea of Social Branding starts by slowly transforming away from a world where reach and frequency are king, but still takes the best pieces of what’s worked before.

Particularly for brands with deeply ingrained bureaucracies, we need to slowly and tediously replace the levels of process, the fear of the off-message, the red tape, with transparency, open communication and the encouragement of experimentation.

But those changes can be juiced from the other side as well. Those pretty advertising messages are often a company’s most recognizable outward expression of who they are. As such they certainly can go a long way in helping change how a company sees itself internally, too. Not dissimilar-ly to how you might feel in a new pair of jeans. Certainly not enough to be truly different, but probably enough to make you feel good about those 5 pounds you lost and give you the confidence to lose 5 more.

So this is where we are. We need to find the center of what makes companies interesting and different. We need to help companies build cultures based on sharing and transparency. We can help corporations feel much smaller by understanding how to peel back the layers and reveal the soul. It’s the humanizing elements that allow us to get to building the outward expressions that make the change feel more real to those both on the inside and outside.

It’s that soul that can help us find the motivating message, that focused positioning that moves people to get beyond just liking us and get to liking to buy from us. And from there, we can build the platforms for conversation, insert the people and new processes that make our communication more cumulative and extendable. And only then will our outreach work that way it truly can.

Brooks on Psychology

David Brooks had a pretty cool article discussing the drawbacks of evolutionary psychology in Friday's NY Times. In it he says:

"But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.'

My initial reaction to that paragraph was praise for the fantastic insight. Although, within a few minutes, the beauty of the language had worn off a bit and I was left with the sort of - well, no shit - feeling.

All these arguments tend to group themselves into neat little categories. Nature vs. nurture, good vs. bad, rational vs. emotional, when most of our world is far too complex and illogical to paint with such broad strokes. I mean really, it's in our nature to believe we are more of a product of nurture. It's our emotions that cause us to ascribe rationality to subconscious thought processes. It can be the bad in us that causes us to judge others for things we deem bad. We're all shades of gray swimming through overwhelming inputs seeking efficiency of story, often at the sacrifice of objective reality.

No real point here, but just got me thinking that a little balance, a little moderation of thought and humility could probably do us all some good.

Now time for you to say, "Well, no shit."

Meet the Yim Gnome. He Wants to Eat You.

Perhaps our relationship ended too quickly. We didn't give each other the proper time and care that allow relationships to survive and thrive. What can I say? Work got in the way. There were fights. He kept trying to eat me.

Plus he still had the stench of Kaitlyn on his breathe, which was difficult to take.

Anyway, with regards to Whrrl and Lauren over at Swarm Collective, I give you my evening with Yim Gnome.

The Shirky Doctrine

Clay Shirky at TED: How Twitter Can Make History

"In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It’s more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups."

Top Non-Entertainment Brands on Facebook

Social brands clearly don't become so because of their social media strategy. They are so because of who they are. It's the fundamental misunderstanding that make those that call themselves "social media experts" questionable at best. The moment you label yourself by that name, you've removed yourself from the parts of the conversation that actually make brands work in the space. Instead they become tasked with building facebook pages, resizing twitter backgrounds until they fit, randomly following anyone who unfortunately utters a phrase remotely related to the products they sell.

And so I'm not misunderstood, much of that is still important. Understanding the nomenclature, the ability to differentiate and remain interesting in social spaces is critical. But doing so in a vacuum is merely a series of band-aids, not dissimilar to a brands sales spike during peaks in an advertising cycle. GM may know a thing or two about that.

But 20 of the top 200 fan pages on facebook are brand-related, minus entertainment, and that may sound pretty good. 10% would actually be more than I expected, frankly.

But a closer look would reveal a slew of unofficial pages fed by their fans, random memes, stuff like that. 11 of them are official, the largest of which was a true fan page that was taken over by the brand (in a good way). And of the top 20, only 16 companies are actually represented. Anyway, interesting to see how basic the vast majority of these fan pages actually are. Most didn't need to be tricked up too much, people wanted to share them already.

Point being - solving the social media problem means solving the social problem, which doesn't have much to do with social media.

8.      Coca-Cola      3,462,807 (unofficial, then given to or purchased by brand)
10.      Nut ella      3,205,591 (unofficial)
18.      Pringles      2,774,256 (official, doing some videos, etc.)
40.      Starbucks Coffee Company      2,307,465 (official, good feed)
55.      adidas Originals      1,944,196 (official)
61.      McDonald's      1,870,132 (unofficial)
100.      Toblerone      1,496,941 (unofficial)
105.      Nike Shoes      1,463,321 (unofficial)
109.      Converse All Star      1,450,969 (unofficial)
112.      CONVERSE      1,418,670 (unofficial)
120.      REESE'S      1,380,962 (official, doing some interesting stuff with college program)
132.      OREO cookies      1,334,269 (official)
139.      Starbucks Frappuccino      1,297,731 (official)
158.      PUMA      1,212,972 (official)
172.      ipods      1,175,028 (unofficial)
178.      oreos      1,166,410 (unofficial)
187.      H&M      1,133,591 (official, applications)
188.      MTV      1,133,246 (official)
189.     MTV     1,129,701 (unofficial)
194.      Red Bull      1,103,357 (official, good feed, applications)

Ranking via PageData Photo via Nicky Deez