Branding and Marketing Machine
February 10th, 2007 by Doug ReynoldsDisclaimer: the following is a bit of a disconnected thought.
I discovered this video on the Viral Video Chart this afternoon. It does a wonderful job of demonstrating why Web 2.0 technologies impact how we will think about ourselves and society.
But it also suggests why it’s challenging to leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media for branding and marketing. The video highlights two important shifts:
- The separation of content and format (presentation)
- The ability of people to easily and intuitively create content and give it context
The question of what this means for marketers is discussed and debated in media and blogs…a lot. No one’s mastered branding and marketing in a Web 2.0 world, but there is one thing that everyone can agree upon; consumers have much more control over a brand than they used to. Ask AOL, Kryptonite, and General Motors.
Some companies have successfully enhanced the value of their brand by turning their brand over to their customers and brand loyalists. B2C examples abound; Doritos, American Express, Aquafina, and of course Burger King to name a few. B2B brands are harder to find, but they do exist: UPS’ White Board Campaign, Intel’s Multiply Campaign (ClickZ and PEBKAC IT Translator), and BigFix.
Some of these campaigns do a better job of engaging prospects and customers than getting prospects and customers to participate and contribute. Engagement is important to awareness. The tactics involved with taking the next step toward participation could keep a brand manager up at night. Activities like inviting people to create videos about using your products, asking people to comment on your blog, etc… However, if you buy that word-of-mouth and referrals drive business decisions, then social media can play an important role in mobilizing the people that already believe in your brand. These are your evangelists. Ben Mcconnell and Jack Huba call them the 1 percenters. Finding and mobilizing them is where social media and tools like communispace, sharedInsights, and BzzAgent do their best work.
Measuring the success of a social media campaign is often presented in terms of engagement. Simple engagement, however, isn’t enough. Marketers need relevant engagement and they need to be able to find ways to measure relevance. Rebecca Lieb at ClickZ did a good, brief article on the topic of engagement.