Some Brands Don't Get It

In an October 2 piece by Brandchannel blogger Peter Feld, he asks whether brand flocking to social media is marketing savvy or bandwagon jumping. If it is the latter, do Twitter and Facebook run the risk of alienating the individuals that made them social phenomenon to begin with?

Twitter, recently valued at $1 billion, is attracting a brand receptive audience. Even rather obtuse promotional Twitter campaigns by the likes of Ford are garnering some pretty impressive numbers. It's to be determined whether sales will follow. Companies like TGI Fridays and Starbucks are trading gratis product for Facebook friends.

Countless companies are struggling through the social media landscape with a broadcast-style mentality. They'll continue to struggle until they realize that social media is an analog style, one-one-one conversation, in a digital setting.

Is "friends for freebies" the true spirit of social media? I'll give you something if you'll be my friend. I knew some of these people when I was younger. I took their toys and then convened with my real friends who also took the toys.

What are people actually saying on Twitter? A recent study from Pear Analytics of the site’s public timeline revealed the following:

Tweets were placed into one of six categories, and fortunately for the skeptics “pointless babble”— was 3% higher than conversational tweets. Conversational tweets—those part of a dialogue between users or starting with the “@” symbol—made up another 37.55% of tweets. Tweets with pass-along value, also known as “retweets,” were much less prevalent, at 8.7%, and self-promotional messages made up just 5.85% of the total. Spam and news were even rarer. Re-tweets with pass-along value, important for marketers hoping to get their messages distributed as far and wide as possible, were highest on Mondays and Wednesdays, when they made up about 10% of the tweets per day.

Any self respecting brand manager would ask where is the efficiency in one-on-one conversation? In a word, it's not. It's not supposed to be. It never will be.

The question really becomes, 'how many customers equal one brand evangelist?' Effective (note: effective does not equal efficient) social media strategies should turn luke warm customers into fierce brand proponents. Brand neutral onlookers see this relationship between brand and fan and want to be a part of it. Why settle for a "human" online friend when you can befriend a brand, an icon, a larger-than-life status symbol? The psychology of Twitter supports this. Maslow's hierarchy of needs puts Twitter somewhere between having safety and possessing self-esteem. Let's just hope it is that important.