Social Media

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

Check out Chris Brogan’s presentation at Web2 Expo 2009. I particularly like the part about social media and serendipity, which is similar to a discussion I had early this week about promoting those “cosmic collisions” with shoppers that make them stop in their tracks and think differently about your brand.

The New Group President, Steve Marshall, and Digital Strategist, Tom Bennett, will be speaking at a Linfield College Alumni Luncheon at The Westin in Portland this coming Wednesday the 11th. Steve, a Linfield College Graduate, is a 20+ year international marketing veteran. Tom is a 20+ year marketing veteran and TNG's own social media guru. 

Not every interaction or engagement with your brand by consumers has equal value. Especially if your goals are to influence consideration of your brand or ignite word of mouth sharing about your products.

So do you have a schema for measuring engagement with your brand across online social channels? If so, how have you determined which actions and points of interaction are the most valuable? Which get higher weighting than others?

A common question I am asked by clients who are nervous about engaging in Social Media is “What about negative comments or flame wars?” It’s a valid concern. We all know instances where a negative meme picks up steam and spins out of control, leaving the brand scrambling to recover. And that’s where the failure was: if you’re not going to be actively engaged in your social media efforts, then don’t bother. Playing catch up is generally a losing game.

Recently I had the pleasure of boarding the Norwegian Dawn Cruise Line in New York City with more than 100 marketing executives from some of the most prominent brands in the country. Although we were all on board for the purpose of networking and learning, I took on the challenge of uncovering the answer to the following question: “What would you like social media to do for your brand?”

Ian Schafer at AdAge nails it in a short piece about social media and what it means to be involved from a branding standpoint. Contradicting the point of a colleague’s post urging companies to “stop thinking of the social web as media,” Schafer cuts to the core of WHY social media branding works.

One of our favorite stories we like to tell here at The New Group is about the Brand Continuum, a rough sequence of marketing narrative and strategy – not a scientific study, but a loose progression of how marketing continues to mature, become more sophisticated, and adapt to changes in the marketplace and the evolution of the consumer as well.