The Strategic e-Blog

Whether or not it should be called a revolution, there’s definitely a marketing shift taking place thanks to social media.  As the video below says, social media brings products to consumers and turns on its head one of the primary ways in which we, as consumers, find products.  If your business hasn’t yet setup a social media account, or at least gotten started with a simple Facebook business page, you’re missing a vital connection with your customer base.

Social media will continue to grow.  Of course it may taper off here and there as one service wanes in popularity and another takes over, but the underlying model will be in place for several years (at least until something new comes along to replace it).   What is that underlying model?  It’s something akin to active rather than passive marketing.  While it may seem like putting an ad on TV or on the radio is an active way of reaching out to your customers and prospects, it’s actually pretty passive.   Besides commercials during the Super Bowl, most ads are just perceived as filler, a chance to get up and walk away from the TV during a program.  Toss DVRs and Tivo into the mix, and it’s even harder to reach a TV audience.

When it comes to radio, you’ve got something of a similar phenomenon going on.  As more and more cars get outfitted with direct audio inputs, iPods and other media players will continue to take an audience away from radio and more toward their own selections of music, audio books and podcasts.   If you want to reach these plugged-in listeners, you don’t have a lot of choices that let you piggyback on their audio choices.  Of course you can underwrite a podcast, but that might not give you the kind of reach you want to achieve – nor enough room to deliver the type of marketing message you want to put out there.

Which is where social media steps in.  Unlike radio or TV advertising, which a passive audience can simply ignore, social media lets you engage actively with active participants.

Let’s say you’re in the business of guide books.  You can use social media to search and indentify people that are into guidebooks and then develop a strategy for targeting them.  In Facebook, it could mean a pointed advertisement, while in Twitter, it could mean following some people and building up a relationship.  That’s the difference with social media, it’s not always an instant message that’s delivered – and, ironically, sometimes the active marketing approach takes a bit more time than the passive one.

In the active marketing world of social media, invasive ads don’t always get received well – especially through a service like Twitter.  With social media it’s more important than ever to show some patience in marketing, but also to make sure that you’re using your marketing opportunity to share compelling information with your audience.  It’s a lot like building your social media brand – but it’s even more about building your social media rapport, which means you have to make sure that once you start building your social media persona, you continue to interact with people that respond.  That’s where the real work comes in, and that’s where a disciplined strategy is of the essence – without it, you can end up with a nice-looking Facebook or Twitter page that nobody sees after the initial push.

As I’m writing this sentence, 729,349 people like Gap on Facebook.  That’s a sizeable number of fans for any product, so it’s no surprise to find that Gap turned to their Facebook wall to announce their decision to go back to their original logo.  Here is what Marka Hansen, President of Gap North America, said on Facebook:

Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight. http://bit.ly/9xvtvJ

The link takes you to the full press release on Gap.com, but even when you read that, it’s clear that Gap is not addressing the press or investors with this press release.  Rather, Gap’s press release is talking directly to the customer – to the online community of Facebook and Twitter – that immediately started to protest, complain and even spoof the logo as soon as the redesign was leaked.

Still, despite the quick, loud (in cyber terms) and direct response Gap received, it was still surprising this afternoon to hear Kai Rysdall mention the Gap’s move on Marketplace and suggest that very few people might even have noticed:

These final notes today. Gap has dumped it’s new logo. In other news, did anybody out there know Gap had a new logo? Apparently, the clothing chain swapped it out for a new one, online, a week ago without telling anybody.

As happens in this Internet age, though, somebody saw it, customers complained, the company caved… You know how it goes. Can’t say as I blame ‘em. That new one was uuuuuuuuugly.

Perhaps Rysdall/Marketplace continues to favor traditional marketing and press releases in order to assess the impact of a marketing or branding campaign.

What we can take away from Gap’s logo gaffe is that connecting with the online community is far more important than even the largest companies in the world seem to recognize.  A decade into this new century we can safely say that marketing isn’t just about the message companies deliver, but also about the interaction of the company – and of the message – with their community.  It’s a funny word to use with a business, but that’s what we have now, isn’t it?  Online communities of followers, fans, friends, people who like, link and retweet?

Ignoring the value of that collective voice, however irrational it might seem at times, can cost a company its own closely guarded image – and also cost a company the chance to connect with their community and allow that community to feel important – to feel like they are part of the product they support with every purchase and with ever click of a Like button on a web page.

Just in case you missed the logo debate, here are the failed, new and the beloved, old logos:

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker column questions the efficacy of social media while raising several questions about social media’s impact in a community.  While Gladwell cites several historical points to support his view that “social media can’t provide what social change has always required,” his argument fails to note that social media as a network should not just be compared to the hierarchies seen in social movements, but should, perhaps more accurately, be compared to the means of communication used during the civil rights movement and also during periods of civil action throughout the contemporary world.

Describing how a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina grew from four college students to thousands of people through the country, Gladwell writes:

By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

What’s missing in Gladwell’s assessment is the impact of radio, television and even the telephone.   Seventy thousand students could not have come together through silent agreement nor through a lack of transmitted information.  They came together through the sharing of information, and that’s what social media continues to provide. The main difference, however, is that social media puts more control (literally) into the hands of the people determined to take action.   Of course this does not mean that everyone who participates in a Twitter or Facebook campaign will take more action than retweeting or “liking” something, but it does mean that private individuals have the capacity to “spread the word” to a degree that they’ve never had before.

So what does this mean for social media in terms of marketing?  To the same degree that the spread of information has opened up to private individuals, so too has the push of marketing.  An individual in Cleveland can now Tweet about a particular hair product or pen, and a follower in Seattle can see that Tweet and, if she trusts the twitterer’s opinion, might go out and try a new product herself.   Twitter might not be part of a hierarchy of social change, but it is nonetheless a tool of contemporary social interaction – and in so far as people use it to share information with strangers with a common interest, it has become an indispensable part of spreading the word.  Facebook does much the same thing, though with a message spread more among friends and acquaintances in overlapping circles.