When you want your brand to take control of an outside social network, the last person you want to send in is corporate communications.
This column is going to deal with claiming existing social networks for your brand. Think of a group that's already formed around your product or service, but you don't control it. You need to become a recognized, authoritative and trusted voice in that group before a competitor claims it from you.
Now, corporations have been dealing with people talking (talking smack or just plain talking) about their brands for a long time, and these corporations have skilled corporate communicators with their cell phones turned on all the time, just waiting to hear that special ring tone before springing into action. That's fine when there's a story that just hit the Wall Street Journal, or a press release to be written, or an angry email from a customer sent to sour the CEO's breakfast muffin, but when it's a social network, particularly an online social network, the last person you want to send in is the polished company spokesperson. Instead, it's time to send in the engineers, the product people, the woman who actually built the thing that marketing is trying to talk about.
Here's why.
Moving a brand into a social network
Readers may be familiar with branded social networks. iMedia has published some interesting columns on the subject (for example, Steve Mulder and Evan Gerber's Build your brand through social networking and Mark Drosos' Branded social strategy: easy as 3+3, the latter of which talks about Jeep Experience and Run Easy as two examples of branded social networks).
But branded social networks existed before the internet as we know it today. Fan clubs were branded social networks before the internet, and the marketers of their day made sure those branded social networks had perks and benefits that kept members in the fold.
But here's the catch and the difference: In the past marketers didn't pay attention to branded social networks until they realized the value they generated. This means the social network existed before marketing recognized it. And this means that marketing didn't control the brand of the social network, only the brand that caused the social network to gather.
Today, marketers create a branded social network and invite participants to gather. The marketers control the brand and the social network that forms around it, or at least they try to do so.
However, there are a whole lot of social networks out there that talk about brands, review brands, and even make friends with brands, all without the brand having any particular say over the matter. (Right about now you're probably thinking "Facebook," and you're right to do so.)
What if you want to move your brand into an existing social network, one that's formed because of a brand but not controlled by marketing? These social networks exist because of a brand without owing anything to the company that owns the brand. This is not a good situation. So how do you move your brand into an existing social network, i.e., how can you at least partially control something over which you have no authority?
Some marketers might think, "Why should I try to control an outside public network? Aren't the Web 2.0 people always telling us to give up control?"
Yes the Web 2.0 people are saying that. However, it's critically important to move your brand into an existing but outside social network that is based on your brand. Once consumers, employees, whoever, draw more of their identity from the social network than from the brand, then the brand loses even more control. The social network will decide what fits the identity of the network (Mark Drosos' brand persona extended into a social network brand persona) and that may or may not suit the purposes of the brand.
So who do you call?
Find the Holmes
I've written about Holmeses (the internal corporate subject matter experts who blog with authority about a product) and Watsons (who translate the Holmes to the rest of the world) a few times before (see links below). Based on that research, the casual observer might think finding the Watsons of an existing social network is key to gaining control over it.
But that's not at all the case. If you want to assert control over an outside branded social network, find the Holmeses within that network and ask for their assistance. Dropping your own Holmes into an existing social network is a risky undertaking because of the time required for them to become recognized. Existing Holmeses, even if they don't contribute that much to the social network, will be noticed and referenced for whatever contributions he or she makes. Holmeses -- by their nature -- will have contact with fewer people in the network; however that contact will be at a much richer, more personal level. This greater depth of personal contact will increase the brand's authority and influence at the social networking level for a marketing Watson to guide if not gain control of the conversation.
At the risk of overstating this, the Holmes is the product person and the Watson is the marketing person or corporate communications talker.
Watsons will have many more contacts with network members, but the richness of those interactions will be weaker than those of the Holmes. This doesn't violate the original premise that you need both a Holmes and a Watson to successfully propagate information in a social network, only that the information carriers must be carefully selected.
First, the Holmes is much less likely to corrupt a product message during propagation than a Watson is. Watsons may have the bullhorn but not everybody will be paying attention, the message might get garbled by other Watsons, so on and so forth. The Holmes experience is much more intimate therefore the message will be tightly directed towards network members the Holmes knows will benefit rather than garbled or ignored.
Second, get different Holmes within the same social network to carry your brand. This is critically important. Another aspect of a Holmes is that they're very dogged and persistent. They will continue propagating a product message long after it has faded from the Watsons' mind. Having multiple Holmes insures that the social network as a whole and various Watsons in particular will continue dispersing the information at different times, from different places, for different reasons, and so it goes.
Third, expect your brand to get beat up a bit in this process. Take it as a learning experience, as a chance to drop your own commentary into the social dialogue as a "Wow, good point, thanks for that" line that will build credibility while again, reinforcing your brand.
Remember: You're the newcomer to the social network, even though your brand isn't.
Summary
There are three critical elements to moving an existing or new brand into an existing social market and they're based on the Holmes & Watson concepts described in earlier columns:
- Get your branding message to the Holmeses in the social network and let them do the work of branding the network for you.
- Get several Holmeses involved, not just one or two.
- Accept that you and your brand are the newcomers to the pre-existing social network. Give yourself time to be recognized as an honest, authoritative and trusted voice.
Additional resources:
- Moving your brand into new markets
- A new branding paradigm, online and off
- Bloggers, influence and your brand
- Controlling a brand conversation
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global. Read full bio.