A colleague of mine, James Rice, participated in a great workshop held in Portland, Oregon, last week called Light Up Your Brand and I just wanted to share with everyone the PowerPoint deck that accompanies his presentation. Of course it loses something on its own, it was designed to illuminate James’ presentation, not be the presentation itself.
So what’s the topic? Social Media? WEb2.0? The death of advertising? Or simply a call attention to the fact that most marketing today is still centered on interruptive advertising? Most agencies are still figuring out how to deliver interruptive advertising on social media rather than using the media for what it’s designed for, having open, honest conversations among many, many people. James asks the question, why do brands insist on “joining the conversation” before they listen to it first and ask themselves what value they can bring before they join in. In fact, I wish most people would listen in first, think about what they can add of value and only then join the conversation, but that’s another topic all together. Check out James’ deck and join the conversation. Here’s the link: http://www.slideshare.net/ascentium/light-up-your-brand
Jul 09, 2008 @ 23:26:49
I agree with you completely. Even as an advertising fanatic I believe that joining the social media (which is actually free most of the time) is the smartest communication tool to read your market.
However, my question is how do you build this conversation? Joining it is a no brainer but businesses need to know how to do it and that is where the difficulty lies.
Do you get all your employees to engage in this conversation on Facebook for instance? Highly unlikely, we would most like have a few people performing that task but how much time do they spend on Facebook? What are the boundaries in this conversation? Public Relations aside, if we speak about joining the conversation in social media for a promotional, brand awareness, advertising, marketing purpose, then how many people in the company should be conversating? How much time should they spend? What topics should they conversate about?
It is clear that a social media is social, therefore the conversation must be, in a way, social. If it is not, the members of that community will be unreceptive. I understand the fear of my employer. Does she pay me to speak about NBA? Of course not but what if that can net us a client or candidate (in terms of recruiting). That is very difficult to benchmark.
My question is, how do you control that conversation from the organization’s perspective – the conversation must be social to be effective otherwise it will not be received as an open conversation but as “another marketing ploy”.