It was almost five years ago and, I can still hear the voices around the conference room table, like it was yesterday saying “how can we create a community of advocates around our brand”? At that time, brands were witnessing the popularity of iVillage, Digg, Gawker and many other community building blogs, and they wanted to know how they could tap into that love and build a community of their own.
So in an effort to start, participate and steer conversations, unique destinations were created in the form of forums, blogs and flogs (fake blogs). The only problem was getting the right audiences to these sites was expensive. And if the experience was not relevant or compelling enough, then people won’t go, and it they did they would quickly leave and not share it with their friends.
Then certain groups of individuals began flocking to community sites like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to connect to and build their own communities online. People were spending more hours online then watching TV and social media was born. And in these past 2 years, Facebook and Twitter have became household names.
We the people have less time and want to do more things. We want balance, ease of use and mass connectivity. We use to separate our play and work lives but now we merge them. Whether its though a laptop, netbook, iPad or mobile phone, people want to share more of their thoughts and information with eachother. And now social media means big business.
But what does this mean for marketers? How do you leverage social media? Well, its time to move past blind dates and one night stands and build a meaningful relationship with your target audience. And, get to know who your influencers are.
It never says this in a brief, but targets are real people, like you and me. And, that is the beauty of social media. It’s genuine, relevant and alive. With the power of social monitoring services like Radian6, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Socialscape, and many others, we can see what’s on people minds, understand what’s important to them and, how they are feeling about an issue, a brand or a product.
Going social and building a Facebook page doesn’t automatically buy brand love, but a big idea that provides real value and a reason to care is a great start.
5 things to ask before writing a social media brief:
