Who owns social media?

This is some stuff I banged out for a recent Neilson Online newsletter.

It’s brief, and shallow, but it addresses something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and working on with our clients. The ‘who owns this’ part of the getting to grips with social web and online conversations.

I keep drawing this picture to illustrate the challenge:

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Who owns the social media beast?

Suddenly the world is different…
In the good old days everything was safe, stable and known inside the big corporation. We were cosy.

Marketing created the outgoing noise. Customer services dealt with the incoming noise. PR owned the media. And Brand owned the brand. Yeah this is overly facile, but the divisions on the playing field were pretty clear, and were largely respected. And then the internet changed everything.

Now social media, with consumers publishing and sharing digital oceans of content amongst one another on a flattened, frictionless, disintermediated plane, has made a nonsense of our demarcated areas of responsibility. For example, if a consumer publishes a hate-ridden review of a new mobile phone, and many other consumers join in, adding their weight to the story which gains momentum and swirls and snarls and bites, is this a PR issue, or a marketing issue, or a product issue, or a customer services issue? Who ‘owns’ the social media beast?

The answer, we think, is easy. Everyone!
It’s true but it’s probably not what we want as senior people or business owners (and I know, because I am one). which is usually a simple focused solution: a clear one-stop go-to-man approach. ‘We’ll appoint someone: David owns social media!’ Nope. It won’t work.

The clue is in the problem.
Social media is very hard to define because it the spaces, channels and technologies are many, and ever-proliferating, and the content, the topic matter, is as broad as life itself. Fascinated by ant farms? Find everything you need to know online. Desperate to know who King Tubby is? Find the answer and his biggest fans online. So the challenges and opportunities that our businesses face in this new online era are as multi-coloured and multi-flavoured as we can imagine (and then some) - they will cut across every part of our organisation, of our industry and of our brands.

So we all own this social media beast.

You own your part of it. If you’ve buried your head or hoped and expected Ted in marketing to pick this up, think again. The world is out there. Your impenetrable company fortress walls have been broken. So whether you’re in market research or engineering, take a peek outside. Start listening and learning and participating in the conversations. The sooner you do, the better you’ll do. Take ownership of your part today - you won’t regret it.

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Yes? No? Bovvered?

Will McInnes wrote this on 17.07.08 – 6 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes, Social media, Social networks, Strategy box

Do you underestimate the value of sticking to Brand Guidelines?

Does your brand follow the agreed brand guidelines? Does it even have a set of guidelines?

For many the answer to these questions is No.

What are brand guidelines?

Behind every good brand is a comprehensive set of Brand Guidelines.

Typically the guidelines developed by your designer will provide a set of rules and more general guides for how the brand will play out at each audience touch-point.

“Your identity or brand should express your character and your culture, and in turn play a leading role in establishing your reputation in the minds of our customers. Brand guidelines show you how to use the various brand elements to help achieve consistency in that message.”

Sounds great, but does anyone actually read these guidelines or in fact do the design agencies adhere to them?

Even the big guns don’t do their brand homework sometimes . . . .

I noticed a new TV advertising campaign for NatWest the other day and it looked nothing like NatWest. The design hack in me rushed to my computer and logged onto Natwest’s website expecting to see the new branding language I had just witnessed on my telly. To my amazement the two touchpoints did not add up. Sure they have the same logo, the same tagline but everything else was chalk and cheese. To my knowledge Natwest are not rebranding, which means this TV campaign has it own style which in effect is ‘off brand’ and does not follow the brand guidelines.

I have seen this countless times before. Sometimes it is total ignorance of the brand guidelines while sometimes it’s the case that the hand isn’t talking to the head and the notion of an ‘integrated’ campaign doesn’t feature in the overall marketing strategy.

But why are they so important?

Brand guidelines can be a bit anal but they do protect a brand. There are plenty of prizes for sticking to them:

Consistency of image in your audience’s mind
Stronger brand equity (value) over time
Accurate audience perception of your idenity/associations
Improved brand confidence
Increased brand profile
Improved competitive advantage

We have recently been working on a web presence for a client who wanted us to evolve their branding identity. Great, job done, it looks sweet.

However this brand identity does not marry up with the offline. So we now need to create some brand guidelines that are integral to the overall brand personality so that when a third party needs to create an offline product it integrates with the online presence we have lovingly created.

Careful not to go too far . . . .

Conversely though, there are also internal “brand Hitlers” who do not give the creative agency enough room in their interpretation of the guidelines. At the end of the day brand guidelines need to be specific enough to uphold the brand values, yet flexible enough not to compromise the creative opportunity.