Picture the audience that you think is currently reading your tweets, streaming your videos and liking you on Facebook.
According to the 2010 US Census, your picture might need some tweaking.
As the census indicates, Hispanic and African-American audiences are the fastest-growing segments of the online population In fact, based on these statistics, eMarketer predicts that more than 60% of the US’s Hispanic population will be online by 2012. And that means the potential audience for every online brand is becoming more diverse by the day.
Since the dawn of the 2000s, social media has been trumpeted as “a conversation.” And as that conversation becomes more diverse, more multicultural, more nuanced and more open to interpretation, it creates a whole new set of opportunities and challenges.
Take a look at the way you’re currently using your social media channels. Now, ask yourself…
How broad is your existing customer base?
How diverse is your messaging?
Are your products and services appealing to multiple demographics?
Are you focusing (whether consciously or unconsciously) on too narrow of an audience segment?
Are you equipped to address concerns and answer questions from potential customers who fall outside your expected demographic?
This isn’t just a question of ethnicity or cultural diversity. This is a consideration of gender, age, region, income and education. It’s also a welcome reminder that the Internet allows you to connect with everyone… if you’re prepared to do so.
Yes, the people you expect to be in your audience are probably there… but so are lots of other people you might not expect to be there, and might not be prepared to engage and support. (Yet.)
So why not find ways to diversify your conversations now, before your competition does?
Mathematically, business is all about profit. And, subconsciously, we all understand this. But when the holidays roll around, people get so inundated with sales messages that they become desperate for an emotional life raft that can reconnect them with their own greater humanity.
Could that life raft be your brand?
Here at Creative Concepts, we’re huge proponents of humanizing your brand. We believe that people want to do business with (surprise!) other humans, and that any effort you can make to remind your customers that your company is still a group of people who are just like them will help them feel better about doing business with you.
So why not consider the holidays to be your opportunity to say “thank you”?
Whether you’re a small business or an international conglomerate, you’re still people. So instead of focusing on coupons, sweepstakes or clearance sales as your way of rewarding your team, why not send a holiday message that’s focused less on dollars and more on sense?
What if your company’s blog hosted a Thanksgiving message from your customers, detailing what they’re thankful for?
What if you asked your vendors for their New Year’s resolutions, and used them as a springboard for a larger conversation about goals and dreams on Facebook or Twitter?
What if your company’s Christmas or Hanukkah cards were hand-signed by all of your employees?
By incorporating the voices of the people who aren’t usually front-and-center in your messaging, you’ll remind your customers, your vendors and your employees just how much you respect, honor and value them — as people.
When the US recession was in full swing, the government conducted a stress test of the banks to see how much trouble those banks could handle before they’d collapse. Understanding potential worst case scenarios should, in theory, help an organization avoid them.
Have you conducted a stress test of your marketing or PR team, to see how much trouble they can sustain before your reputation — or your business — would fall apart? (Good news: it’s probably more than you think.)
On the other hand, how much positive feedback can you process before even the nicest compliments start sounding like white noise to your overtaxed brain? (Do you even know what you should be listening for?)
As exciting as the immediate connectivity of social media can be, that immediacy comes with a price. Bad news can travel fast, while good news can become a tsunami that overwhelms our ability to make use of it. The key is to understand your limits at both ends, and to plan for both the best and the worst-case scenarios. Ask yourself questions like…
In an emergency, how many people would we need to operate our social media channels?
Are there well-known protocols to help everyone stay on the same page?
How bad does a situation need to get before we need to make a public statement?
Or, while thinking happy thoughts…
How are we separating “good” feedback from “great” feedback?
How much of our feedback is actionable, and how much doesn’t require a response?
Can we identify potential partnerships and opportunities by studying our metrics?
The better prepared you are for both the highs and lows of real-time engagement with customers, competitors and the general public, the easier it is to capitalize on your upsides and mitigate your losses.
Today, if you’d like to, you can hop on a plane and fly from New York to San Francisco and back. The process of crisscrossing the country has become so automatic that it’s easy to take it all for granted.
But if you’ve read up on Lewis & Clark (or played the Oregon Trail), you know how daunting America’s westward expansion really was. In the 1800s, our maps were still being drawn by hand, and our railroads, highways and airports were but a distant dream.
Yet, every time another covered wagon arrived at the Pacific coastline, word was sent home: “It can be done!” And the more the pioneers succeeded, the more others wanted to follow in their footsteps — especially because doing so became both easier with experience and more cost-effective with demand.
Getting companies to buy into social media was an uphill battle. Concepts like transparency, connectivity and conversations with the public were seen as potential threats to financial stability, rather than assets that could actually improve business.
Today, as the social marketing field grows and matures, getting started is becoming ever easier. The maps have been drawn. The studies have been conducted. The pioneers’ wagons have crossed the rough terrain and now the towns they’ve built at the edge of the water are booming with great expectations.
If your company hasn’t explored the world of social media yet, now you can learn from the successes (and failures) of thousands of brands who’ve gone first. These pioneers have figured out what works and what hasn’t (yet), and many of them are selflessly sharing their own experiences to help others find their way.
Why?
Because those boom towns need new arrivals in order to keep growing.
If your competition is succeeding in social media, they need you to succeed alongside them. When an entire field or industry embraces new technologies, it increases general customer awareness while simultaneously driving down entry costs. And when everyone is on the same page, disruption becomes innovation and everybody wins.
Simply put, the better you do at social media, the better we all do at social media.
So here’s to you, and to your co-opetition. May you all keep redrawing your maps until you find the best, fastest, most scenic and most effective routes from where you are now to where you’d all like to be.
Back in February, we at Creative Concepts were scheduled to film a video for our client, Ouidad, better known to curly-haired fashionistas around the world as “the queen of curl.”
The video was supposed to be simple: a before-and-after interview with the winner of Ouidad’s “If These Curls Could Talk” contest, including a glimpse of her fabulous post-makeover ‘do, live from Ouidad’s New York City salon.
But we had one problem: the East Coast had just been buried by a blizzard.
In fact, the winner herself lived in Baltimore, which had just set a snowfall record. Amtrak wasn’t running, the highways were shut down, and there was a very good chance the shoot would have to be canceled.
And then, miraculously, everything came together.
Trains and buses began running mere hours before the shoot was scheduled, and the winner arrived just in time…
… and with straight hair.
For those of you who don’t spend your lives in a hair salon, this is the equivalent of winning free tickets to a hockey camp and then showing up with a broken leg. Whatever the camp intended to teach you, they suddenly realize they’ll have to heal you first.*
So Ouidad and her stylists set to work, not only to give their contest winner the curls of her dreams, but to help her understand why straightening her hair wasn’t the best idea in the first place. We’re pretty sure their advice worked, because the contest winner was awestruck by her new look and her newfound understanding of how to best care for her curls.
So remember: in social media, there’s no such thing as a true negative. Every stumbling block is really an opportunity for improvement, and another positive just waiting to happen — and when it does, you end up with an even better story to tell!
(Speaking of improvement, for more helpful haircare Q&As, visit Ouidad’s info-packed website. If you’re not curly by nature, you’ll wish you were!)
* And speaking of hockey, enter this Facebook contest from Bigelow Tea — who is also our client — and you could win tickets to Wayne Gretzky’s hockey camp in 2011! (But be careful about that broken leg. Seriously.)
Want to turn your troubles into treasures? Join us on Twitter or Facebook!
Blockbuster misunderstood why people were choosing Netflix and Redbox in the first place, and they could never recover from their own clouded perception.
In their case, they underestimated the time their customers would be willing to spend in (or in transit to and from) their stores, when similar (and sometimes better) options were available online, or in less time-intensive settings.
You may not be running a video rental empire, but your business is almost definitely competing against external threats. You may think you understand those threats, and how to combat them.
But you may also be wrong.
How can you tell whether or not your company is misdiagnosing its operational problems?
Ask your customers.
Social media makes it so easy to track and respond to customer complaints — or to solicit customer feedback on everything from their in-store experiences to their wish lists to their discussions about your company’s culture — that you no longer have an excuse for not knowing what your customers really think of you… and of your competition.
Here’s a test:
What do you think your value proposition is?
Do your customers agree?
(Do you know?)
Ask random customers for five reasons they’d suggest your products or services to a friend. If their answers are wildly divergent from your own, you may have a problem of perception.
And no matter how far they are from what you think the mark is, when it comes to the public’s perception of your business, the customer is always right.
Just ask Blockbuster.
Need a perception boost? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
You may know actor Ed Norton from films like Rounders, Red Dragon and American History X. What you may not know is that Ed Norton is also one of many celebrities who’ve embraced the power of social media to create real, tangible change among real people, from America to Africa.
And it just so happens that one of Norton’s ventures is directly benefiting one of our clients, the Children’s Aid Society, all because one person decided to make a difference.
For example, one Crowdrise member is currently raising money for the Children’s Aid Society. Her goal is to raise $1000 and, at the time of this writing, she’s more than halfway there. And while the Children’s Aid Society certainly stands to benefit from any funds raised on their behalf, the knowledge and experience that the donors and organizers glean from taking part in the effort can’t be overstated, either.
In other words, if your supporters are using their own crowdfunding initiatives to raise awareness of all the wonderful things your organization does, aren’t those the kinds of supporters you want to empower?
And if helping your favorite charity raise money becomes an experience that helps you understand the true value of a cause, doesn’t everybody win?
Thanks to the speed of the Internet, a meme can become a global phenomenon in a matter of hours. So it’s no wonder that some advertisers find creative ways to exploit the latest news headlines as a way to inject themselves into the larger conversation — for example, this Australian beverage ad which capitalized on the instant celebrity of the rescued Chilean miners.
But how do marketing opportunities change when these tactics can occur both instantly and globally?
How nimble is your agency?
How quickly could you capitalize on a hot topic?
How quickly could such a venture be approved?
Would it fit under a larger branding motif, or would it need to be invented from scratch?
How would you measure the impact of a meme- or news-related campaign?
Are your company’s values compromised by being overly topical?
Are there political or cultural references that you would not make?
If marketing moves at the speed of business, and if that speed is forever increasing, understanding where your company stands on these issues will become increasingly important in your brand’s fight for both short-term dominance and long-term relevance.
Will anyone remember the Chilean miners in a year?
Will anyone remember this Chill beverage campaign?
Will it matter?
For more big questions, connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Our client, Bigelow Tea, recently announced a new business partnership with Bruegger’s, the Vermont-based chain of bagel bakeries who’ve agreed to carry Bigelow’s line of organic teas. To help celebrate this nifty news, Bigelow asked Creative Concepts (that’s us) to film a video featuring Cindi Bigelow and Jim Greco, the CEO of Bruegger’s. We said sure.
In theory, we knew the focus of the video was supposed to be Bigelow’s organic teas, but as we’re well aware after having filmed dozens of videos for our clients, live video shoots are unpredictable and you never know what the real story might be, so we kept our options open.
As it turns out, the story behind this shoot turned out to be the remarkable similarities between Bigelow and Bruegger’s, both of whom pride themselves on seeing their employees and their customers not as numbers but as family. Whether it’s a friendly glimpse of Cindi Bigelow scrambling to make a bagel sandwich for a Bruegger’s customer or Jim Greco’s tale of how his mother first intoduced him to tea, it’s these wonderfully human moments that remind viewers and employees alike that the companies they work for (and buy from) are, ultimately, comprised of people.
And, as we’ve said before (and we’ll say again), people like doing business with people, not brands.
How is your brand reminding its customers and its employees that it is refreshingly, endearingly human?
For tips on humanizing your brand, follow us on Twitter or Facebook!
Is this proof of the branding power that connected customers wield, or was it all just a social media ruse intended to garner Gap some fast & cheap equity in the pop culture conversation?
And when The Simpsons had their beloved intro sequence “hijacked” by pop artist Bansky, the web was afire with controversy over just how complicit Fox was in the skewering of its own cash cow. Now that the video has been pulled from YouTube due to a “copyright claim with Twentieth Century Fox,” that controversy will only expand.
Are each of these examples conversation-worthy? Sure. Controversial? Perhaps. But what do each of these examples say about the equity brands are placing in their public images?
I Am What You Say I Am
A logo represents your brand. If you hand that logo to your audience, you’re empowering them to redefine your brand from the outside-in. And while that may be good for temporary buzz, it misses the larger point:
Your brand is ultimately defined by its actions.
Paying lip service to the concept of “gathering social feedback” through crowdsourced logo stunts may get you a few headlines in Gawker, but it won’t dramatically affect the way the public perceives the meaning of your brand. Except, possibly, to make your company look conniving, clueless, manipulative, disingenuous or simply desperate.
Are you holding your brand hostage for the sake of cultivating some social currency?
Avoid sacrificing your brand’s future: follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
Picture the audience that you think is currently reading your tweets, streaming your videos and liking you on Facebook.
