Experience Matters

Branding Through Experience: Go With Your G.U.T.

Branding is thought of as “the process of creating a unique, positive and recognizable identity for a product or service” and has traditionally been achieved by companies through mono-directional interactions with their customers.  Social marketing requires companies to let go of their death grip over their brand and put faith into the hands of users and customers.  Branding 2.0 has nothing to do with product shots, tag lines or carefully crafted copy created by marketers.  Branding 2.0 is about letting customers define your brand for you.

That G.U.T. Feeling

The catch with social marketing is that it doesn’t really matter how pleased the company is with the effort - if customers aren’t feeling it then it will fail.  Try to make a piece of brand-friendly social media that doesn’t allow customers to interact with it the way they want to and you will end up with nothing more than a web based black hole that sucks in money and resources and never gives anything back.  So what makes one social marketing effort a success and another a dud?  The G.U.T. - Genuineness, Usefulness and Thoughtfulness.

Genuineness

For social media to be genuine it has to support the interests of the users, not the creators.  Take Dell’s corporate blog for example.  In 2006, when Dell was caught in the midst of some bad PR regarding a video of a Dell laptop battery catching on fire, they decided to do something different.  They used the blog to talk candidly about the situation in a way that traditional PR did not.  What happened next was an explosion of traffic around the entry and real conversation.  For once a company was having a conversation with their customers that customers actually wanted to participate in.

This is the key to genuineness.  While posting a blog entry about Dell’s batteries did not appear to be the most “appropriate” thing to do (from a branding standpoint), it was, inevitably, what the customers wanted and proved that, in the end, the customer is always right.  Genuine social marketing requires a company to put aside their conventional ways of invoking customer responses and really focus on what appeals to their customers, regardless of whether or not it is completely in line with traditional branding initiatives.

Usefulness

The term “useful” can be rather subjective.  In social media, usefulness can be thought of as that media’s ability to enhance the informational, entertainment or communicational experience of the user.

In terms of usefulness, one area of social media I often see go awry are widgets and social applications.  A great example of a not-so-useful application is the “Ford Mustang News” application that acts as a feed reader for news related to Ford Mustang’s model.  While this seemingly fulfills the requirement for enhancing the informational experience of the user, it completely lacks any entertainment or social aspects that could make it more of a useful piece of social media.

Ford, however, has another Facebook application called the “Ford Movie Challenge and Win,” where users make guesses on how much a given movie is going to earn on a weekend.  Users earn points based on the accuracy of their predictions and have the ability to challenge friends and hold direct competitions.  This application, while not very focused on Ford or their products, provides a much better entertainment and social experience than the previous example (and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that its user base is over 60 times larger).  These two applications are great examples of how usefulness can create a better branded social media marketing asset.

Thoughtfulness

Users want to engage social media that not only provides interesting content, but content that is unique to that social media channel, as well.  A prime example of this is the major U.S. telecommunications company Verizon.

Up until recently, Verizon managed their own branded social network for their customers.  After sinking money into their social networking experiment they decided to deactive it and move all of their corporate social networking activities to their Facebook fan page.  Not only did their existing Facebook fan page have more members than their own social network, Verizon’s Facebook allowed customers to communicate with each other as well as with Verizon.  Oh, and it was also free to operate.

If users can get a similar experience using another channel of social media that they are more accustomed to, then chances are they will head toward the familiar…or at least wherever they can find more of their friends.

Summary

Instead of thinking of social media as a channel for broadcasting a brand message, it is better to think of social media as a channel through which customers themselves can create and broadcast their own messages.  This is already one of the primary reasons for social media’s popularity.  The more rules brands attempt to apply to their efforts in promoting traditional branding at the cost of genuineness, usefulness and thoughtfulness, the less success companies will have at utilizing the power and potential of social marketing.