Ten principles of social marketing

There are ten simple – but not always obvious – social principles that I’ve found useful while working in digital media for the past 20 years.

Before we dive in, let’s look briefly at how and why the well-understood potency of consumer word-of-mouth has been massively scaled and accelerated by connectedness, to create the monster we call social media.

Segmenting Consumers by network behaviour

Connected consumers don’t just think and behave differently today compared with ‘pre-web’ times, they use their connectedness in widely diverse ways. We can view the three major profiles as readers, authors and actors.

The huge majority – readers – are relatively passive in their behaviour (the received wisdom puts these people at some 90% of the overall population).

The authors are most active on sites such as Facebook and Twitter: they use social networks as publishers.

The actors – most evident in visual and audiovisual forums such as YouTube and Flickr – literally perform for their tribes. For them, social networks are a stage.

Authors and actors – simply because they’re connected and communicating – can have a significant impact on the way a tribe of consumers perceives a brand.

With reference to cases that have demonstrated – most of them by accident, a very few by intent – the beginnings of what has become ‘best practice’ in social media, here are ten principles, examples, over to you ideas & issues and practice to help get you started.

1. Listen before you speak.

No matter how iconic your brand, or how inspired your insights or creative work, social consumers and their tribes must be listened to carefully in order for you to intelligently join and participate in the conversation.

Tiger Beer in Malaysia began its successful engagement campaign, ‘Limited-Edition Stand Out’, with a focused listening programme. It collected and analysed discussions and blog posts in local social media, not just uncovering powerful, up-to-the-minute insights about the target consumer, but identifying the bloggers whose opinions were most influential.

Carefully brief and use an approved tracking service before, during and after your engagement tactics.

2. It’s not your story, it’s theirs: help them tell it.

In social networks, the primary motivation for users is not consumption of content, it’s self-expression.

They’re trying on new identities, sometimes every day. Their networks are like playpens, in which they can test and refine these identities. This is about tribal display, call and response, and it’s often more serious than it looks.

Sony Bravia’s celebrated ‘Bouncing Balls’ ad – an early example of a niche consumer tribe co-opting a brand and building powerful engagement – was ignited and sustained for literally years, by the creative passion and playfulness of (mostly) amateur, connected designers.

Brief your agencies to help your target consumers to self-express more creatively, more richly, to more people, or just to have more fun doing it. This is their story, how can you help them tell it?

3. Feedback, always feedback.

A golden rule of consumer engagement is that self-expression without feedback is empty.

When connected consumers express themselves, this is only one half of an equation that demands balancing with comments – such as ‘likes’ (as on Facebook) and, above all, validation.

Bailey’s pioneering ‘Shang Wenjie’ campaign in China culminated in a massive concert by this national star, a potent symbol of female empowerment. It was streamed over broadband to millions of young aspirational women. But the essential and easily overlooked engagement piece of this remarkable event was the online chat facility that joined up millions of real-time discussions among the audience alongside the content.

Wherever possible, build real-time, meaningful feedback mechanics into every engagement tactic.

4. Recognition is crucial.

Take on board the social consumers’ powerful need to be acknowledged for who they are: you’re on their turf. This means that your readers, but especially your authors and actors, need to be handled according to their profile. This is difficult and it can be costly to get right, but you must be aware of the issue and take steps not to get it wrong.

Nike+ has evolved powerful automated mechanisms for recognising its runners. From designing a personal avatar, to tailored suggestions for workout programmes based on running data from the sensor, each tool deepens the user’s sense of identity and belonging.

Ensure that, wherever possible, listening tools and consumer profiles are used to optimise recognition, and brief your agencies on the need for meaningful, brand-relevant market leader Quarter 3, 2011 11 > over to you ideas & issues recognition mechanics.

5. Rewards are crucial too.

It’s not just about reward from your brand, it’s personal to the consumer, it’s on their terms, it’s genuinely impactful and significant to their profile.

With a powerful set of recognition tools in place and in use, Nike+ now has an impactful and intimate platform for personal reward. For runners, this is of course based on the achievement of goals. A simple system of goal planning, with tracking and medals, voice-over congratulations from sports stars, including Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong, and printable certificates, are examples of meaningful, memorable, and shareable mechanics.

Brief your agencies to extend your recognition mechanics into your reward programme, and to align both of these key engagement elements intelligently with the consumer behaviour you’re seeking to encourage.

6. Add value by enabling.

Pre-social brand advertising has, one way or another, been about: ‘We (the brand) do stuff, you (the consumers) watch.’ This tradition has been powerfully subverted in social networking online, to become the norm.

From the frivolous, frothy ‘click campaign’ to the serious, time-consuming creative endeavour around Sony Bravia Balls, this consumer is looking for enabling and active platforms, not passive spectacle.

Axe/Lynx, with its popular and intrinsically viral click campaign, enabled a cliché (‘hopeless males getting the attention of unattainable females’) to evolve into a daily platform for funny comment, competition and sharing about all aspects of young male life.

Find the values and behaviours that your consumers are keen to enact: align them with the overall brief objectives.

7. Trading places.

We can take the enabling platform thinking further. In our X-Factor obsessed world, when we bring willing consumers onto the stage and help them to strut their stuff – great, average, or ‘so bad it’s good’ – something special occurs.

When the audience become stars – and, even more powerfully, when stars become audience or the ‘witnesses’ of the consumer’s personal and tribal self-expression – a powerful engagement dynamic is created. Baileys was able to use Shang Wenjie, the star of Chinese Idol, in this way, to ‘witness’ the emerging identity onto the global stage of young, educated Chinese women.

Brief your agencies – especially when your strategy involves professional performers – to create and build in ‘subversive performance’ opportunities.

8. Think useful.

Consumer engagement driven by entertainment or novelty (like a quirky video on YouTube) can be attractively explosive, but fizzle rapidly with little genuine brand attribution. A useful, consumer-relevant and brand-credible utility can establish real, sustainable permissions to get, and stay, engaged. As an example, we only have to look at the runaway success of mobile apps, to see how their increasing utility brings brands and connected consumers together.

Even where your campaign is based around entertainment, brief your agencies to seek and deliver useful, shareable gifts from the brand.

9. Use events intelligently.

Without a highly consumerrelevant point and a focus, branded events can veer dangerously close to ‘nice party, who invited the suits?’ territory. Rather than using star performances – or so-called exclusive content – to try to ignite brand engagement, focus on the consumer behaviour you’re seeking to encourage. Use the experiential work to incentivise, recognise and reward it.

Tiger Beer both incentivised the ‘Limited- Edition Stand Out’ campaign’s authors and actors, and concluded its successful engagement campaign with a firstof- its-kind standout blogger party.

When briefing the event component of your campaign, try to look at it as the icing: stay focused on the ‘cake’ of the core campaign objectives.

10. From brand monologue to hosted discussion.

Above all, engagement is to do with conversation. Rather than dominating or interrupting, brands that ignite, support and add value to ‘conversations that matter’, are able to achieve powerful access and permissions among connected consumers.

Dove’s iconic Campaign for Real Beauty tapped into a huge ‘fresh cultural truth’ that ignited lively global discussion around the timeless area of female identity, meaning and selfworth.

By enabling and distributing the discussion among consumers/stakeholders, Dove came to own the subject area, creating a powerful and very intelligent marketing success story.

Again, ask yourselves and your agencies: what – and where – is the conversation to which we can add genuine value?

This article featured in Market Leader, June 2011.

Michael Bayler, Managing Director, Bayler & Associates [email protected]