Brands Can Get Personal When They Stand For Something Good

By now it’s clear that social networking “platforms” like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are stable environments where the people of the world spend a great deal of their free time. I’m not predicting that any one of these will last forever, but I am pretty confident that all signs point towards people spending more time in these types of interactions, taking away from traditional forms of media like print and television. The allure of reaching millions of people with personalized messages is causing brands to take notice and experiment with new ways to reach their customers. I’m hopeful that advertising innovation is added to the long list of disruptions created by the Internet, but for the most part I think brands are still struggling with this new opportunity. It’s easy to “go digital” when they can repurpose existing advertising campaigns from print or television, but when they try to get personal and invent new relationships in the social space, their efforts are often uninspiring.

According to Royal Pingdom, corporate brands are far less successful than popular personalities on Facebook and Twitter as measured by number of followers and interactions. In his post Why brands are not your friends, social communications consultant Tom Evans says, “A brand’s social media presence exists to serve the consumer, not act as a faux BFF.” So true.

Savvy brands don’t pretend to be your friend or trick you into buying something. There are many great examples of brands that use social media as an opportunity to connect their real employees with their real customers. Ford and McDonald’s, for example, list the names and photos of the employees who manage their Twitter pages to avoid displaying an impersonal corporate voice or any pretense corporate friendship. You know exactly who originates their posts.

The problem here is not solely with the brand and their lack of imagination or awkward implementation. There is also a platform design problem in the mix. Facebook was not designed with brands in mind or they wouldn’t call all relationships “friends.” Real people have many types of association with others and don’t live in a faux world where everyone is their friend. Facebook is designed with a fundamental flaw with this insistence built into their platform. Furthermore, Facebook has a consistent track record of wielding their power over users’ best interests. As a free service, I give them full support to push the world forward in service of their own mission, but this doesn’t necessarily build trust or encourage real friendship, causing everyone to be less friendly to each other and more so to brands that try to blend into their news feeds. It’s like being at a party and having someone you don’t know step into a circle of three intimate friends discussing someone’s recent indiscretion. The conversation suddenly stalls and becomes awkward. The only recovery is to excuse yourself to get a refill on your drink or bring up a neutral topic, “So how about the weather today, huh?”

Give Facebook full credit for building the world’s largest social network but don’t assume they have your best interests in mind while interacting on the site. And that lack of trustworthiness makes it very difficult to get truly personal. People tend to withhold personal information if they perceive risk. One glance at my news feed and I find several unwelcomed examples of ads for products and services that I don’t want, never wanted, and find annoying. I realize that selling space within my personal conversations so I can use the app for free is consistent with the age-old argument for cramming dozens of commercials into primetime television. If you want to consume premium content someone has to pay for it right? So it’s easy for the brands to justify this, but reminds us that most are tone deaf to user-centered design and really don’t care about us as people—they just want to push their product.

I whole heartedly agree that makers of premium content should charge full price, but the traditional forced-ads approach is poorly designed, poorly executed and, in a world of many choices, will lead people away from brands’ efforts. A heavy, inappropriate ad load is simply too annoying and impersonal to keep users engaged when they can switch to other forms of connection and entertainment.

But back to the brand side of things… the challenge for brands remains: how to leverage the compelling power of social media? Can they unlock the promise of personalization to connect better with customers? I’d say yes, but only if they start with users in mind. You can get personal, but you have to get out of the way.

The basic design flaw inherent in Facebook gave rise to “pages” that allowed brands to set up a presence within the app. But apparently this wasn’t generating enough revenue, probably because being in a margin away from the main traffic is like putting your new store off in a field instead of the center of town. Conventional wisdom states: location, location, location! Or you could just realize that in a virtual world, in order to drive traffic you need to offer something really interesting—content is king!

Some brands have developed clear, interesting voices and offer valuable content that attracts people to their pages. But for many companies this is a difficult challenge, and they use social media in awkward, forced product pushes that are simply digital versions of the junk mail we used to see in our snail-mail boxes. The lack of imagination and tact these brands employ in their campaigns can be too blatant and stunningly out of touch.

Nobody wants to sign up or follow these brands because they are simply spamming people with crap. To all of this I say, caveat emptor (buyer beware), and remember lesson number one to kids on safe use of social media, “Don’t accept invitations from people you don’t know.”

To get more content in users streams, savvy brands simply become reporters on the latest happenings in and around their brand. Instead of pretending to be a “friend” the employees who work at the brand use the pronoun “we” instead of “me” to speak on behalf of the company, providing updates on new happenings and interesting sidebars on things their customers care about.

To pull this off successfully, a brand has to be crystal clear (and committed) to who they are and what they value. A brand should not exist to push a product. It should exist to clarify potential like Oreo, stand for something like Method Home, or make a difference in people’s lives like IBM. When a brand is successful at presenting itself as a distinct way of being, customers will flock to it. Brands that earn the right to get personal do not trick their customers into buying something any more than strangers become friends by providing shallow offers for free drinks if you promise to go home with them. You can’t buy friendship, but you can inspire others to like you by standing for something real and being yourself.

Brands can only get personal on social networks when they demonstrate their beliefs about goodness in the world and then live up to them with their content. Nike take note—if you want customers to behave like high performance athletes, your Nike Plus website better load quickly and deliver the goods according to your world-class standards. I won’t post my runs if it takes longer to access the website than it did to run my 5K workout.

And for all other brands, step up and be unique, then deliver with passion and excellence. Offer something in your posts that no one else can touch. I might be your friend if you stop pushing yourself on me. And who knows, if we’re friends I might even be more likely to buy your stuff when I need it.