Two Ears and One Mouth: Social Media and Continuous Dialogue

Cocktails-sign

I’ve heard or read that many marketing types believe that one of the themes of social media next year will be continuous dialogue with customers. For a while I thought this sounded great; ongoing dialogue means more opportunities for marketing. And this is all synonymous with social media, or so they have us believe…

Having mulled it over, I’m not convinced that ongoing dialogue is the right way forward for most brands. Let me quickly clarify something. I feel that, broadly speaking, there are two types of brands when it comes to social media and online marketing: those that I call ‘utility brands’ and those that aren’t. Utility brands are those in the utility sectors themselves, along with pseudo-utility brands like telcos, banks and public sector organisations. Utility brands are those where we have few opportunities to switch (think long term contracts with electricity companies or telcos). Non-utility brands are those that we can pick up and discard easily. If a restaurant is rubbish, we just won’t go back, for instance.

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I should cocoa

Nestle

There has been a lot of online debate recently around Nestlé’s Facebook fan page.

The page has almost 100,000 fans, which initially looks like a pretty good situation for the marketing folk at Nestlé. Except for the fact that many of the people who have signed up as fans have done so just to slag the company off, mainly about its use of palm oil.

As is usually the case with these online storms, there are some people standing up for Nestlé, but they do seem to be outnumbered by the haters.

Some argue that this is a great example of Social Media in action as it is a platform for people to vent their already existing views about a brand; on the other hand, where is the engagement from the brand and should there be a filter for the people putting up irrelevant, “funny” posts?

What do you think?

An engaging online strategy doesn't necessarily mean an increase in bottom-line revenue

Bk

I’d never really noticed it before, but Burger King has a really cool homepage.

Take a look for yourself, but the website has three volume bars (‘Fun’, ‘Food’ and ‘King’), which control how big the central icons are.

For example, if you max out the ‘Fun’ bar, and minimize ‘Food’ and ‘King’, it makes it easier to see all the advertorial video content on the site.

This is a really cool idea as it offers a degree of customization to the site and it’s certainly more engaging and entertaining than, say, McDonald’s homepage.

It probably creates more brand equity and although not directly connected to Social Media, shows the direction big brands are taking these days.

Another example of this is how Pepsi decided not to have a Super Bowl advert for the first time in 23 years and instead are plowing the money into Social Media.

What I must ask though is does this cool website help sell more burgers? I don’t think it does, which makes it something of an anomaly.

It builds brand equity, which is vital for long-term success in the majority of businesses, but I don’t think it will make a difference when people are choosing between the major fast-food joints.

However, it may help attract the best employees, so if this was the aim then the amount of effort put into creating the site makes sense.