Jan 2011
Starting the conversation: how Mobile can help drive your Social Media strategy
By Phil Gault
For my first 10 years or so in advertising, we were all focused on the Declamatory Brand; its authority both established and characterised by the loudness of its mass media broadcasting.
But you can’t preach to convert these days, it would seem.
Brands today are having to learn to be significantly more flexible and open-minded things. Immersed in the codes and behaviours of the 2.0 world, the modern consumer expects brands to engage, to listen, to respond – and to do so at deeper, more meaningful levels than simply jumping on the crowd-sourcing bandwagon.
This obviously poses a problem for all of us. We’ve been playing the game long enough to understand the rules of One-to-Many communications. Ditto One-to-One communications. But what we’re talking about here is One-amongst-Many communications…and that’s a whole new kettle of cod.
The Social Media party is in full swing, and it’s getting noisier and more crowded by the day. It’s fluid, chaotic, apparently random – and thus an environment that poses unfamiliar challenges for brands. How do you get people to start talking to you ? How do you keep the conversation going, and prevent attention wandering to the next ‘guest’ that passes by ? How do you ensure your efforts lead to something measurably beneficial in terms of either equity or sales ?
Mobile is obviously only part of the solution – but it’s going to be an increasingly important one.
There are three key reasons for this. The first is that Mobile is intrinsically a conversational medium. At heart, it’s about friends communicating with each other by voice or text.
Which leads directly to the second reason: a staggering amount of Social Media already happens via Mobile. Dick Costello, CEO of Twitter, recently announced that 40% of all tweets are posted via mobile. Facebook now has more than 200m mobile users worldwide (up from 65m in just twelve months); and they’re twice as active as desktop-only users.
The third – and from a marketing perspective, perhaps the most important – reason is that Mobile brings the benefit of context, through a unique and powerful combination of time and place. We can make what we have to say both immediately relevant and immediately actionable.
This is why the location-based, offers-driven model is so hot right now, via the likes of Gowalla, Shopkick and Foursquare (the last credited by Domino’s UK as a key contributor to recent sales increases). As we’ve seen with the launch of Facebook Places, or Google’s offer to buy Groupon, services like these fit naturally under the broad umbrella of ‘Social Media’.
To finish, here are four thought-starters on how Mobile could accelerate the success of your Social Media efforts:
- Support what’s happening already. Our work with Coca-Cola on Core 3 Crediting (a recent winner at the Global Mobile Marketing Awards) indicates the potential for brands to sponsor and enrich their users’ conversations in innovative ways.
- Give people something that connects to their proven interests. For instance, there’s a lot of Social Media activity around finding great offers. So we created a reason for Zavvi.com to become part of the conversation within Deal Forums – with spectacular results.
- Empower people in new ways. Driven by the app phenomenon, there’s a real Content Culture growing around Mobile. Could your brand give people the tools to take an even more active part in this, perhaps by creating and sharing their own Content ?
- Co-operate to accumulate. People who monopolise the conversation tend to be boring; whereas working with complementary partners can make you more interesting to more people. An excellent example is what Shazam and Spotify are doing together. Rather than define competition in the traditionally narrow sense, they’re happy to increase their respective talk value by building on each other’s strengths.
Sponge Chairman Alex Meisl shares his views on augmented reality here
