Brands ‘fear' their consumers

Warren Griffiths, Gloo MD, explained that Web 2.0 refers to the transition of websites from isolated information silos to interlinked computing platforms, including a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with the freedom to share and re-use. The result is a raise in the economic value of the web as users can do more online.

“Consumers are now becoming more powerful: consumers can make or break bands online,” Griffiths asserts.

In the world of Web 2.0, there is a massive shift from consumers being merely members of the media audience, to active participants, collaborating and generating their own content. That's where the phrase user-generated content (UCG) comes from. That's what makes the Internet different today: consumers are generating their own content and not just consuming it passively.

And believe me, if they don't like your content, they discard or change it. And there is nothing you can do about it. What marketers can consider is tapping into that need and using it to promote their brands.

Griffiths explains that social networking sites (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc) are human search engines where mass ongoing collaboration occurs in the collection and redistribution of information and knowledge. Brands need to learn how to leverage those content platforms in order to harness the collective intelligence of these communities.

That knowledge in these early days of social media online is power.

Many business leaders still, however, regard social media and the current surge of Internet activity on social networking sites as a fad: that much is evident from the banning of Facebook in companies worldwide. An extremely shortsighted and short term move according to the online gurus.

Understand the medium

“Generally marketers don't understand Web 2.0. So if we as marketers can understand the medium, we can use it very effectively. We need to change the way we reach our customers and how we communicate in that space,” Griffiths urges:

• Very important: marketers need to publish value-added content. Static websites and stale content are effectively dead.
  
• Consumers of products and services trust people and their peers, not websites or faceless corporations.
  
• Value-added audio and text content will be expedited online and required in the near future.
  
• Collaborate with your customers: through blogs, wikis and social networking platforms that are already being used in advertising and product development.
  
• Your content is covered online in many ways, not just linearly. Learn more about how consumers are consuming your content.
  
• Take time to understand the audience you are communicating to in the Web 2.0 environment – they behave differently to audiences in other mediums.
  
• Take the time to understand your consumer's digital journey.

Sound advice, particularly when one considers that most brand gurus these days believe the traditional marketing model is dead.

Griffiths referred to two recent case studies where local brands had used the social networking phenomena to reach their target consumer: 5FM Radio's Youngblood campaign and Virgin Money's credit card campaign. Virgin Money took the (still) unusual step of sponsoring a blog of one of the top bloggers and new media gurus in South Africa's, Vincent Maher of the Mail & Guardian Online, and asking him to write about his experiences with his Virgin Money credit card. It has not prescribed to him what to write about. The dandy thing about a blog, though, is you can make comparisons with other financial products. Maher, as one of the most respected bloggers in South Africa, also has the right target audience for Virgin.

In the case of 5FM, a campaign, launched online for Youth Day to find out what social causes the radio station's listeners cared about, has continued long after as the website created has become a forum for the youth to talk about what matters to them in the social, economic and political context, debating and engaging with one another. The users are keeping the site going with user-generated content and constant activity – the radio station just keeps a watching brief.

Internet pioneer and research guru, Arthur Goldstuck, pointed out that your brand is involved in social media just by virtue of being in the market and being talked about – whether you like it or not.

“Your consumer is engaging online and any new initiative by marketers must take into account online environment,” he says.

Goldstuck's five rules for engaging with your consumer online are:

1. Be aware of what people are saying about your brand/services: someone's job must be to track the trackers (through social media networking sites such as Zoopy, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, key blogs, and the blog aggregators).
   
2. Be responsive: someone's job must be to respond. Don't ignore your consumers.
   
3. Position yourself: your job is to be out there.
   
4. Engage before you get engaged: you need to be engaged or you may be forced to engage at some point and you may not be ready.
   
5. Engage where you are already engaged: leverage CSI initiatives in blogs, campaigns in Facebook.
   

There's an example in the media today of a major brand, a media one at that, not listening to what people are saying on the blogosphere and now that the issue has gone mainstream by being reported in the daily newspapers, still they refuse to comment. I'm talking about the storm of controversy over whether there was a sexual assault in M-Net's Big Brother Africa house or not. M-Net has done what most brands still do when they don't know what to do with the cacophony of cyber chatter: refused to comment and pulled all the negative comments off their official website, instead of listening to their users and engaging with them in a transparent, honest manner. It hasn't stopped the chatter: it's continuing in unofficial Big Brother websites, blogs… and now in newspaper columns. When will brands learn just plain reputation management, let alone online reputation management?

Fear factor

The fact is marketers are afraid to engage with their consumers one-on-one. They are afraid of what they might learn. It takes great courage to find out that your consumers might be more knowledgeable about your brand than you, might hate your latest promotional campaign and might even try to destroy your brand.

Negative feedback is what keeps most brands away and leads them to make poor decisions about how to address that negative feedback when it comes. But you ignore the storm of cyber chatter at your peril. Global brands have been destroyed online – often by just one blogger who finds a mistake and blogs about it: Google ‘Dell hell'; ‘Kryptonite locks'; ‘Fedex furniture'.

Yes, there will be content that is bad for your brand posted, but if you embark on the process to engage with your consumers, you have to take the good with the bad – if your consumers are thinking it, wouldn't you like to know?

This is new territory without rules, as the chair of the conference, brand architect Patrick Collings from Sagacite, pointed out, but there is still a chance for savvy marketers to become early adopters.

What came out of the conference is that you won't survive very long without an online strategy – your company or your brand could be less than a decade away from being completely irrelevant with the online, mobile, connected consumers of tomorrow who have grown up as the wired generation and are quite comfortable interacting online.

See also:

• What is your brand's narrative? [article]
  
• [Digital branding] The big deal about social media for marketers [blog]
  
• [Digital branding] Consumers can break your brand [blog]
  
• [Digital branding] Answering marketer's questions [blog]