Tag: consumer trust | Danny Brown

Depending who you listen to or read in the social media space, the best reason to use social media for your brand varies.?It can be for listening; resolving issues; lead generation; focus groups; recruitment; and much, much more.

All good reasons. All good value. And yet?.

While these are all solid enough reasons to be on social media from a brand?s point-of-view, they mean nothing unless you have an audience. Not just an audience, but also one that actually trusts and supports you, and will listen when you speak.?Without that, you?ll just be another tree in the forest that no-one hears fall.

So how do you build that most valued of commodities in social media (and business in general) ? identity and trust? Especially in such a crowded space to start with??Thankfully, it?s not that hard ? but it does take work and stamina. Let?s dig in.

Step 1: The Message is the Key

The big mistakes that brands make when jumping into social media is they see their competitors doing it, so think they need to as well.?Wrong answer! (Insert buzzer noise here).?For sure ? social media can (and does) offer a fantastic additional tactic to add to your existing marketing mix. Yet only if it?s right for you ? so make sure you?re doing it for the right reasons and not because of forced impressions.

Once you?ve gotten that out of the way, the most important part comes next ? defining what your message is going to be, and how that is going to build the loyalty and brand identity that will define your success in this space.

The core points to consider here are:

What?s our brand?s value proposition, and how do we convey that?

Who will be our spokesperson/spokespeople, and in what capacity??How do we want to be perceived ? thought leaders, the company that listens, educators, or something else?

How will we ensure the message we?re sharing is consistent?and built to last?

These are some of the initial questions to ask, and answers to provide. Without these, you?ll be floundering pretty quickly and people will move on to the next brand.?Don?t let that be you. Think about the above questions, and make sure you have the answers (or know who the person is with the answers).

And, for the love of God, please make sure you actually know internally what your business stands for before you go outside!

Step 2: It Ain?t What You Do, It?s The Way That You Do It

Once you have your goals defined, and know exactly what will be said and who will be saying it, you move on to the next most important part ? building your brand identity with these components.

This, probably more than anything, will be the part of the puzzle that either builds your identity and success, or sees you crash and burn on takeoff (I watched?Top Gun?again the other night, so forgive the gung-ho analogies!).

While it?s crucial to have the right people and message defined, it?s just as crucial (if not more so) to take it to market properly.?What you say, and how you say it, is going to be the difference between you and your competitors. And if there?s one thing social media has taught all brands, it?s that people are always waiting for you to slip up.

To ensure your message is understood in the way you want it to be seen, you need to be consistent across every touchpoint:

If you?re setting up a blog, make the editorial guidelines clear, both for internal bloggers and guest authors, determine the message from the blog, and make that core across all posts.

On social networks, the people that will be the ?official? voice of your company need to share communications with each other regularly, and know whose role it is to reply to a certain question or issue.

On social media-led promotions that carry over to the offline space, ensure the same people promoting and answering online are attached to any offline teams as well, to keep the message clear and integrated.

These are just some of the ways to ensure the messaging from your brand is consistent and clear. That?s one of the first steps to building a true identity online.?On top of that, obviously you need to make sure that your brand?s look and feel ties into this identity too.

The last thing you want to do is confuse people when they visit one of your online outposts (blog, social network, Pinterest board, etc.) and find a different colour scheme or look and feel at each place (unless you?re building external resources as a separate part of your brand identity, for SEO or thought leadership reasons).

Get the message consistent; get the look consistent; the rest will start to fall into place.

Step 3: The Long and Winding Road

Of course, this is all pre-identity stuff. Or, at least, pre-social media identity (you have identified what your brand stands for internally, right?).?That?s the (relatively) easy part ? the hard part is making sure that message is seen and, more importantly, retained time and time again.

And that?s where many brands fail, by expecting social media to be the quick fix to all that ails them.?It?s not. Social media is not a fire sale ? it?s a long-term investment and tactic, strategy, campaign, call it what you wish.

If you?re expecting your brand to be immediately identifiable through your actions on social media, you?ll be sorely disappointed.?Instead, it?s the consistency of the message and voice that will build your identity, not the speed in which you bring that to market.

Customer loyalty isn?t something that can be bought ? and the brands that identify the most with their customers? needs will be the ones that are rewarded with loyalty, referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Social media can enhance the reach of these referring voices to the Nth degree ? but you need to make sure you?re deserving of it to start with.?Get your identity right by planning it and building it up the right way, and the world (social media or otherwise) can truly be your oyster.

The choice is yours.

image:?Margarita Perez Garcia

Over the weekend, I posted this status update on my Facebook profile.

Every day it seems I read a new privacy concern regarding Facebook.
From the Messenger App recording audio and video without your knowledge, to Facebook always resetting your Privacy settings to the default Public setting whenever an update goes through, to people appearing in Sponsored Ads without permission – it’s becoming equally tiring and concerning.
While I get the “You’re the product if you don’t pay” argument, I would counter with, “Yes, but product by its nature has a shelf life.” I’m thinking my shelf life with Facebook is coming close to its end.
I get the irony that, as a marketer who works with social data tools, I need peoples’ data to help make decisions. But that should be opt-in permissive data – freely available by that person’s decision, and not available through some questionable data sharing practice based on hoped-for ignorance by the users of that medium.
A lot of thinking to be had in the next few days – but the way it stands at the moment, Facebook doesn’t deserve the loyalty of its users (including me) that made it what it is, when the privacy of these same users is not something Facebook is too bothered with, regardless of their protestations.

As it turns out, I didn’t wait the few days I was planning on doing the thinking around my use of Facebook. Instead, I simply deleted my account for the simple reason that, at some point, we need to take a stand for our privacy.

We’re Better Than This

It’s been almost seven years since I opened my Facebook account. In that time, I’ve shared a lot of data about me personally, and recently my growing family. I’ve also allowed access to my data when certain third-party apps have requested them (though I did stop short at allowing access to my friends’ data).

I’ve tried to counter my growing concerns about the way Facebook uses and abuses the data we give them with varying degrees of justification.

It’s a free product so what right do we have to complain or question?
It’s only data that can be found elsewhere.
It’s only to allow ads in our streams, and we can always ignore these.

These, and arguments like them, have kept me logging into the world’s biggest network and continue to share data and, little by little, strip away any remaining privacy, imagined or otherwise.

Until the weekend.

Because this weekend all the doubts, all the growing concerns, all the facts that were staring me in the face came to a head, and enough was enough. This weekend, the mindset changed from “We simply put up with this” to “We’re better than this.”

We May Be The Product, But Every Product Has a Shelf Life

As I mention earlier in this post, I understand the irony of a marketer who uses social media data as a key part of strategic planning complaining about Facebook privacy. Pot, kettle, black, right?

And maybe it is. Then again, maybe it’s a sign of how questionable Facebook is in its approach that a marketer who needs certain Facebook data is taking a stand against the very data Facebook serves up – because it can’t be guaranteed that Facebook users have actually offered up that data.

Using the popular Facebook Messenger app I referred to earlier, did you know its ~~Terms and Conditions~~ Permissions include this specific language?

Allows the app to call phone numbers without your intervention. This may result in unexpected charges or calls. Malicious apps may cost you money by making calls without your confirmation.

Allows the app to send SMS messages. This may result in unexpected charges. Malicious apps may cost you money by sending messages without your confirmation.

Allows the app to record audio with microphone. This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation.

Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.

As a digitally-savvy user of social media, that language scares the hell out of me. Now, imagine how many users that don’t care about this little social media bubble we inhabit know about these settings?

Can you honestly say the “We are the product” argument holds sway in the light of the terms above? At what point does “free” come to mean “[loss of] free[dom]”?

While we might currently be the product (Facebook won’t allow us to pay a premium to remove that product monkey from our backs), every product has a shelf life. When that shelf life is nearing its end, the parent brand can either renew the product or let it go to pasture.

In the case of Facebook (and other social networks), the product decides how long a shelf life it has.

Your Product, Your Rules

For me, that shelf life came to a close on the weekend. In the short term, it won’t mean squat to Facebook. It’s just one person among a billion.

But you know, even the smallest acorns can shake the mightiest oaks given the right conditions.

It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow.

But as more people start to read stories on the mainstream media channels, and more parents face the need to learn about social network privacy to protect their fast-growing children online, the nefarious privacy settings and language that the likes of Facebook use will be more evident.

Here’s hoping that learning comes before too many people find out the hard way that being the product Facebook-style is much more than just some legalese on a Terms and Conditions page – it’s essentially a target on your data forehead, and hunting season is always open.

Note – the Facebook Messenger app terms highlighted in this post would appear to be Android only at this point, which has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times at time of writing.
Note – In the comments, Facebook Production Engineer Jeff Ferland advised the Terms and Conditions referenced in the post are Permissions. The post has been edited accordingly.

image: opensource.com
image: infowars