“Social’s future is not community”? I disagree.
Katy Woodrow-Hill, Strategy Partner.
We’ve been loving Admap’s 50th anniversary issue here at Dare. It’s rammed full of articles on the future of brand communications, many of which are insightful and provocative.
That’s certainly the case with Darika Ahrens’ piece on why “Social’s future is not community.”
In fact, we were so deliciously provoked by it, that we decided to respond in writing.
If you haven’t read it, we’ll give you a little summary. Then we’ll bring on our strategy partner and resident leader of all things social media, Katy Woodrow Hill, to give something of a counter view. Then, dear reader, you can decide what to use and what to discard.
Darika’s argument is that the “original dream” of social was that brands could recreate, for commercial gain, the complex social ties that bind communities.
The dream is dead, she asserts, because people just didn’t want brands to play this role.
So what’s left? At one point, she gets very reductionist: “Advertising is the only space left for brands in social.” Then she recants – or, at least, finds another couple of reasons for brands to use social – when she says: “Brands need to ditch the community ideology. Then invest in the parts of social media that are working: advertising, customer service, and data.”
According to Arhens, “the true future of social media” is to “take social data, social signals if you like, and use them to customise brand experiences. Customisation. Personalisation. This is the Holy Grail for both consumers and brands today. Because it’s something that both sides want….It doesn’t even require a direct conversation.”
Amazon’s use of its customers’ Facebook and Twitter accounts is a pioneering case in point. “Doing this allows Amazon to access my social graph,” Ahrens writes. “This reveals more about me and my true preferences, not just my purchase history.” All of which leads to a better customer experience.
We like a lot of what Ahrens is saying here. We believe everything a brand does should be framed within the overall customer experience and be designed to make this experience better. Hence, building community for the sake of…well, building community…is a bit of a nonsense.
But, where we take issue is her assertion that this was the “original dream”. And, indeed, that building community is now always, inherently wrong.
Contained within her own article is the example of Sony Europe – whose forums provide always on, peer-to-peer customer service. It saves Sony money (one ‘super user’ actually does the work of three Sony employees, according to Sony’s own calculations, Ahrens tells us).
Her point is that the brand itself is absent from these interactions. Perhaps. But it’s still hosting them. It’s still an official Sony community. So how does that make the building of community a dumb thing?
Such are the perils of polemic. We don’t wish to be overly critical. But we do think a bit of perspective is needed.
Dare’s own strategy partner, Katy Woodrow Hill, started her career in community marketing. While she freely admits that this makes her “somewhat biased”, we thought she’d be the ideal person to provide a counter-view to Ahrens’ argument. So we’ve given over the rest of this post to what Katy has to say.
“I can’t help but be a big supporter of community marketing. I really want brand communities and social marketing to exist beyond just comms channels in order to keep brands accountable. I’m very much aligned to a view that social media should run throughout a business as a way of behaving, because it forces brands to create better experiences and means they can’t just create advertising to paper over the cracks.
“I think this article boxes social marketing into a comms corner. I don’t agree that the future of social is non-conversational. This is for the simple reason that humans are conversational and they want stories and they want dialogue — perhaps not with faceless brands, but definitely with people who buy those brands or who work in those businesses. That’s when community becomes the partner to great experience.
“Brands may not always succeed at creating communities, but there is proof to show that participating in communities around shared passions can be extremely effective for brands.
Sometimes these communities are created, sometimes they’re just facilitated by brands.
Look at Starbucks, IBM, Nike, Apple, Red Bull — they have genuine communities congregating around them, created or not.
“The best and most effective work I’ve seen and done is when brands have a genuine reason to positively participate within relevant communities and (shock horror!) where they manage to add value….where they collaborate and co-create products and services; where they serve customers in those communities or inspire them with ideas, which create new avenues of conversation. All of this can be proven to drive consideration and often direct sales.
“Great community engagement happens when brands don’t try to control or own communities. Brands who’ve done well in this learn quickly that if they don’t serve these communities then it won’t work.
“But isn’t that the biggest thing we should all have learned by now from social media? It’s a lesson for marketing in general rather than just a social media rule: the customer calls the shots now. Brands need to roll with it, work with this reality, respond and serve.
“I also agree with Darika Ahrens that brands should also use data insight to respond and serve indirectly – delivering just what you always wanted without even having to ask you what you wanted is way more impactful than simply giving you what you asked for. It’s a new kind of magic and it is a big part of what makes for memorable and delightful customer experience
“I love the idea that when brands get the experience thing right, people are naturally attracted. Red Bull claims to have found the correlation between social media community and sales, which also raises another point that ‘community’ doesn’t have to be in one place, but is instead a behaviour that glues everything together. When brands understand that, they can win big.”
