If you’re a brand and you’d like to harness the power of social media (via Twitter), it’s honestly, a difficult situation to be in. Because Twitter is a community where the signal to noise ratio is really huge and you could make out the difference between spam and a genuine guy in the minimum possible time compared to any other social media channels.
For the same reason, life for brands on Twitter is tough for sure but not “un achievable” a target, or so do I prefer to believe. And I can substantiate my stand.
Why or How does brands fail on social media?
1. When they don’t get “social”
Obviously, there is no “power” held with popular people on social media, if at all there is anything that makes them popular, it’s because they are social. They interact, discuss, learn, make noise and have fun. It’s because people like to have them within their circle of friends. So when brands get reluctant to get social, they fail.
2. When they talk only about the product.
Some brands hop on to Twitter hoping that they can shout about their products, and get people interested. That’s fine as long as you are an established brand like Coke or Obama. People will keep waiting for your updates, and they are okay if you only talk about yourself. But if you’re a brand that’s struggling to get attention, you got to mix it up until you reach an authority.
3. When they don’t answer, where they’re supposed to.
And don’t expect people to get all nice with you. They’ll ask questions, criticize or even bad mouth you. But all they want are answers. And when you don’t answer them at the right time, people will strike you off the list of their “trusted” friends.
4. When they don’t accept mistakes.
Accepting mistakes are a great way to get close to people. I think its the most powerful and effective tool I know to win someone’s heart. Now, don’t get blind that discussing mistakes will mar your reputation. No. That’s a big mistake, when you accept and discuss mistakes, the one portion of the community who are “willing to befriend” you will stick with you. The other portion of critics will anyway go away, if you discuss it or not.
5. When they don’t understand people.
Brands exist because people use them. When they fail to understand people, they lose the game. And to understand people, you needn’t take mass psychology classes, just behave like you are one among them. When you fail to do that, the gap between the brand and user widens.
6. When they don’t give value to the followers.
Being a good brand is half task done. But that’s not enough. You got to give value to your followers. May be an exclusive discount offer or an exclusive product review? Use the principle of divide and rule. Give value/ Reward to your followers – leave the carrot dangling for the cynics – Leave your critics with no options. That would be a great way to make things interesting.
7. When they aren’t fun.
This is one factor I found very interesting with brands getting online. Most of the time, companies are “scared” to get social, while they want to make their presence social. And what happens is that they play a double game, which fires back at them. Many companies online draw rules left and right to keep “things in control” and what they don’t understand is that the rules in social media is not set by you but the people. So if you got to save you a** through all that’s happening around, you better be the fun-guy-around. Don’t get scared to talk to people, that’s not the essence of the whole idea.
8. When they fail to create win-win situations with people
Another strategy that’s a 100% winner all the time is creating opportunities and letting people win. It’s easy to play it, but it’s not easy to take the initiative. Creating win-win situations is a must for any brand to succeed, and it’s one of the few ways available where you can get the users/followers involved. A nice example would be the “Taste casting” thing that happened at a restaurant recently. Where a new product ( I guess pizza) was introduced to a bunch of tweeps from the locality. The restaurant could get a cost effective way of advertising their products while the tweeps felt happy that they were being treated exclusively as elite. Classic win-win situation.
9. When they are bothered at all.
Okay, so if you aren’t bothered at all about your users/people, you better get out of the way. This is hard to imagine but there are folks out there who don’t give a damn about what people think about them. I think this is a lie and only a big damn excuse.
10. When they have bad products.
Obviously, social media isn’t a place where you can expect magic to happen if you have a failed product. If you are one, better try rebuilding your brand and not pushing the same thing across to people.
GM Reinvention is a similar project that’s come out recently. When it met with the worst times in business, it embraced social media and came up with this new idea of limited products and introduced it through social media. It’s getting great responses to the website now and I think this is a great way to rebuild your brand.
So, essentially, In Social Media, brands just don’t remain brands as in traditional media. They got to understand the pulse of the crowd and morph themselves in to a more..well “social” form to be successful one.
It’s amazing what social media can give back to you. It always gives you back in multiples..always. You give them value, they give it back..a lot. You try to be smart, they get smarter!
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