Social Spam Brand Building

Father’s Day recently passed, and similar to what happens during every holiday in our digitally social age, Facebook was alight with posts addressing the festivities and the importance of the day. Alas, not to let an opportunity pass them by, opportunistic brands and marketers everywhere also tried to capitalize on the holiday, like they do every other holiday, by posting calendar-related nonsense, like this example from Old Spice, in the hope that the timely relevance of their post will inspire fans to like or respond in kind, thus sharing the brand’s message with their respective fan bases.

This got me thinking about how brands communicate on Facebook in general, and more specifically, it got me thinking about a problem I have long had with how most brands utilize Facebook to deliver brand messages.

Take this post from Coca-Cola for example. They are not offering anything of value here, either from a content, offer or enhanced experience perspective. Breaking it down to the most base motives, Coca-Cola is essentially delivering a lowest common denominator message to try to exploit their fanbase into propagating their brand. And this is certainly not exclusive to Coca-Cola, it is status quo across most brands utilizing Facebook to engage people.  

Am I crazy or is this approach no different than the spam about purchasing Viagra and cheap prescription pills that we receive in our inboxes daily? Put another way, when savvy brands look to do email based CRM programs they perform rigorous exercises to ensure that the content they provide is valuable, that the frequency of delivery is palatable and that people opt-in to receive their messages so the brands are not providing them with messages that they don’t want. Why should Facebook or social media be any different? Would you send an email to your opt-in database about broadswords & mobile phone cases and with no other content of value whatsoever?  

I realize that email and social media don’t make for such direct comparisons as illustrated above, but I can’t help but feel that in the digital social space many brands are taking advantage of the connections they have built with people. I also realize that when brands first started popping up on Facebook there may have been a novelty to interacting with a brand or having a brand comment on a post. However I have to believe, now that brands have more or less saturated the space, that people don’t really care when a brand asks them what their favorite color is, nor do they believe that the brand cares about their answer.

To that point, I am linked to a number of brands on Facebook for professional tracking purposes, one of which happens to be Old Spice, and when Old Spice’s randomly comical posts like, “Is your mind currently generating mastodon steak recipes while your body is rescuing a baby panda from a pack of angry cougars?” first started appearing in my newsfeed, I admit I found them entertaining. However, after a few weeks they quickly lost their novelty and began to annoy me in their frequency and repetitiveness.  A sprinkling of these posts within the larger context of content with actual value I might have been able to handle, but in the absence of that content it simply grew old quickly.

Am I alone in this thinking? Am I giving people too much credit in what they should expect out of brands in social media? Am I being too idealistic in how I think a brand should activate on Facebook and other social channels, which is to say, to provide content of value, however that may be defined by the specific brand in question?

There are definitely brands out there that are doing just that, and doing it well, unfortunately most are focused on lowest common denominator nonsense. And to their credit, Coca-Cola is actually creating deeper based content which they share off of their Facebook page, such as this and this. Which in turn begs the question - is it worth it?

I truly believe that it is, yet still I question whether that is correct. This is something I will continue to explore in this blog.

Use Protection: The Hidden Danger Behind Brand Relationships

I recently read an AdWeek article written by the Ad Contrarian which basically stated that the prevailing dogma around digital and social media providing an opportunity to finally meet the unfulfilled desire of people to form relationships with brands is bullshit.

I have high regard for the Ad Contrarian and I believe that If you had to read only one industry blog it should be the Ad Contrarian blog, as it is one of the most insightful commentaries on the business of marketing and advertising, period. I also generally agree with the article’s point of view. However I do believe, as is the nature of the Ad Contrarian (and honestly part of what makes the blog great), that the relationship dynamic depicted in the article was painted a bit too black & white.

And now my shades of grey...

I do think the notion that people have an overwhelming pent up need to form deep relationships with their denture cream and throat lozenges is completely ludicrous. That being said, we also have to acknowledge that the advent of digital media has altered the way in which people  interact with advertising, in that, interruption based messages (e.g. a TV commercial) now have a harder time breaking through than they did prior to the evolution of the digital space. This dynamic is particularly accentuated in environments that have only ever existed in a digital form (e.g. online), which is why banner ads are, in most cases, completely useless.  

The main driver behind this circumstance is the simple fact that digital platforms; whether they are computers, TiVo, tablets, Digital Video Recorders, etc., allow a greater ability for people to control whether or not they see advertising messages, and given that choice, most naturally opt not to. In order to counter this dynamic marketers are attempting to integrate their advertising into people’s media consumption in a way that compliments vs. interrupts the experience, and unfortunately in doing so, have created this distortion that people want to form relationships with brands the way they do with other human beings.  

There is a relationship people want with brands and its parameters are simple:

1. Provide me a quality product that meets the need it promises to meet (this includes appropriate levels of customer service based on the complexity of the product and/or category)
2. Provide it at a price that is competitive
3. In some instances, again depending on the product and/or category, provide me with a self-image boost derived from the cache the brand provides

For those two to three things, I the consumer will provide you with a limited amount of loyalty until you screw up.

That is it. What vehicles you use to communicate your part of the relationship does not change the parameters of the relationship, it merely changes the parameters of the communication. I will further extrapolate on this point in another post titled “The Stupid Shit Brands Do On Facebook”