It’s The Brand Not The Personality Stupid
I’ve just gotten out of a Ustream.tv chat hosted by Hot Dog Media.
The chat was refreshing and the conversation flowed onto the subject of brands using social media (So.Me), and how and why.
At some point the ugly notion (in my humble opinion) was raised that social media is about personalities, in that if company x employs a community manager they should drive their communication from a personality stance.
WRONG
What brands need in this tribal infested Web 2.0 play-ground are in fact “moderators“, or “facilitators” of dialogue, operating much in the same way a good anchor man/woman on a television news programme would, or a Chair at a convention board.
The fact is that people (social media) will amplify your brand’s negative or positive aspects quicker than you can get your wages paid. Clearly this mean you need two vital things.
- a good product
- conversation moderators - to promote the positive conversation aspects, and to address the negative aspects, with promises of change (disaster management)
- if you have a crap product people will talk about it being so
To give you a very clear example of why the BRAND should be the talking point and not the personality read this forum thread.
It is a first hand experience, a concrete example, of how I moderated (I am Audiocourses), and facilitated the positive aspects of the BRAND. I wasn’t asking to be loved, the conversation was zero to do with my personality, I was moderating the conversation with objectivity, because I knew full well the BRAND was solid and more importantly that customers thought so too.
What would I have done if the BRAND was not good, or if I didn’t have happy customers? Then I would have facilitated conversation which put forward processes for change.. “yes, we have looked at this, and we are very aware of it, we are organising a steering committee to address this issue” - you get the point.
Think brand, not personalities.
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Hi Chris
The point about personalities involved with promoting brands through So.Me is that to create conversations and engage with communities (be them online or not) you need to interact with other human beings.
I have spent the last 10 years representing large brands as either Head of PR (in-house) or PR Consultant (external).
In my experience those people who know where the conversations are taking place and are plugged in to the communities usually have more personality than those who don’t.
I would always rather be with someone who has an opinion than someone who sits on the fence anyday.
Thanks for the reply..
I still maintain that it is the brand that should be the focus here and not the person doing the talking, just the same as it is with any other form of PR.
I’m not advocating sitting on a fence, quite the opposite in fact. I am saying the person should extract the positive stuff in company Online conversations (official ones or otherwise) and if possible aim to amplify that, and correspondingly, extract the negative aspects and look to address them..
That is not sitting on a fence at all, this is the inverse.
So.Me strength is in making companies more publicly honest along with obtaining market research for improving products/service.
If the same old evangelising personality is barking on about how good something is all the time, people will (or is it just me?) get frightfully pissed off.. that’s just sitting on a positive fence… people see through it.
Going back and listening I feel misquoted here.
I am convinced that people who are “active” within social media tend towards “personality” tend towards the more Extrovert characteristics determined by Jung/Briggs-myers
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jungtype.htm
Should the personalities be bigger than the brands. Well no . Will they be ? well yes I believe they will.
Determining the level at which the personality becomes bigger than the brand and its impact is another metric I guess we will have to follow.
Hey
If it’s the brand that does the talking then why does Advertising exist? I don’t disagree the brand should be the focus but to draw and to engage it requires personality. People don’t necessarily buy Nike shoes (an example) because of the brand - there are occasions where people won’t buy something because of snobbery (brand focus) - they will tend to buy a product based on it’s association with theirselves. It naturally comes back to the common factor that if people can’t relate to it, they’re not interested in it and therefore won’t buy it. So Social Media utilises the personality of someone (hence why PR amongst the celebrity world is so important)to engage people and it’s possible to attach brands to that in order to sell.
I’m thinking out loud now but is it possible that offline it’s a brand that gets driven by personality, and online is a personality that gets driven by brand (ie people engaging with personalities because they’re associated to a brand or subject they’re interested in)
And i’m spent… for now. ha
my tuppenceworth…
yeah, but no.
brand is essentially what ‘other people’ think/feel/percieve. brand-ing is what marketers do to try and influence that.
by any means nessesary. personalities included.
when the ‘personality’ becomes more important than the brand, that’s when you have problems. think of all the shite Beckham has ‘endorsed’.
exactly. i can’t remember any of the brands.
sort of.
@Ian
Thanks.
In my opinion, So.Me (more accurately social networks) enable people to be social around a product (brand), not a celebrity…
The Virtual Thirst campaign with Coca-Cola (of which I was a part of) created a noise/conversation around the brand not celebrities.
SOCIALISE around the product.. it’s very different.
@Nic.
Look at Amazon reviews, no celebs
Look at Friends Re-united, no celebs
Look at Facebook, no celebs
Look at Cadbury Gorilla TV campaign, which went viral, no celebs.. just an object to talk about and parody.
You just need to enable channels for communication and steer then the best you can.
Twitter is perverting peoples concept of what So.Me is.. IMHO.
thanks for the reply chris, but not one of those examples are representative of sites which have an established community manager. Especially the Gorilla Viral.
In the discussion yesterday and in previous conversations I continue to raise the issue that Corporates who bring engage in social media and in doing so single out an individual as a point of contact will be building a personality to represent that brand.
Amazon has Jeff Bar, Ubuntu has Jono Bacon , Bungee Labs has Ted Heagar (spelling ?) , VON has Chris Brogan. Spinvox has James Whatley.
Now the larger brands have latched onto celebrity to associate with brands.
but my point is not that personality is more important than brand. its that corporates looking to use social media and social networks should look for strong personalities to lead the way.
at this rate I really should be writing a blog to respond , shouldnt I.
its going to be an important distinction though especially when we look at how larger brands enter social media. Brands like Ikea may find it easier than those of Tesco or Walmart.
@Nic
Thanks for your thoughts (as always appreciated).
I’m not sold however.
A large company needs a Customer Relationship Management system in place, and a team of people who monitor and work the channels to facilitate.
Why?
1. singular doesn’t scale
2. data will be lost
3. sickness will fuck up the system completely
4. not everyone (heaps) will “like” the personality, COMMON
5. personality moves on, his “friends” move too = BAD business
When asking my partner (opposite of me for So.Me) if she’d prefer a singular personality when contacting John Lewis she said:
“no way he might be a tosser. Also they should have all the details about me on record from my last chat with them regardless of who I speak with, and I might want to ask for someone else”
You see, for people not in the So.Me echo chamber this singular personality idea is nonsense.
Yes companies need to have moderators (a team) in these spaces, but forgot about singular personalities.
A large client of mine, for example, has 50 campuses in 21 countries, how on earth can we have one personality covering all that 24 / 7? - let alone the work load, let alone all the languages needed, it’s just not doable, Nic. We are looking at at least 5 people just for covering Online help, switching operators, languages blah blah.
What you are signing up to is “Gordon Brown” rather than the Labour party, or (as Eaon points out) David Beckham rather than football.
Do you read Heat magazine?
Right then , this deserves a blog post, and a copy of NUTS !
For what it is worth, marketers picked up the idea of personality to make a brand for a product or service - an enduring yet intangible conglomeration of attributes that we relate to in some way.
Getting one person to front the package is as old as the hills - that is what a President is surely? Our package has a way of speaking back. If it represents somebody we aspire to be, all the better.
I think both personality and brand are past their Best by date. People want to be active. Social media is like a computer game. We do. . . We don’t want to sit passively anymore and we don’t have to.
The brilliance of the BO media campaign is that it allows you to act autonomously and socially to extend the idea of the package (doesn’t matter what it is).
We need it all! Which would you do if you only had one - well do what every you know how to do. It is a start! But you may get whipped by someone who can do all three
a) attractive face
b) solid package
c) service that is not only responsive it allows you to be an active creator of the package.
So there is the academic - pitch.
BTW having run communities of students. Faces often polarize - very popular with some, hated by others. Then there are the bland services that are ploddy and reliable - not loved but appreciated. Then there are the services who expect their consumers to be appreciative and are annoyed when they are not - not going to happen!
And PS Let’s start writing the BO screenplay. What social media will he use when he is President. What are the crises So.Me will face when the pressures and conflicts become more intense? How will they be resolved?
@Godfather
Hey, yeah I’m sorry.. I focused on celebrity as an example, but i was merely using celebrity as a media equivalent of a blogger or social media person.
I’m comparing Media to Social Networking and the difference in the way a brand can be driven by the personality or the other way round. I need to stop responding to blogs when I’m at work because my points are being confused without my full attention.
I hope I’ve given a little clarity but I do like your point.
Totally disagree with anyone who says a company needs a “Community Manager”. What a company needs is either a series of moderators that stop all the phishing, spam and offensive content uploads, or a commissioning editor who creates new content at the behest of the community, or a combination of both. You don’t ‘manage’ a community, you ‘foster’ it.
A-list bloggers (ie: personality driven sites) are very different from community managers with a personality. A-list bloggers generate a community because what they know their subject area, and they write well. ‘Community managers’ don’t generate a community; they are given one. If they write well and they know their topic they can be interesting but they don’t - and shouldn’t - hijack the community. Or if they do, then the company’s brand is at very great risk.
As a consultant, if I found *any* so-called ‘Community manager’ becoming more popular than the brand, then I’d give them a blog and hire another moderator/editor. Because a popular performer is better given a stage where the firm can to some extent sequester the opinions of the blogger than permit them to have a voice which drowns out the community the firm intended to cultivate.
Jo has touched on my point in a better context but I like what you say Jo. This Social Networking medium has dimensions to it that go far beyond the normal media restrictions.
Love this topic Chris. This is brilliant.
Hey Chris would you mind linking to the source Media as well then ?
Hi Chris,
May I just say that when I worked for a company called Adjustamatic Beds they used Gloria Hunniford as their celebrity representative in their adverts and brochures and from that I had members of the public tell me that they would never consider purchasing the product even if it was brilliant because Gloria was the representative and they did not like her! On the other side, we received Xmas cards and calls for Gloria from members of the public who did like her and wanted to pass on their best wishes. This particular example would indicate that the personality exceeded the brand in some peoples eyes both negatively and positively. Maybe best for brands to stick to a scene rather than a person??
@Shelleftr
Hi.
That’s kind of what Joanne was saying.. and me actually. You will never find ONE person that everyone likes..
And this argument is really about using a person to moderate the communication for the brand, they need to be replaceable, and it needs to scale.
Hi All,
There is a negative impact on having a personality, but if the research has been done well then the conversion of people buying into the brand as a result of the personality should be greater than the people who choose not to.
However, I am in total agreeance with Jo’s comment about the requirement for an Online Community Manager. What do you say to someone who is seeing an increase in requirements for people to go into that role? As a recruiter I’m seeing a slow increase in this so what do you think Jo?
@ian
Use the example that I initially indicated, that’s what they need to do.
They:
Monitor
Moderate
Facilitate
Leave the ego at home.
“Conversation moderators” communicating “promises of change” are wasting time. They need to acknowledge problems and communicate actual evidence of change.
Promises mean nothing to me as a consumer. Show me that you understand the issue and show me what you are doing about it - not what would be nice to do about it, or what you promise to do.
If a corporation screws up I don’t want to have a conversation about it I want it corrected or I will move on regardless of the warm smile the company places on display.
@Brian
I agree, warm smiles and bullshit egos are not worth a penny.
Action is indeed what is important, and a scalable company-wide strategy is how that is achieved.
@Ian
… not sure which Jo you are referring to when you ask your question above, but I’m prepared to put my 2 cents worth in on your question if that’s useful?
You asked:
“What do you say to someone who is seeing an increase in requirements for people to go into that role [Online Community Manager]?”
As a recruiter you need to find out:
1. What the social media site is supposed to achieve for the firm; and
2. What the role actually involves.
First of all, there’s often a huge discrepancy between objectives of social media sites as perceived by corporations, when compared with the intentions of some So.Me (some some… so cute!) advocates. If an organisation wants a social media site to be so rigorously structured and moderated as to be a fairly thin-ly veiled advertisement, then you might as well tell them they are doomed to failure and their site will remain bland and unvisted, and the only traffic it will attract will be from sites that complain about online corporate presences. Believe me, they will thank you when they realise the cost savings for just dumping the entire idea.
If the organisation wants to pursue a celebrity endorsement model, then tell them to start a blog instead. They clearly don’t actually want a community.
If, however, an organisation wants to create a community, and wants an ‘Online Community Manager’ to ensure the environment for conversation and debate is a ’safe place’ (ie: doesn’t tolerate harassment, doesn’t expose the community to digital trojans and offensive content), this is a perfectly reasonable job spec. But depending on the size and output of content from the community, that could be a job that takes 20 minutes a day, or it could be a job that requires about 19 other staff working around the clock (ie: BBC blogs staff). If it’s a job that takes 20 minutes a day it may be reasonable to ask more of the role; perhaps in scanning the questions or comments posed by the commnity, and then posting relevant news which may be of interest to the community from external resources, or perhaps sourcing relevant expert advisors on issues of interest. That’s when the role becomes more of a commissioning editor than a ‘community manager’. (I still say even the moderation role isn’t a community manager, but is instead more of a community janitor.)
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you are seeing a rise in these roles for recruitment purposes. However, I think you will also see a high churn rate in these roles if the positions are not properly articulated, and if the performance of people in these roles is not measured in accordance with the objectives of the site. As a recruiter it is your role to make an educated guess about the viability of the stated ambitions for the site, and to match appropriate persons to those objectives. Strong personalities and opinionated visionaries are not what you need to drive traffic to a community. Useful content and an interesting array of users are far more valuable than a sole voice that renders mute your registered user base.
I think Joanne’s description provides pretty clear job descriptions. Can we shift the information or a link into the wiki under social media jobs, or something like that. Lot’s of people will find the information useful.
OK, added a crude entry for now, until we have a commissioning editor to clean it up.