“Cultures cross like ships in the night”.
This is how Amartya Sen described London a few years ago, referring to its wide diversity of communities, religions, beliefs and ethnicities. However, despite the city’s versatility, Londoners sometimes find strong similarities between themselves; they happen to be commuters every morning and every evening, transcending their origins, all reading the same copy of the Evening Standard or Metro.
This vision is pretty similar to the crowds that brands try to engage with through social networks – acquiring their attention through relevant entry points, maintaining interest with a phased content approach and long-term story, building a kind of political system with rights and duties and activation momentums to accelerate the share of voice in a challenging attention economy. Demographics at the end are less important than affinity and micro-moments of truth.
It is a challenging ecosystem too as the channels are no longer exclusive to a single function or audience: Twitter is used by ISIS activists whilst being highly considered as a second-screen for TV shows like The Voice. Tumblr is a gigantic hub for subcultures where old content can generate the buzz du jour, totally dismantling the approach of content strategy. Brands now need to plan what “could” be important in a few years instead of focusing only on the now; the Google experience is highly different depending on one’s usage, making it even more difficult to land a first place on any query a user could do.
Time-poor people expect a hyper-relevant and rich experience
People don’t have time to consume ads for the sake of them. Three Group understood it very well and are going to tackle “excessive and irrelevant mobile ads” in the coming weeks.
In this shaking environment where consumers can easily get rid of brands messaging, the only way is to create a pervasive environment between cultures and brand organizations. Culture is independent on a marketing plan; cultures can forgive a bad year or a failed tactic. Cultures (as they take time to rise) paradoxically last longer than products and ads.
As Maison Kitsuné has blended music and fashion, they’re somehow independent on one collection’s success or failure; their consumers “inhabit” the brand. When they attend a concert, they actually wear the products because it has become one of the key rituals. Embodiment is therefore an on-going vector of both culture and branding, in every capital of the world – and it’s an ultimate goal for most organizations through social media.
Content proves a brand statement
This cross-road is no longer a luxury but the only way to create a shared system in which the “consumers” are both the targets and the decision-makers. In order to leverage brand equity, consumers need to be in a position to own a part of the reputation of the brand. By becoming shareholders of clusters of reputation, they can make them grow and eventually develop the brand in ways that were not initially planned by the brand owners. In other words, the best media-buy is to directly make people the key support instead of considering that they need to be “exposed” through some intermediary messages.
Back-office activities rule cultural relevancy
To make this pervasiveness happen and be meaningful, organizations must play with a curative and “open” approach. Active listening, the ability to track relevant cultural trends and transform them in the brand creative process, has become the main component of social media teams. Maintaining “off the grid” relationships with power users and customers is as important as working with relevant influencers, at the very least. This effort helps to generate the cultural cues between a brand and its representatives towards a community of people. It comes as a key social infrastructure to the “3 H” principles as defined by Google:
#zaradaily #monday #newthisweek #trf #trench Now available at zara.com Ref: 1255/014
A photo posted by ZARA Official (@zara) on
- Hygiene content, which are always-on, easy to replicate pieces of content. Think about Zara on Instagram – every morning they add a tag stating which day it is. It creates a routine with their followers, in a simple way
- Hero content, which are the nearest digital translations of a brand TV campaign: it’s generally a stunt, a “coup”, which aims to go viral or at least generate more interest than daily content. A good example is the Jean-Claude Van Damme “epic split” for Volvo Trucks
- Hub content, which is a frequent push dedicated to a community. It can be a featured video with a niche beauty blogger for L’Oréal Paris, made to attract a certain kind of community, therefore refreshing the specific audience
The model is well-known, but in fact it’s not actually implemented that much within the industry as it requires a merging between integrated marketing strategists, digital analysts, content strategists but also the validation of boards, where the fear to lose control can sometimes jeopardize the cultural relevancy of the brand.
More pragmatically, this full-service approach is extremely dependent on the budget and resources of brands.
Few models to land a global social media strategy
There’s a wide range of approaches, but four main scenarios seem to matter: the first two are the ones that are implemented by “digital genius” brands while the latter are attempts for brands that have less manpower and resources.
- A strong global strategy dedicated to a global community of like-minded people
- A minimum global strategy with strong local power
- A hybrid model
- Local strategies only after consolidation at a global level
A strong global strategy dedicated to a global community of like-minded people
Scenario:
- Strong brand identity with the ability to influence the top-down communities of consumers
- Ability to spread brand values through visual formats
Core brands:
- International luxury brands (i.e.: Louis Vuitton)
- Global FMCGs (i.e.: Red Bull)
- Top celebrities (i.e.: Kanye West)
Some brands have a chance by tapping into an affinity more than just an audience, whilst being fundamentally visual. It’s the case for Red Bull who made a strong effort to become legitimate in extreme sports. The brand is now famous for its stunts in a set of disciplines that are relevant to certain groups of people.
Where Red Bull becomes utterly relevant is in their ability to understand how social channels work, independently from their own direct communications. For instance, YouTube users who have watched a specific set of videos on one of Red Bull’s playlists will be suggested other relevant videos in affinity with them. By handling loads of hygiene and hub content, Red Bull creates a relevant set of touch-points through niche content that is automatically suggested by the channels they work on. Red Bull through its global community provides the social currencies (big events, videos) whilst its members take care of fine-tuning the broadcast and push of these elements to their networks. New assets help to refresh their communities by improving the discovery of related topics. The more the communities grow with Red Bull, the better the experience for its new-comers.
Beyond “official” content, Red Bull knows how to equip passionate people that are not fully endorsed by the brand but who still convey positive brand messages for the brand. When a Red Bull event occurs, a lot of connected communities create content to celebrate it; by publishing their stunt on their personal channels, they both broadcast Red Bull to their YouTube subscribers or followers in general, but they also create a lot of related touch-points with Red Bull’s official channels that will then be suggested to the official channels’ subscribers.
At the end of the day, the target audience is probably more male than female, but it reaches a global array of demographics – teenage boys dreaming of mastering a super-bike trick, but also young backpackers, craving to discover new mysterious lands and perhaps environmentalists.
These subcultures are handled very carefully as their communities can potentially be very opposite (think about skateboarders vs inline skaters), but as the Red Bull experience reveals itself as through a ‘Russian dolls’ effect, these subcultures coexist while propagating Red Bull to a very wide audience.
Hence with the rise of Instagram, a lot of brands decided to stop all local accounts to develop a central visual story, because the empathic power is stronger than the cultural differences.
Another great example using a slightly different approach is Under Armour – any single piece of content must refer to the “I will” brand positioning. The way social channels are orchestrated mostly depend on the brand goals they try to spread, instead of starting from the people’s usage.
However, each Instagram account is created the same way: strong partnerships with top celebrities, a strong adaptation of their core values (i.e.: Protect this House and a series of three pictures in the behind the scenes of a training session.
Beyond these simple global rules, the tone-of-voice can be either more like a “video-game” or “real-life”, depending on the reactions of the followers.
Another global strategy approach can be found within Marriott’s marketing team and how they use social media to connect customers across all of the hotel’s 19 brands. Beyond brand content, the team monitors live, what is said / shared in traditional and social media channels. The team then redirects questions of customers to the most relevant local team, and they then try to transform detected trends into reactive content. This pull to push approach is highly efficient in terms of relevance, but it requires a lot of talents and languages to be efficient.
The key takeaways from this first approach:
- Do build guidelines that are a constitution with rights and duties than static rules
- Split by brand goals and try to connect with relevant subcultures instead of trying to focus on a global persona
- Do structure a creative strategic brief in a way that wherever consumers land, they can feel a consistent approach
- Do create an easy to understand internal chain of command with key roles and responsibilities to make sure that the social media value chain is flawless
A minimum global strategy with strong local power to cultural communities
Scenario:
- Very famous brand identity with ability to adapt the narratives at a very local level
- Ability to create real-life events led by people who are not from the brand organization
- Ability to track all local efforts
Core brands:
- Global lifestyle brands (i.e.: Nike)
- Franchise business (i.e.: Starbucks)
The “running” community powered by Nike is one of the best case studies: the interest transcends the static traits of the individuals. Nike gives the impulse at a global level, but it’s then through local activists that the “running clubs” become real. The secret is to give a real-life consistency and fact-proven experience to the consumers turned local activists.
It’s a big deal for brands as they need to share the reputation of their activities with people they don’t “own” or truly control.
This strategy can only work if the central team is extremely well organized, but more importantly, owns a state-of-the-art differentiator. In the case of Nike, launching Nike+ and providing the “RUN” app has been the big trigger as they had the opportunity to progressively grow with a diverse community of joggers turned “runners”.
Another good example is the Louvres museum – the brand might be extremely well-known worldwide, but its social presence is still pretty low compared to other cultural institutions or digital influencers.
The team has decided to outgrow their digital footprints by directly partnering at the very local level with top cultural YouTubers. In 2016, the brand decided to focus mostly on younger generations, slightly revealing and explaining their 460,000 pieces of arts through the voice of three YouTubers, beginning in France. Invited to regularly shoot content in the museum and to meet all relevant curators, the tone-of-voice is a definite breakthrough to say the least with the traditional explanations of the art world. This first “hub” approach is completed by on-going content strategy which is going to be rolled-over in the coming months. After the French experiment, local adaptations will come to life to connect better with local audiences, whilst following the global templates.
The key takeaways from this second approach:
- Decentralized approach only works with strong connections with local top influencers; it means that the PR, content and marketing team must work hand in hand to avoid redundancy and properly phase the growth of the effort. Strong local powers work with strong partners, in the case of Musée du Louvres with the most powerful local YouTubers or Nike with the most active local runners
- Global teams must however provide a culture of “digital champions” by promoting local best practice and patterns to replicate most interesting initiatives
A hybrid model
This type or organization has been picked by most global brands. They rely on two big pillars:
- Setting up global guidelines and providing one or two global campaigns
has the advantage to give a clear template for countries and a certain readability for local consumers. However, the success of this approach relies on the ability for the headquarter to be respected by local teams. The financial structure plays a big part in this game: if headquarters have a ridiculous budget, countries might consider them mostly as a problem than a provider of solutions. Local teams are often tempted to go their own way, as they are supposed to know better than their local people. It can be true but it sometimes, it relies too much on intuition and a certain black-hat attitude, more than a true interest for the local consumer. - Chief Digital Officers or digital acceleration teams
if the principle is interesting… (leading change and an obsessive interest for social listening). It’s very rare when these teams can really plug their expertise in product teams. As the effort is temporary or too vertical, the cultural relevance is forgotten in the corporate process
Local strategies only after validation at a global level
This approach is often used in the retail industry. In fact, when brands own thousands of point of sales, it’s sometimes more efficient to have an encouraging strategy. Local managers can set up their own level of activities as they can decide to hire community managers or do some digital marketing tactics – and they can even try to get involved with very local communities.
In France, some hairstylists who are part of a network set up their own strategies. Salon Biguine near Champs Elysées recently set up a programme with a lifestyle magazine to build up frequent events with digital influencers. Another salon part of Franck Provost arranges evening exhibitions, transforming the salon into a gallery. It works because the brands trust their stakeholders, and they actually incite them to reinterpret the brand values.
To conclude, there is a need for brand marketers to slightly let go of social channels du jour and go back to basics. As collective meanings mostly regroup through micro-needs by niche communities, there is a need to explore the user journey of the cultures we try to tap into – from search queries to the potential transformation of this interest. The conversation truly starts with Google: its semantics and semiologic resources can help in discovering a usage. The next step is to try to define on which channels (and on which layer of this channel) this interest expresses itself. It will help in understanding if the brand is legitimate or not to do something, or if it simply needs to actively curate and re-purpose existing content. Finally, if a sweet spot is found, there’s a need for brands to think in the long-term. A community does not exist per se. There are rituals, evolving values and a maturity circle. A brand trying to set up a social media strategy to reach and work with local cultures need to plan what could be episode two and three of this relationship. It’s a bit like a reader following a saga in newspapers – web users need to feel a sense of purpose and a scarce reciprocity with the brand.
As Kori Schulman, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the White House, wrote after the interview following the State of the Union between Obama and YouTube stars Ingrid Nilsen, Destin Sandlin, and sWooZie…
“This interview continues our efforts to meet people where they are — and make it possible for people around the country to watch and engage with the State of the Union in new ways.”
The social media strategy is a never ending deal between the brand and the communities it tries to engage with, and the acceptance that it has to slowly share its reputation with new shareholders: consumers.