objectives. Ralf Beuker, Professor, Design Management, University of Applied Sciences, Münster, Germany

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1 D e v e lo p m e n t Interestingly, while the audience turnover for blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and similar sites is very large, that doesn t seem to compromise their potential contributions to various corporate objectives. 54 Ralf Beuker, Professor, Design Management, University of Applied Sciences, Münster, Germany Erik Roscam Abbing, Founder, Zilver, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2 Two Faces of Social Media: Brand Communication and Brand Research by Ralf Beuker and Erik Roscam Abbing In April 2009, David Martin of Nielsen Online reported that more than 60 percent of people who sign up for Twitter abandon the service. 1 Based on traditional marketing and branding metrics, most would certainly agree that this indicates a problem. Still, as usual, there are two sides to the story. For most social media services blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, and the like it s neither the mere presence of the service that makes it valuable nor the per- 1. David Martin, Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth. Nielson Online. April 28, centage of returning customers (the retention rate); rather, it s the content that people generate on them blog posts, photos, videos, conversations, and material for special interest groups. This content, and its value, is something that is very often neglected in polls like the one mentioned above. You can t measure such value by the retention rate, as you might with physical services. Retention rate is simply not a relevant metric for Twitter, for example. Consider that its costs are low, and the potential target group is huge. With that in mind, if even 10 percent of its users return, Twitter would still be doing well. For brands that consider using a social media service such as Twitter or Facebook in their marketing mix, it is thus important to realize that different metrics apply, and that the content that is shared, and the interaction between the brand and its customers, is central. This interaction often goes unmentioned in a discussion of brand uses for social-media services. And yet it is exactly this interaction that will allow brands to play to their strengths on the Web. That said, the goal of this article is threefold. It will provide you with 2010 The Design Management Institute 55

3 The Impact of Social Media on Service and Product Brands a) a more differentiated view of social media; b) a guide to how to use social media not only for brand communication but also for brand research; c) selected insights we have gained as consultants exploring the social web and building a digital brand strategy for Mexx, an international fashion brand. Social media and brand Over the past few years, we seem to have accepted the notion that activities on most social media platforms are driven solely by users/consumers. Although this is not exactly wrong, our experiences (backed up by recent research done by Razorfish 2 ) confirm that brands can proactively start and steer these conversations with considerable impact. 3 Indeed, according to this same research, even without any specific actions, percent of consumers report having had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Of that group, a nearly unanimous 97 percent say that their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased a product or service from that brand. Digital is not only a place to build a brand: it 2. Garrick Schmitt. The Data. From FEED: Wayward Thoughts on the Evolution of Digital Brand Experiences (Razorfish blog). Available at: 3. The basis for the data was a representative survey of 1,000 US consumers with high-speed Internet access, conducted in August can also make or break it. 4 A very tent across all digital channels, thus simple example of the power of digital pertaining to movies on YouTube, crowds can be found at This site is a good illustration on Amazon, comments on Facebook, postings on corporate blogs, ratings of how others play with associations and conversations on Twitter. Some of your brand. It is fascinating to see 52 percent even posted on their own how simple tag clouds (clustered oneword associations to go with major service experience. blogs about a brand s product or brands) generated by consumers can We could continue with these provide you with insights about your figures, but essentially it is our brand s image at the click of a button, viewpoint that there is one key message for brand management here: and at no cost. Our opinion is that this sort of research is preferable to Consumers clearly no longer believe badly done focus group sessions. that social media sites are a one-way It s also noteworthy that 69 channel, and they are considering percent of the Razorfish respondents the social web as a source of twoway interactions and conversations. have provided feedback to a brand, through either the brand s website However, this does not mean that the or a third-party service like GetSatisfaction.com. Interestingly enough, On the contrary, the driver for the social web is about altruistic behavior. this level of engagement is consis- engagement just described is clearly 4. Ibid. deals, as Figure 1 illustrates. These What is the primary reason you follow a brand on Twitter? What is the primary reason you follow a brand on Twitter? I am a current customer Exclusive deals or offers Other people I know are fans of the brand Interesting or entertaining content Service, support, or product news Other 6.3% 3.5% 0.4% 23.5% 22.7% Figure 1. Deals are by far the biggest reason fans engage with brands on the social web. 43.5% 56

4 Two Faces of Social Media: Brand Communication and Brand Research might be special discounts, entertaining content, or special services, support, or news. Let s continue our exploration by sharing some information about how we ve dealt with the factors described above and translated them into a set of social media platforms facilitating a sound digital brand strategy. Keeping Mexx POSTed Mexx is a clothing manufacturer and retailer that operates stores around the world. The company sells clothing and accessories for men, women, and children and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Liz Claiborne fashion company since Zilver Innovation (Erik Roscam Abbing) and Strategy Coaching (Ralf Beuker) have been working with Mexx since 2007, coming together in a joint project with the company to explore digital conversations on social networks, something Mexx believed might represent an emerging opportunity in the fashion industry. Our work with Mexx began with an assessment, a characterization of the kind of deal between brand and consumer that might spark the conversation (Figure 2). Our goal was not simply to help Mexx communicate its brand message via social media. What we wanted instead was to help the company to use social media to get to know its target group better to understand lifestyles, behavioral patterns, and motivations of consumers who might engage in dialogues with the Mexx brand, and to understand the nature of the relationship between brand and consumer that resulted from this behavior. (This relationship is based on the exchange of value, as explained in Figure 2.) Mexx hoped to get a holistic picture of its customers in the context of online engagement. To narrow it down, the company decided to focus on xx by Mexx, a Mexx sub-brand for teenagers/tweens. However in contrast to the ideas we were beginning to generate of what they want, deciding what we could offer (that is, what we have ) in exchange was more difficult. From past experience, we know that this is a dangerous decision point, at which many companies and consultants fall into the trap of selecting a social service that is currently in vogue and selling this service as the offer to the consumer. Such an approach often leads to the following chain reaction: The brand/company identifies a social service or technology that is currently dominating the news. A volunteer (ideally someone in the company s IT department) sets up a blog, opens a Twitter account, or creates a Facebook profile, and then waits for responses or interaction. Company management requests Figure 2. We wondered what kind of deal between brand and consumer would initiate a conversation. 57

5 The Impact of Social Media on Service and Product Brands various metrics to describe the brand presence s effect on the social Web visitors, number of comments, mentions on other platforms, and so on assuming this will quantify the success of the venture. Due to a lack of clear benefit or success, questions like Who are we targeting with our blog, Twitter account, and Facebook group, and why? slowly begin to surface. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the above chronology. We like to think of this common problem as one that can be easily described in terms of a decision-making framework called POST. Created by authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, POST (which stands for people, objectives, strategies, and technologies) suggests putting the highest priority on the target audience and determining what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they want and need in the context of social media. Note that in the POST framework, objectives form the basis of strategies. In the bulleted example above, the company involved gets POST exactly backwards: technology is the first consideration and people aren t considered until the last step. We wanted to avoid those mis- takes in our work with Mexx. At this point, we were still unable to answer the question, What kind of social media services can we offer that the xx by Mexx target group would find useful, relevant, and valuable? So the next thing we did was to invest in quantitative and qualitative people research in order to find out what their online behavior was with regard to social media, online shopping, and so on. This might help us to understand their motivations for connecting with the brand online. Here again we turned to the lifestyles leading to more or less presence online, and a more or less active and involved online behavior. Subsequently, Zilver addressed the qualitative research by developing a (closed) online diary environment based on the technique of cultural probes 5 : research instruments centered around the idea of helping users reflect on their own lives by giving them the expression tools to do so. In this case, the expression tool was an online visual diary, enabling users to keep a journal for a week, uploading work of Li and Bernoff and a tool they created that classifies PEOPLE consumers 5. See, for instance, Gaver, W., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E., Cultural Probes. ACM Interactions, January-February into six overlapping levels of participation 1999, pps in the social web. Based on a Forrester Technographics Profile: Female, 18-24, Europe Research survey of the Age: Country: Gender: behavioral patterns of Europe Female users of social media Index (All adults = 100) services, Li and Bernoff Creators 31% 221 Critics 36% 189 were able to map how participation in social Collectors 9% 150 Joiners 39% 244 media varies among Spectators 63% 129 Inactives 24% 55 groups of consumers, globally. We captured some of that key quantitative data on cards like the one in Figure 3, Dominant group is SPECTATORS (%). This group is characterized best as having an overproportional number scoring on JOINERS as well. thereby trying to clarify On another scale, it s interesting to note that these are for our client that different followed by CREATORS. people behave differently online, and thus have different digital Data from Forrester Research Technographics surveys, 2008 Figure 3. Participation in social media varies among groups of consumers. Data from Forrester Research Technographics surveys,

6 Two Faces of Social Media: Brand Communication and Brand Research Figure 4. We took what we had learned from our participant users online diaries and assembled it into a booklet for the client. images and text (by mobile, , or Web) in response to daily questions and themes, and creating collages with their data. Typical themes were shopping, school, work, going out, friends, and online. Typical questions within these themes were: what are you wearing today and why, document a shopping afternoon with a friend, document a cultural activity with a friend or family, document which websites you visited, and so on. We carefully selected end users on the basis of the brand s existing target group profile, and made sure they were motivated to cooperate and felt comfortable about sharing their diaries with us. We did this by showing genuine interest in them, by explaining to them why we did the research, and by being very strict in keeping the (sometimes personal) data confined within the small research team. The incentive we gave them was 100 euros to be spent on a day with their friends, which was to be documented in the diary. At the end of the project, we assembled the compiled data into a booklet (see Figure 4). In essence, what these journals did was to get a feeling for the online behavior of the xx by Mexx target group, while at the same time testing our own social media platform with a selected group of customers. For instance, one key point we took away from this process was that although young people seem to share all and everything online, Mexx s target group was different, more prone to sharing information in a secure, closed environment. As a matter of fact, the xx by Mexx target group made rather passive use of social media, but felt delighted by the potential the closed environment gave them to map their lives in a visual diary. This newfound understanding allowed us to rephrase our objectives (returning to the POST framework), focusing the brand communication we hoped to impart more toward inspiring the target group than through actual engagement. For the brand research that needed to be done, we decided to focus our efforts on intensifying contacts in closed environments, where customers felt it was safe to respond. These objectives resulted in a three-tiered strategy: To further develop and use 7daysinmylife.com as a design research instrument to explore the target group s lifestyle and online behavior To engage in the exploration of easily accessible existing social media platforms (such as Facebook) and use them to inform and inspire To further explore the development of dedicated online applications focused on music since, not 59

7 The Impact of Social Media on Service and Product Brands surprisingly, a common interest that was very meaningful for the xx by Mexx target group was listening to, sharing, and talking about music As part of the resulting technologies, we ve created a network of citylife blogs for major European cities, with Rotterdam as a pilot ( These blogs are endorsed by Mexx through paying the author a small fee and providing him or her access to such Mexx-related events as fashion shows. Otherwise, the content is entirely left to the author. The Cityblogs are meant to stimulate or energize consumers toward an interest in fashion rather than to advertise the brand per se. We also created a Facebook research group for Mexx fans by invitation only. As with 7daysinmylife.com, one element of the group activities offered consisted of assignments that combined the use of social media in relation to fashion, like asking the group members to upload images of inspiring trends or links to inspiring fashion websites. And a collaboration with Edwin Rooseman of the digital media consultancy Nandooh helped us to develop several interaction concepts based on a dedicated online Mexx music library. As the phenomenon of social media continues to evolve The examples we ve shared clearly represent first steps. Back in late 2007/early 2008, Twitter, for example, did not have the relevance it has today. Today, 20 percent of all tweets mention specific brands or products. 6 Accordingly, Twitter may start to play a larger (and more intriguing) role in stimulating and moving brand strategies forward, much as, say, Facebook did two years ago. As part of our consulting services, we wanted to acknowledge the dynamic nature and progress of the 6. Tweeting Is More than Just Self-Expression. Penn State Live ( September 10, Figure 5. We presented our final assessment and recommendations in the form of playful visual tools that would support Mexx in tracking developments on the social web. social web in our final assessment and recommendations for Mexx, and we therefore deliberately avoided a traditional text-heavy report format. Instead, we created playful visual tools that support the client in tracking developments on the social web (Figure 5). If you take away nothing else from this article, what you should know is that the social web can go beyond simple brand communication to offer opportunities to stimulate and facilitate brand research. Bear in mind, though, that the key to gaining useful insights from social media is to start with research into consumer attitudes and behavior the people part and adapt your objectives, strategies and technologies accordingly. Acknowledgements We d like to take the opportunity to thank Max van Lingen (former director of interactive brand marketing at Mexx International Marketing Communication, now director of strategic brand innovation at Veldhoven Group) for facilitating this research project and granting permission for sharing insights. Reprint #10211BEU54 60

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