SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook has more than 800 million users. Twitter claims 100 million users, who generate 230 million tweets a day. Te fact that these services are both blocked in China has not dampened the social media bug there—Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, China’s two leading micro blogging sites, claim 250 million and more than 300 million users, respectively.
One look at these sorts of audiences is enough in itself to demonstrate the potential of social media to deliver hitherto unheard-of consumer audiences to brands. But it is not just the scale of the potential audience that is attractive. Perhaps more significant is the changed interactive dynamic between brand and customer that is facilitated by social media. Rather than being a one-to-many medium, marketing has now become a two-way conversation between brand and customer, allowing a level of personalisation and behavioural understanding that is a marketer’s dream.
Other attractions of social media marketing include:
• The potential for a viral effect—the average Facebook user has 130 friends;
• The ability to test campaigns before launch and rapidly scale up if they catch on;
• Obvious cost efficiencies when using an ad-funded, third party platform; and
• The ability to get feedback from consumers and engage evangelists for your product or service.
But this changed dynamic and obvious brand potential do not come without risk. Te primary risk for brands associated with social media is loss of control. If brands ever had total control
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over their marketing message, they definitely do not have it now. Te nature of a conversation is that you can only nudge it in the direction you want it to go and hope that it stays on course. Coupled with this, there are practical concerns, such as:
• The fact that social media campaigns tend to be cross-border in nature, bringing multiple legal regimes and jurisdictional risk into play;
• Dependence on third party platform providers to deliver your campaign;
• The speed of engagement required, meaning that legal review of marketing copy is oſten impractical;
• The unpredictability of user-generated content created as part of your campaign as well as a result of it; and
• Perhaps the most significant: a greater reputational exposure should you get it wrong.
Te brands that successfully navigate these risks are the ones that understand both how their customers behave and how to build consumer trust and credibility via conversation.
Stories from the front line
For some, the early days of social media were rocky. One of the most famous examples of misjudging the audience response was the now infamous Walmart fake blog (or ‘flog’). In 2006 a blog appeared which ostensibly charted the travels of two people in an RV (motorhome) across the US, interviewing happy Walmart employees and sleeping in Walmart parking lots at night. Te blog was hosted at
walmartingacrossamerica.com. Te problem
Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 1 31
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