Commercial Identity in the Social Media Space

[Gruden]

Last week, on my personal site, I published On Chatter, an essay about Twitter, Facebook, and the nature of the always-on stream of noise, which I’m calling Chatter. We thought that some of it would be relevant to readers of the Gruden blog, so I’m reproducing a couple of excerpts here.

Starting to Get Twitter

Admittedly, it took a long time (I first signed up in the second half of 2006), but Twitter has grown on me. It’s not quite right, and it’s still incredibly geeky, but it points to an always-online, always-chattering future for everyone.

While it’s geeky, it’s not necessarily techy, so there are a lot of different people on Twitter, every one of them using it slightly differently. Some are using it to broadcast, some are using it to chat, some are using it to keep in touch with a group of friends. Many do all that and more. I find myself using Twitter in two very different ways. On the one hand, I follow people for their links to news or cool new things online. I’ll ocassionally tweet in the same mode myself. But on the other hand, I follow people I know in the real world. This is, for the moment, a much smaller group of people, and their updates tend to get lost in the noise created by the first group. But it’s the mode I normally tweet in myself, and it’s by far the mode I’m most interested in.
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Real People

The thing about ambient intimacy, is that it really only works with real people. Characters and personas you can get away with — we’re all putting on personas, all the time, both online and in the real world. But no-one wants to be intimate with a corporation. And a corporation can’t tweet about what it had for breakfast.

So there’s no easy answer for companies, no three-step process to monetise those eyeballs. No-one will own the æther. There’ll be money in plugging people into the æther, and in helping them filter it. But you’ll be working with a whole lot of other people, and other systems. And through it all, you’ll have to be yourself — be a real person.

At work we’re starting to get into the social media space a whole lot more. But when we looked at the idea closely, we realised, we don’t want to go into that space as Gruden. Most of us already have a presence, and an identity of our own, and Gruden is just a part of that identity. So we blog and tweet in our own spaces, and sometimes we blog in Gruden’s space, and sometimes we link or tweet each other, just like anyone else in our social space. It’s not about creating a new persona, it’s about being real people. And any company looking to get into this space needs to be ready for that — you don’t do this as a job, it’s just something you do as a person.

The essay explores more of the cultural impacts of these services. But what about the impacts on companies, and on marketing? Everyone seems to be aware that “social media” is something they should be doing, but no-one’s really sure of what that means, or how they’d go about taking their brand message into the social media space. The key, however, is to not think about social media the same way you think about your traditional media. There are half-way points, like Facebook’s Pages, designed for a traditional brand presence within Facebook. But if you’re going to embrace the social aspects, you need to be sending real people into the space. In some ways you’re loosening control over your company’s message, letting all your employees into the social media space. Some won’t want to identify their work, some will embrace it.

To take it further, let key outward-facing staff (be they marketers, public relations, sales, customer service) put some of their work hours into their social media presence. Obviously, such an investment requires some return, but the pay-offs are, initially, going to be difficult to measure. The key, in the short term, is in establishing a presence as a recognisable and real identity.

Steve Rubel is arguing that, while it’s clear that Facebook and Twitter will be replaced, they won’t be replaced by a new ‘hub’, but rather by the open web. The argument is that the web will become “one giant social network”. So you’ll no longer be able to setup your brand presence on the kids’ latest favourite website, but will instead need to focus on your identity, and really participate.

Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it’s peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways.

The social media space is still in its infancy. It’s an area in which we’re all experimenting. It takes such a dramatic rethink of the way we market a brand that it’s bound to ruffle a few feathers. We’ll look back on this period and wonder why it was so difficult. But this experimentation is only human; it’s what makes our presence all the more real.

So we’ll continue experimenting with our own presence. And we’ll encourage clients to start sending people into the social media space. Some are going to be more ready than others — we’re not suggesting everyone go create a Twitter account immediately. But as you start to look at what you or your employees are already doing with your personal presence, you’ll find it becomes easier to bring the company into the conversation.



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