Page 109 - Social Media Marketing

Importantly, the social applications are not necessarily communities per se, 87
though some amount to as much: they are more generally enablers of an activity or
outcome that is useful to the members of a community with which an application is ■ ╇ S ocial A pplications
associated. Simply put, and critical to understanding how to build an effective social
presence, is recognizing that most brands, products, or services will not support a
“community” by themselves. Why not? Think about the products that you use, the
organizations you support, and the real-world community around you. What among
them constitute the things you think about daily, regularly, that you obsess over?
These—and only these—are the things that are candidates for long-lived, organically
developed “communities.”

Despite a lot of time and effort spent to the contrary, most brands, products,
and services do not command sufficient daily mindshare to sustain a community of
their own. To see why this is so, make a quick mental list for yourself of the real-world
organizations of which you are a member. The typical individual has one, three, per-
haps five or even a few more organizations. After that, most people literally run out
of bandwidth, the combination of an individual’s time, and attention. There are only
so many social organizations one person can effectively participate in. Online it’s no
different: How many social communities can you really belong to? More importantly,
how many will you actively participate in? For most, the answer is surprisingly similar
(or perhaps not surprising at all) to the capacity for participation in real life.

Against that, ask yourself: “How likely are you to join a deodorant, toothpaste,
or laundry soap community?” Yet, more than a few CPG/FMCG brand managers have
undertaken to build just these types of communities. Make no mistake: As long as the
advertising spending is happening, people join, take advantage of offers, and maybe
even engage in light social activities. But understand that membership is being driven
by ad spending and not organic social interaction. Organic growth—versus ad spend-
ing and incentive driven growth—is what you need to build long-term participation in
a community.

This is not to knock “awareness” communities or the application of social media
channels in awareness plays: These communities may well be important parts of overall
marketing programs and often do deliver on some of the surface promises of the Social
Web. Content consumption certainly happens, and to an extent curation—people vot-
ing or ranking what they see or do in these communities—may also be happening. But
above that, in the more important behaviors of content creation and collaboration,
activity generally starts to drop off. And as noted, when the ad spending stops, the
community generally stops growing as well.

Now, consider social applications. Social applications are designed to facilitate
accomplishing something in the context of a shared or collaborative goal— “Look at
us!” —and thereby to provide a specific value to a given group of participants. Social
applications are rooted in the task-orientation of many Internet activities, but then