Having worked in the online consumer space for more than 10 years, I’ve seen the rise and fall of many platforms that people have used in order to connect with each other; geocities, Myspace and Bebo to name just the bigger platforms that toppled over the years.
I’ve also seen the way that brands and marketing departments have had to evolve in order to utilise this increasingly valuable environment in order to connect with their customers.
For those of us working in the “online community marketing” field, as it used to be called, one of the biggest challenges came circa seven years ago when our space started to be rebranded as “social media”.
The evolution of online community marketing into social media meant that there was an immediate requirement to re-educate all those who had only just started to see the value in what had – albeit in a different form – been a commonplace function of many companies from the .com boom.
Here was an, apparently, new and exciting way for brands to connect with online communities. When the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter arrived, brands had new tools for engaging with millions of users in an instant. However, it was immediately apparent that the vast majority of commercial users lacked the knowledge or experience as to how they should tap into these burgeoning communities and treated them as they would traditional platforms, to the detriment of the campaign leading to negative views on this space.
The launch of a new terminology inherently complicated the message and fractured the landscape. Put simply, what we were, and still are, working with is the online community; every person that logs onto the internet uses their choice of platform – whatever that might be – in order to connect, share and converse with each other, and in order to connect our brands into those environments, it was imperative for marketers to join the conversation.
However, very quickly social media was viewed as a separate entity to othermedia channels. Boutique outfits, and in-house teams working in silos made it very hard to show the real value of utilising social spaces as part of a comms plan, as they were built on elements that had no central strategic place for a long time. It was only when social strategy and the teams implementing it started to be drawn back into the original agency model to work as part of a holistic strategy team that we started to see real value in this area.
So has social media really evolved? Should we still be speaking about social in the same way? Should we not just be a asking what our digital strategy is without having to separate out the strands that use social platforms? Realistically we should be creating strategies that tie everything together so that we are being completely “360” in our development of comms campaigns. When social has as much to do with a mobile, TV, and experiential strategy as it does for a digital plan, it cannot be seen as anything other than a conduit for success, rather than a tool in isolation.
The way we are now looking at social media is no longer as a separate channel to use, but rather as a conduit to amplify the reach and effectiveness of other marketing and communications tactics. This is where the real value is in utilising these social platforms to engage with the online community – an amplification of, and a way to join together, traditional communications platforms. In essence social is the digital glue that pulls all out communication strands together to make everything else work harder.
By Jonathan Palmer, Head of Social at Vizeum.
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