Straight sales pitches may be the right message in traditional advertising, but in an era with a nearly limitless choice of social media sites, companies should seek not sales, but connectivity to their customers.
That is the message Ric Dragon, CEO of Kingston-based DragonSearch (dragonsearchmarketing.com), an Internet marketing company, brought when he spoke Dec. 2 on “Humanizing the Brand in Social Media” at the @BrandsConf in New York City.
Dragon said that his company has tested ways consumers humanize brands. He said given a choice of images, people chose a soccer mom as the image for Starbucks, a grumpy middle-aged man for BP and a “hip-looking Asian guy” as the human icon for Google. He called that last choice particularly revealing since the founders of the company are not Asian, but white Americans.
And he said the exercise showed that people routinely anthropomorphize brands. “People project onto brands a sense of humanity, if you will,” he said.
And companies of all types can use social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to feed customers desire to humanize brands, Dragon said, and do it most effectively by stoking passion connected to the product.
He cited Nike as a brand that has mastered soft-sell through connection to customers”™ passions, saying its Facebook page with 3.3 million “friends” has the famous Just Do It slogan as its icon for each entry, but only one tiny logo on the page and no overt advertising.
“It”™s the most brilliant example of a brand embracing the passion behind their products,” Dragon said. “There is not one single promotional post on their wall, everything is talking about Coach so-and-so, or congratulating a team, all strictly about their passion.”
He said that Harley-Davidson has a similar Facebook presence. “They are celebrating their customers,” Dragon said. This month in particular they are celebrating their military customers, building brand loyalty through identification with admirable organizations and the passion people feel for those groups and their motorcycles, he said.
Another approach some companies take is to let fans create Facebook pages on their behalf. Dragon contrasts the approach taken by the supermarket chain Publix and the soft drink giant Coca-Cola. He said Publix actually had two Facebook sites, one with 2,000 friends, created by the corporation, and the other a Facebook page created by an employee, with more than 20,000 friends.
The corporate decision-makers forced the employee to take down his version. “I would have said to that employee, good work and from now on your job is going to be maintaining that site,” said Dragon, saying the difference in the fan base was a good measure of the difference between selling a product or fostering passion. And he said Coca-Cola, was faced with a similar situation, where fans of their product independently created a Facebook page unconnected to the corporate Facebook offering. They flew the fans to company headquarters in Atlanta and encouraged them, Dragon said.
“The more I study these companies on social media, I realize they are going on social media and promoting and selling and it”™s the wrong thing to do. In that medium people are not into being sold. But if you can tap into the passion behind the product, then you will be successful.”
He said many businesses are still focusing on old-fashioned sales pitches, rather than taking advantage of interactive nature of social media and “tapping into their communities and their passion points.”
“I”™m really starting to feel from the inside out, as businesses we have to stop selling,” Dragon said. “It”™s not about selling, it”™s getting more in touch with your customer.”
