Much is written about the evolution of marketing communications from one-way broadcasting to two-way conversation. You’d have to have lived on the moon for the last 18 months not to have encountered some discussion on this topic. But as aware of the issues surrounding this as most businesses are, many if not most still have one huge question hanging over them . It’s no longer a case of ‘why’ we need to be involved in the social web (or at least it shouldn’t be) – it’s now a case of ‘how’. How do we penetrate the social media space and how do we use the tools available to promote our brand, drive awareness and impact the bottom line?


The good news is that there really is no dark art to getting involved in the social web. Social media isn’t Davinci Code-complicated and should be viewed merely as another channel to reach customers. The difference is simply that the rules are slightly different and those brands that have failed haven’t understood the need to converse, the need to treat customers as individuals, the need to be ‘social’ and haven’t taken a long-term view.


And it is in ‘being social’ that the secret lies. Human beings love to talk, to engage one another, to relate on a personal level and, importantly, to share – interests, ideas, ‘things’. Psychologically, social media is a truly fascinating area. Now, we’re not all psychologists, me included, but brands that understand and can hook into this basic human trait of sharing and connecting are the ones forging ahead. In our everyday lives we don’t spend much time talking to friends about marketing messages. What we do talk about is things we find interesting, quirky, cool and new. We might like to believe we’re all top of the intellectual pile, but the information we generally share in casual conversation is things like movies, music, tv shows, videos, websites and numerous other elements of pop culture. So when communicating across the social web, why don’t most brands embrace this instead of fight it?

Just this week, the global pest control firm Rentokil* has launched an application for Twitter that is worth taking a look at and has been devised to encourage and facilitate natural human sharing behaviour. The company wants to try and gauge the effect that the very cold winter has had on wasp populations in the UK, and it wants to encourage the public to connect in doing so. Taking a lead from a snow-tracking application that was developed by Ben Marsh and was popular during the winter, Rentokil developed the #UKWaspWatch website to enable Twitter users to tweet the locations of wasp sightings, stings and nests, and to track these on an interactive Google map. The company has turned a quirky, inventive and interesting application into something with a real long-term business benefit. And more importantly, at least in the context of this article, it’s social.

It’s an example of using a social media tool (in this case, Twitter) to drive brand awareness through the social web. But doing so doesn’t always necessitate employing a web programmer to develop a custom application. Far from it, in fact. They key is simply to be creative; to open up possibilities by looking beyond the constraints of conventional marketing. Music and video are great examples: any (and I do mean ANY) business can create a more social Facebook page by having some fun and streaming in music and comedy videos from YouTube. They don’t have to dominate, but given that our natural behaviour is to gravitate towards things that make us laugh, that impress us or that we quite simply relate to, where’s the harm in relaxing the brand guidelines a little and showing our human side? That’s the REAL secret of utilising the social web for business.

* disclosure: Rentokil is a BOTTLE PR client