A self-promoting headline from the trades last week claimed a coffee brand in the UK "develops first social media strategy."
Here's how they describe the "strategy:"
"To target students and give the campaign an anti-corporate feeling, the brand will launch simple games on Facebook illustrated by DJ fly-poster and Nike T-shirt artist, Mark Ward.
The games, ... include 'Pet the Puppies' and 'Flick the switch', which time users on how many times they can hit their space bar within 10 seconds."
Now, this is just a report in Brand Republic so in all fairness there may actually be more to the tactic than described here. Still, knowing how much brands - especially FMCGs - want to succeed in social media, you would think they would be more careful in terms of how they describe their efforts via press release to the marketing pubs.
Plug-and-play Tactic
As described, this is a plug-and-play tactic to "check off" the social media box - create (or more likely, repurpose) some game apps, plop them in Facebook and hire a hipster the kids will like to offer a draw of sorts. What this has to do with a coffee brand beyond their desire to reach a younger audience is not clear.
Their communication goal may be to raise what we call "relevant awareness" - the top two levels of the funnel: awareness and evaluation. In social media, you would rarely set out to just achieve awareness. More likely, you would be laser-focused on a segment of folks by traditional demographics or some type of affinity ( younger folks who like drinking coffee for example) and then try to educate them to some preliminary evaluation. This presupposes that you have achieved some level of relevance - hopefully in relation to the product.
If all you want to do is achieve a superficial level of engagement - people playing a game that has little to do with the product, you are really approaching social media as an ad channel.You hope that the catchiness of the game will get them to play and pass-along. Your brand is the "host" of that game, logos emblazoned everywhere, and you hope that you "impress" upon them the brand name. That approach misses all of the true value potential of 'social' - sustained and relevant word of mouth.
The other watch-out in the story include the following words and phrases:
- "target" - time for a moratorium on the ancient use of warfare language. The use of words like "target" may reveal how little the brand is interested in social media
- "an anti-corporate feeling" - presuming they mean all the negatives we associate with corporations, then they may want to try "anti-corporate behavior" and not just a feeling. Brands can be genuine and personable - even big FMCG brands. That way they might earn the "feeling."
- "how many times they can hit their space bar within 10 seconds." - makes it sound like all they are doing is providing mindless finger-candy when I am sure (hope) it is so much more.
- "Facebook" - note to self: don't promote new Facebook-based campaign when you only have 146 fans, little true engagement and a different, unpopulated brand page comes up first in Google. Better to wait until your platform looks and feels more robust
Too Critical?
Perhaps I am being too critical. Maybe we should be satisfied as more and more brands - big ones - start experimenting in social media.
On second thought, lets not be satisfied with this approach. These experiments will blow-up for brands. Many will be ill-conceived or executed and the results will turn CMOs off to social. Social media is not a channel. It is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. It is time for even "first-timers" to adopt a true social media strategy.
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