Raluca Duta, GH Bucharest: Brands and Social Media in 2013
In analysis published within 2013 Media Recap, an e-book recently release by GolinHarris Bucharest and Alex Ciuca, Raluca Duta, community manager within the agency, says brands must learn to communicate through stories, help niche blogs and invest more in technology but also in monitoring, research and evaluation.
- 1. Brand must learn to communicate through stories
Brands that will grow in 2012 are the brands that will know how to use social media to tell stories, through a quality content shared with their community.
It is the time for brands not to see separately the content and the community, as the two are like a queen and a king in stories we all loved: for the brand to become immortal, the content must assume its role and the community must become the queen. A brand can tell a good and relevant story for its public or only close to its community, like the king next to his queen.
- 2. No more press blitzs and parties that aren’t part of an integrated and coherent social media campaign!
We all saw, in 2012, the reactions bloggers had to the presents they received from agencies. To receive a credible message, brands must tell a story with every action they organize, with every word they say, with every gesture they make.
And clients know that, instead of 4 press blitzes and 2 parties within a year, a well made campaign, with a powerful message and concept, will serve better to the brand. This way, the story brands will tell through press-blitzs and countless parties is just a photo that appears, from time to time, besides other photos from rival brands, on bloggers’and consumers’ timelines
- 3. Brands must help niche blogs grow
Here we talk about co-dependence, because these blogs do not grow contentwise and trafficwise if they aren’t involved in big campaigns. On the other hand, big clients do not want to invest in them because they have a small number of readers.
2013 is the moment when smart brands, that consider their social media growth on long term, organically and not punctually, will realize that niche blogs are the only channels that help them reach their targeted public and not just a huge mass of readers that include, from time to time, some interested readers.
These brands will be the ones that will tell their story via knowledgeable endorsers from their interest domain. Those clients will be the ones that will get credit for a correct social media approach and that will win consumers’ loyality. A bloggers loyality, and a loyality from readers that are directly interested by these brands
- 4. Brands must invest more in tech and monitoring, research and evaluation activities
I think the most relevant is the example we live every day with our digital activity on GolinHarris’ Bridge. On Tweetdeck, that runs right in the middle of the Bridge, we have set key words for our clients and for their competitors. In the same time, we are on Facebook all the time, on all the pages we are managing, and also we are present on the blogs.
Practically, as soon as we see on the Twitter column that someone wrote something about a client, we react directly to that content, we moderate it, we sometimes take action offline if it is needed.
Any brands that want to build a loyal community in online mediums must be there all the time and when I say all the time, I really mean it. This means continuous monitoring, in real time and very active.
What the Bridge manages is to position our clients in pole position, giving them the opportunity to be the first that find out, analyze and fast react so that their social media stories will be successful ones.
Bottom line is that brands should be even more innovative when it comes of their online communication. It is the time to tell an unitary and emotional story via blogs, because that will insure them memorability among all the other brands that tell sequential stories that appear on blogs in 2 paragraphs articles, just to be mentioned „among many others”.