A dynamic exchange can strengthen customer ...

Originally published in Design Management Review; Volume 21, Issue 1. © 2010 The Design Management Institute, Wiley-Blackwell: Publisher.

D e v e lo p m e n t

A dynamic exchange can strengthen customer relationships. But there are caveats. This interaction must be supported with compelling experiences, moderated commentary, and a respect for privacy.

Tom Briggs, Senior Social Media Strategist, Lead Content Developer, Quango Interaction Design

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Social Media’s Second Act: Toward Sustainable Brand Engagement by Tom Briggs

Social media in the service of brand has reached an interesting state. It simultaneously exists as both the darling of Web X.0 marketing evangelists and the bane of those ready to label it an unsustainable feel-good fad with an air of early-dot-com hype.1 An examination of brand efforts in the space thus far reveals that each position has some merit. While early social media efforts have produced some inspiring successes with abundant potential, there have also been blunders where misjudgment of complex new social structures ef1. Stephen Baker. “Beware of Social Media Snake Oil.” BusinessWeek, December 14, 2009.

fectively distanced those they sought to engage. At its best, social media has the potential to drive meaningful connections and provoke conversations with actively engaged audiences. Watching Barack Obama’s inauguration live via CNN video stream alongside a realtime Facebook comment feed felt like a well-executed marriage of old media with new. At the same time, it provided a logical and natural extension of Obama’s populist message.2 2. While the Obama White House has left unfulfilled its promises of a US government opened up by social media, the Obama campaign’s effective application of social media outreach to a degree previously unseen in politics cannot be denied.

At its worst, social media can be self-servingly unidirectional—lacking any underlying base of authentic listening or mutual exchange. No brand seeking authentic engagement wants its efforts to be equated with the contextually blind automated spam programs that quickly infiltrated Twitter and other social networks. Devoid of any self-knowledge or conversational ability, they interject canned statements into social media spaces. This is the equivalent of an individual walking into a cocktail party, standing on a chair, and endlessly repeating his or her personal Web address at maxi© 2010 The Design Management Institute

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The I mpac t of S ocial M edia on S er vice and Produc t Brands

mum volume. Social media requires that brands navigate a fine line.

In ways that are becoming increasingly apparent, social media drives user expectations that brands will interact, provoke, commiserate, and generally act like trusted friends. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Facebook’s walls—spaces that automatically display real-time posts from members of an individual’s social sphere. Here, brands accepted into a user’s social network speak alongside spouses, family, friends, and colleagues. In the resulting environment, brand is expected to engage with a new sense of intimacy. Faust and Householder’s definition and subsequent call to authentic brands in a recent Design Management Review provides a timely perspective: “Simply put, an authentic brand is a brand that’s clear about what it is and what it stands for. It’s a brand that’s built from the inside out versus one that panders to the latest trend, fad, or customer segment. More deeply, it’s a brand with a real story, a connection to a fundamental truth and an appreciation of its smart customers.”3 Few brands have successfully

carried their real story into a compelling social space as Nike+. Since 2006, the Nike+ system has enabled users to lace up a pair of shoes and capture detailed personal workout metrics. Through the use of an accompanying iPod or Nike+ device, they can log detailed statistics that include distance travelled and calories burned. Post-run, these statistics can be uploaded to an online gathering of what has been called the largest community of runners ever assembled. To date, more than 1.3 million Nike+ users have logged more than 130 million miles and burned over 13 billion calories.4 Uploading results encourages Nike+ users to engage in a social space where they can meet and challenge other runners, design an animated personal avatar, compare statistics, and gain support from those working toward similar goals. Drawing on the inspirational elements of the Nike brand story has enabled Nike+ to form an appealing social media space. Acceptance by the global running community is proof of success. Social media demands social brands able to provoke conversations and inspire resonant stories. In this space, brands communicate and

3. William Faust and Leigh Householder, “Get Real and Prosper: Why Social Media Demands Authentic Brands,” Design Management Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 2009), p. 47.

4. Mark McClusk, “The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics,” Wired, June 22, 2009.

Social media demands social brands

engage alongside trusted members of an individual’s social network. An established, well-known, and sharable brand story serves to imbue character while providing a basis for the gathering of like-minded individuals. Similarly, any brand superficiality or false authenticity is quickly identified and amplified. Social media demands the authentic extension of brand narrative. Any dissonance between the two spaces will produce backlash among engagers who expect authentic connection. Integration enables unification of social presence

Social media brings with it new opportunities for interpersonal connection. Just as significant are new elements encouraging the interweaving of distributed social media touch-points into a unified digital persona. Driving this integration are Web application programming interfaces (APIs) for social media. At their simplest level, APIs enable sharing of information among what are otherwise disconnected online social nodes. This interconnection facilitates consistent presentation of an online presence. New opportunities for interconnectedness reveal opportunities for a brand to grow presence throughout an individual’s

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S ocial M edia’s S econd Ac t: Toward Sustainable Brand Engagement

social media footprint—his or her “social graph”—while simplifying and unifying the engager experience. Prior to the emergence of social media APIs, engagement with multiple online communities meant separate experiences—different login credentials and a diluted online persona. With social media APIs, users are coming to expect greater interplay among social media presences and interactions. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are each working to establish themselves as the de facto standard for online presence integration. Each tool enables one interaction to be easily shared throughout a social graph. In this way, a restaurant review posted on the user-driven review site Yelp can be simultaneously pushed to a Facebook wall and broadcast on Twitter. The result is a streamlining of the user experience and a greater unification of online presence. Using the same concepts, a Facebook or Google login can be “passed” between sites, simplifying the user experience and contributing to social graph continuity. Where an online persona was once distributed and diluted, emerging technologies are interweaving the social footprint. This increasingly robust interconnection will encourage and empower users to bring consistency to their online persona.

Brands have an opportunity to use these emerging API technologies to simplify and enhance the interconnected experiences of their social media engagers. Social media’s moderating influence

By nature, social media thrive on the open and uncensored dialogue that is a cornerstone of the online experience. Brands looking to engage in this space must accept that opening

transform moderation into a collective experience. The success of the online knowledge resource Wikipedia provides an example of effective crowd-sourced moderation. In a 2005 study conducted by Nature and reported by CNET, subject matter experts compared 42 Wikipedia entries from diverse subject matter areas to their equivalent articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. A total of eight serious errors were discov-

Users interacting typically face no censor but their own, and efforts to silence the open exchange of ideas are generally frowned upon. up new communication channels invites fans and detractors alike into the conversation. Users interacting typically face no censor but their own, and efforts to silence the open exchange of ideas are generally frowned upon. Fortunately, the move to greater socialization and interconnectedness of the online experience also reduces anonymity—encouraging users and brands alike to stand behind their words. In essence, social media forges a social contract through the fostering of sharing and mutual observation among self-acknowledged affinity groups. Empowered users assume ownership of their communities and

ered—four in Wikipedia and four in the Britannica.5 The example of Wikipedia shows that the integration of community moderation opportunities into online social spaces can foster alignment of content and interactions with stated community goals. Genuinely engaged supporters equipped with tools to bury and silence negative engagers will contribute to productive social media experiences when offered a compelling community vision around which to rally. While official moderation of any social media space dedicated to brand 5. Jim Giles, “Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head,” Nature, December 15, 2005.

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Social Engagement Sorting

ENGAGEMENT

is necessary (if for no other reason than to spur engagement), those bringing brands into social media find unprecedented opportunities to interact with users primed for engagement. Through “social engagement sorting” (see Figure 1), individuals who engage appropriately within a social media context are recognized and rewarded. In a social media environment built upon personal visibility, this public recognition and reward serves to foster appropriate social media engagement. At its simplest, community self-moderation is seen on sites that dynamically shift comments based on user feedback. By voting for or against the comments of fellow users, site members democratically decide which responses sit closest to the original content—receiving increased visibility—and which sit lower on the page. Some culture sites reliant on usergenerated content take user moderation a step further, rewarding contributing members for original material. On these sites, registered community members who provoke a discussion or post material that garners a certain number of comments are awarded a persistent profile icon recognizing this and similar accomplishments. Brand managers considering the design of social media interactions must recognize the openness

Figure 1. “Social engagement sorting” uses individual exposure enabled by social media to recognize and reward appropriate user engagement. Through public recognition and reward of contributing engagers, positive interaction is encouraged and negative interaction discouraged.

of the social media environment. Fortunately, this openness encourages authentically engaged social media users to self-moderate when given appropriate recognition and the tools to silence those who would engage inappropriately. Navigating privacy

With social media’s “What’s on your mind?” prompt being answered by an increasingly broad mix of users, more data representing the sometimes

intimate details of life is appearing online. While users are becoming more comfortable sharing their lives online with trusted networks, some notable overreaching in social media has produced instances of considerable backlash. Brands looking to design compelling and sustainable social media interactions must recognize and respect wide variations in perceptions of privacy and openness among users. Brands that help their social media engagers establish and

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Social Privacy Spaces

Figure 2. Social media engagers desire control over the visibility of individual personal data elements (e.g. photos, posts, interactions) as seen by their social graph and the online public at large. Meeting this desire for clearly defined and easily manageable “social privacy spaces” drives productive and sustainable social media experiences.

manage elements within their “social privacy spaces” (see Figure 2) will be best able to forge sustainable social media engagements. The emergence and eventual termination of Facebook Beacon in response to outraged users reflects the shifting frontiers of social media privacy. Launched in late 2007, the Beacon service quietly observed the interactions of Facebook users on 44 partner websites. Some of these activities were then published to

individual Facebook walls where they were visible to friends. Users reacted to this perceived invasion of privacy, and civic action group MoveOn.org became involved—demanding that users’ actions not be published without express consent. Beacon was soon modified to require user approval of postings. Users were eventually given the opportunity to opt out of sharing this type of information entirely. A class action lawsuit followed and was only recently settled. In September

2009, Facebook announced that it would terminate the service. Shortly thereafter, the network released its most dramatic update to its privacy policies since its inception. As the world’s largest social network, Facebook set a precedent for subsequent privacy postures. While the rising tide of information sharing enabled by social media shows no signs of slowing, engagers are coming to expect granular control over personal data proffered online. Beacon showed that those engaged expect to retain control over what is shared and the associated degree of visibility to both their social graph and the world at large. Brands seeking social media engagement should recognize social privacy spaces and empower users to control the degree of exposure of individual social media data elements (defined as any sharable content). Users in control of shared data are more willing to contribute good, honest personal data that forms the lifeblood of sustainable social media experiences initiated by brand. Brands looking to design and manage within the social media space do so for users with wide-ranging views on privacy and openness. In the case of Facebook Beacon, what was seen as open sharing in one context (the voluntary sharing of a

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recent purchase with friends) quickly devolved into perceived snooping and invasions of privacy when users saw information travel beyond their sphere of control. Backlash against perceived privacy invasions provides a wake-up call for brands looking to engage via social media. Social media experiences must recognize and accommodate fluctuating and uniquely individual notions of privacy and exposure. By designing straightforward systems that enable individual control over personal data visibility, wide-ranging notions of privacy can be accommodated.

in which appropriate content can live and open, productive conversations can occur. Responsive to engagers and committed to the creation of content exploring food and wellness, Whole Foods demonstrates that a compelling brand narrative deployed across an interconnected social media presence can foster sustainable engagement. In recognizing that its social media presence affords an ideal blend of communication opportunities for engaging supporters and detractors alike, Whole Foods offers a compelling example of social media in the service of brand.

Sustainable social media engagement in practice: Whole Foods Market

Social media’s second act

Although many brands are flocking to social media, few have demonstrated the sustained commitment of organic grocery retailer Whole Foods. An early social media adopter, Whole Foods maintains an interconnected presence consisting of a blog, Facebook group, Flickr feed, customer support community portal, topic- and location-specific Twitter feeds, iPhone application, and podcasts. Leveraging the strengths of each social media element and integrating each into a consistent brand-aligned presence has enabled Whole Foods to forge spaces

Social media’s evolution is a given. The time it takes for new social media tools to appear, integrate with existing systems, and iterate shows no signs of slowing. At the leading edge of this evolution are mobile devices with increasingly robust technologies and capabilities. Gartner projects that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people around the globe will carry handsets capable of mobile commerce.6 Increasingly robust devices combined with the growing acceptance of social media worldwide will further amplify the opportunity of social media in the 6. “Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010” (press release), October 20, 2009.

context of brand. Mobile device capabilities including location-aware GPS and ubiquitous Internet connectivity will effectively abolish the final barrier between real-world and social media relationships. In doing so, they will make it easier to share social interactions in real-time and from anywhere—encouraging users to offer up more of the information that is the lifeblood of social media. In time, these mobile, location-aware devices will spur (and drive expectations of ) social media and networks that more realistically mirror the complexities of actual social interactions. As my colleague Marc Anteparra-Naujock has observed, social media will gradually become less of a destination, and more of an unobtrusive digital overlay through which individuals interact and inform their continually shifting real-world identities and relationships. One of the earliest examples of this real-world/digital social space convergence is provided by the FourSquare mobile application. When visiting a physical business location (Starbucks for an afternoon coffee run, lunch at the deli down the street), users “check in” and earn points by validating their presence through a GPS-enabled mobile device. Registered users logging the

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most check-ins at a location are promoted to “mayor” and retain the title until another, more dedicated, user surpasses their commitment. Small profile icon “badges” are awarded to those who complete different checkin scenarios, like checking in at multiple locations over the course of an evening. Check-in point leaderboards and integration with existing friend lists socialize the entire experience. In time, experiences like these will continue to blur the line between the digital and real worlds. Is it any wonder that relationships will evolve as well? Integration of social media will provide designers looking to develop compelling brand experiences with entirely new opportunities to spur engagements. In doing so, they will discover opportunities to affirm audiences and blur the line between online and real-world socializations.

by Will Ayres & Scott Lerman

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my team at Quango Interaction Design, specifically Marc Anteparra-Naujock and Dave Anolik for their insights and critiques. Thanks to Alec Hill for diagram designs. n

Reprint #10211BRI46

by Will Ayres & Scott Lerman

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