How smart brands win (valuable) friends on the social networking scene
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008By: Allen Adamson
Among the topics I write about in BrandDigital is the role social networking sites play in the brand-building process. While some marketers believe that to succeed in the digital economy a brand must have some presence on sites like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn, most others agree with my premise that a brand should carefully consider the value of where it chooses to hang out, not to mention its acceptance by this like-minded group. As Kevin Lane Keller, a professor of marketing at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business aptly put it, “You don’t want your brand to come across as a professor crashing the frat party.” His point, obviously, is that as much as you think your brand might fit seamlessly into a particular social network crowd, it’s crucial to remember that you’re still “the brand,” and they’re the consumers.
The value of this point was driven home a week or so ago at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference which I had the opportunity to attend. Among the folks participating in a discussion chaired by the magazine’s technology editor David Kirkpatrick, was Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, who talked about this well-populated social network’s position on “brands as friends.” Akin to what I write about in my book, Sandberg suggested that the key to successful branding on a social networking site is the ability to determine what type of people are spending time on the site, to listen to what they’re talking about to each other, what interests they share, and then determine whether your brand can offer anything of relevance to the virtual conversation. Your branding objective should be to demonstrate to participants on the site that your brand has a good reason for being there; that engaging in the branding will be worth their while and worth sharing with their friends, word of mouth being a key dynamic in the social networking scene.
Sandberg gave a great example of a brand that heeded this online social branding principle. Mazda, recognizing that one of the target audiences it wanted to befriend was hanging out on Facebook, decided to launch a branding initiative which involved helping it plan for the design of its 2018 MAZDA3. The company’s relevant contribution clearly got people to pay attention. Not only did Facebook members submit designs, hundreds of them voted on the design features they’d be interested in, something that will help enable Mazda to meet consumer needs more relevantly than its competitors. Mazda didn’t simply repurpose an existing ad or video for its Facebook presence, it developed a branding strategy specifically for a particular social networking scene, taking into account both the “friends” and the business objective it wanted to meet. Any brand can learn from Mazda’s experience that to win friends and influence people on a social network site, it must identify who’s at the party, know what these folks are interested in and make sure it has something of relevance to add to the conversation.

