Social media is not new. It is a concept that dates back to the Romans. When the Romans wrote letters, they didn’t address it to a person, they wrote ‘please read out to so and so’.
The Romans had another social media innovation – the graffiti wall. Roman houses looked inwards into the courtyard and the wall was a place for people to write their views and opinions on issues that mattered.
An Arab invention, coffee, found its way into Europe in the 1640s. With it started the concept of coffee houses. Coffee houses were specialised; the one near Westminster was about politics, and the one near the sea was about ships and navigation. People would go from one coffee shop to another to collect information. The Lloyd’s coffee house morphed in later years into the largest insurer.
Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, wrote The Wealth of Nations in a coffee shop and circulated his manuscript for comment among coffee shop regulars.
The telegraph was the first online community, where all the operators could listen to the code and also participate with responses.
Social media in recent times
So, social media has been around, but in a different format, over the last millennium. Social media has got a new meaning with the phenomenal spread of mobile telephony. According to research firm Gartner, of the worldwide sales of 4.4 billion mobile phones in the second quarter of 2015, smartphone sales totalled 3.3 billion units, an increase of 13.5 per cent over the same period in 2014.
The mobile Internet will be bigger than the fixed Internet globally. A smartphone in a citizen’s hand makes him a powerful catalyst for change, positive and negative. Smartphones and the Internet are transparency vehicles in countries that aren’t free. Today, 48 countries are not free and another 57 countries are partly free. So, around half the countries in the world are not fully free. Social media is the vehicle of revolution in closed countries.
The father of social media ‘freedom’ is Tunisian fruit seller Tarek Tayed Mohammed Bouzizi. His act of defying the commissioner who confiscated his goods led to the Arab Spring and the fall of the 23-year-old authoritarian Ben Ali regime. He died young, at 27, but started a revolution in the Arab world.
Social media, consumers and brands
Social media gives a voice to consumers/citizens and the end result is a demand for greater transparency, and accountability from leaders and society.
Social media can be used effectively in companies. A company’s blogs can be used to collect feedback on strategy. Social media can be a huge culture auditor. Social media and the image cultivated can help attract talent to a company.
How can brands use social media? To answer that, we need to go back and see how brands communicated in the past. The first level of communication was via packaging. Packaging differentiated the brand from a commodity. Early branding as in ‘labels’— Green Label tea, Yellow Label tea, Red Label tea, Blue Label whisky, Black Label whisky, Red Label whisky — where the brand owner used the colour label as a price-quality marker.
Early days of branding
After packaging, brands used posters to communicate the brand’s values and differentiators. One of my early advertising teachers, Michael Bronsten in Unilever, taught me the T-shirt test — he would challenge me to put down the brand essence in two words on a T-shirt. It was tough!
Buying retail shelf space was another way for brands to talk with consumers at points of sale. Then came print advertising and the advent of two-way communication. Early print ads had coupons to stimulate immediate purchase. Television advertising truly made brands build scale by reaching millions of consumers. In emerging markets, television advertising turned illiterate women and children into consumers through audiovisual magic.
Social media started as a vehicle to connect socially. As always, the social angle has now moved to a business domain. Today, with social media, consumers trust their peer view more than they trust media or brand view. Social media is the future trust vehicle.
Celebrities needed brand endorsement to reach a wider audience. In a social world, the celebrity has to be smart enough to generate news and the fans will follow. Celebrities do not need brands in a future social world.
Marketing has been about needs, wants and desires. With respect to the world of social media, they are the need to be heard, the want to be resolved and the desire to see change in a brand or a company. For this, brands need to be responsive. In today’s world, the fast beat the slow; the big do not beat the small! Consumers expect a Twitter response in 15 minutes and a Facebook update response in an hour. So, if brands are not responding in 59 minutes, consumers will take them to task.
Not entirely rosy
In the world of social media, brands will be expected to show responsibility. They will be expected to resolve, to be empathetic, and to do right. The bar will go up with every good and bad example.
Not everything with social media is rosy and positive. The hate mail one sees is astounding. Consumers and readers who do not understand the totality tend to comment negatively and viciously about authors. Consumers using fake identities show bravery by pulling down celebrities with vulgar language. Fake digital identities can be created and comments therein can pass off as public opinion. The dividing line between gossip and truth can be thin and can lead to misinformation, even social unrest. Blackmail via shaming is another by-product of the social media society. The list can go on.
The benefits of social media are obvious. The downsides of social media depend on the responsibility shown by consumers. The tables have turned; consumers always expected responsibility from those that served them, and maybe consumers need to show equal restraint and responsibility now.