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Social Takes Center Stage

The economic news is getting better for a change. But don’t expect people to consume the way they used to—not after learning to get along with lower-priced brands and living with less. The impact the recession has made on consumption will be long lasting (sigh).

And not just on what we are willing to spend money on. But in the way we go about buying things in the first place. The difference goes beyond using cash vs. credit or shopping offline vs. online. It’s in how we’re increasingly buying “social”: turning to what other consumers say, think, publish or otherwise share about a brand online when we make purchases as opposed to what a brand communicates alone. This has implications for the way we market and build brands.

It’s a transformation that was well on its way back in 2006 when Time Magazine boldly declared “You” the person of the year. It seemed like the only thing not going for the new medium was consumer trust, which was tentative at best.

The recession has helped to change that—globally. A recent survey showed that 43 percent of consumers in Western Europe, China and the U.S. now report far greater trust in online consumer content such as blogs, review sites and forums than they did before. By contrast, confidence in established companies, brands and media channels has fallen to record lows. The shift is one of the reasons why “social” has become more than just the latest buzzword but a powerful force on the media landscape.

“Social” is increasingly how we consume and create media, most dramatically online . Today, 33% of all online content is user generated and 6 out of the top 10 websites in the world are social. Social is also how we are increasingly learning about brands: 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are now links to user generated content.

But that’s not all. Social is now a powerful force in commerce, too. It’s increasingly the way we buy—more, in fact. Retail surveys show that two-thirds of shoppers spend more online after reading recommendations from an online community. And 84 percent of consumers say they are now more likely to check online for reviews prior to making a purchase than they were twelve months ago. Translation: the community “closes the sale.”

It’s happening right in your neighborhood, too, thanks to fast-growing local social networks like Yelp, where consumers share the experiences they’ve had with local businesses. Yelp’s unique users jumped from 16 million in December 2008 to a whopping 26 million in December 2009, doubling the number of total reviews posted to the site to 8 million.

When the pace of change is this furious, it’s time for marketers to do some accelerating of their own. But creating another Twitter account here or Facebook fan page there, as my colleague Chris Perry often says, is not the solution.

He also says, and I agree, that this has become part of the problem. The jump in use of blogs, branded social communities, discussion forums, Flickr, Wikis, ratings and reviews, YouTube and other types of social media is rapidly creating a fragmented and inconsistent online presence for more than a few brands and companies today.  What’s more, it’s not unusual for it to be managed by different functions within a company as well as by different agencies. While this a good problem to have, it’s still a problem.

The bigger challenge, of course, is that companies have ever less control over the empowered consumer voices speaking on behalf of their brands. The result is an increasingly two-way marketing dynamic—less communication and more conversation—that requires as much embracing of what audiences are saying as it does talking at them.

So expect to see more and more brands wrestling with how to communicate who they are as a brand and what they stand for in social media in a far more consistent, strategic and global way.

The key, we believe, is a new strategy that takes the principle behind the brand architecture systems, guidelines and standards brands have traditionally used to manage their visual identities and logos and evolves it for the two-way, verbal, visual, experiential and interactive world of social media engagement. Does this approach look different? You bet it does–big time.  But the concept is based on the same mission of better integration and brand building, even though the rules of the road in social media couldn’t be more different.

We’ll be talking a lot more about this new approach for building stronger socialized brands in the coming weeks and months.

Image credit: Getty Images