Content area
Full text
Papers from the CCI Conference 2010
Edited by Michael B. Goodman
The brand will be socialized
Global enterprises are struggling today to understand how social media impacts their brands. Corporate management is witnessing a new level of activism from an influential constituency rarely heard from in the past - ordinary consumers. Many of these new consumer influencers are gaining a large share of voice in the market thanks to the power of the internet, and to technologies that bring together people who share common interests. Consumers are impacting brand equity as never before. This unnerves corporate marketing practitioners with responsibility for brand management. How can corporate marketing control the reputation of their brand in an environment which is increasingly out of their control?
Companies feel pressure to control the brand conversation. They may not currently have a voice in the social media space and feel an acute need to immediately jump in the conversation flow to simply catch up. However, establishing a presence on Twitter or Facebook without the due diligence required to make the effort worthwhile will produce few worthwhile results. Simply acquiring a presence on these sites for the sake of maintaining control over the brand discussion provides the illusion of taking action and taking action often feels like taking control.
The truth is that corporate marketing never had control of the brand. The ownership of the brand and its reputation has always belonged to the consumer. Some companies outsource the solution to this problem to a digital marketing agency, which delivers services that focus on the technical development of internet-based marketing products. These services can include web design, e-mail marketing or microsite software development. Additional services may include viral marketing campaigns, banner advertising, search engine optimization, podcasting or widget development. Digital marketing agencies tend to emphasize web-based tool development as a means to an end - focusing on everything except the most important social media element: the quality of the relationship between the firm and the consumer.
Brand ownership
The rate at which Americans are using the internet for social media purposes continues to increase year over year. Most notably, social networking and (micro-) blogging sites and video have increased, with:
Four out of five internet users visiting a social network site...