Social Strategy for Boring Brands

Was flipping through my monthly Marketing News magazine from the American Marketing Association and found and interesting article called "Social Strategy for exciting (and not so exciting) brands", written by Josh Bernoff, VP at Forrester Research.

The article discusses how "talkable" or popular brands have an easier go with social networking because people already want to discuss them and talk about them. In a recent survey of theirs they asked online consumers whether they'd like to interact with various forms of social applications with their favourite brands. 42% of respondents said they would like to. Thats a pretty nice number. When it came to how they preferred to interact it was a little different
- 1 in 4 would prefer a discussion forum
- 1 in 6 would be interested in connecting through a social network profile (ie. Facebook)
- 1 in 5 would prefer watching online videos
- Only 12% would want to read a blog about the brand

Interesting stuff.

Now onto the "boring", non-talkable brands that no one really cares about or wants to interact with (much like insurance, which is the sector I primarily work within).

"Boring brands have a different problem, but social applications can help them, too. The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won't talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watchiing other things. In a social context, this fails miserably."

An interesting point, and one that I agree with wholeheartedly. Ie. the post that I did earlier on the pharmacy centre advertisement. If they wanted to get into social networking they could provide a place where people could talk about what ails them, etc. and help provide health advice and that sort of stuff.

An interesting article, its not up yet on the http://www.marketingpower.com/ website but check back here soon and it should be http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/AMA%20Publications/Marketing%20News/MarketingNews.aspx