Brand Management and Social Media

Hamburg.
We continue at next09 with a panel expanding on the question of brand-consumer relations in the social media age. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club promotes a holistic, whole-of-business approach here - it's about more than marketing. Great products aren't sold, he says - they're bought; this has been the case for the iPhone, for example. The brand needs to convene the conversation around their products, and act like the host of the party - this means returning to basics, and letting go of the illusion of control.

Chris Messina from Vidoop adds that part of the job is building bridges; the organisation needs to be service-driven, and needs to have staff who act as the voice of the customer. With Twitter and similar tools, in fact, the backchannel has become the frontchannel, and companies need to listen and respond to this content. Heuer also adds that the networked environment has also created greater job mobility - if your company doesn't appreciate you, leave!

The challenge for business as well as organisations is also to lower their overhead and costs, Messina adds. And they need to think about their organisational structure - in a flat organisation, can you have a peer relationship with co-workers who have higher-level roles?

Companies that can create more signal and less noise are the ones that are successful - less buzz, more substance. They need to be more transparent, and tell the truth - but today there are few companies we expect to hear the truth from. And they need to identify those to whom they are relevant, and engage with those communities. Companies will be the more successful, the more they can make others successful, Messina says. This is also about reinforcing human connections - big brands have dehumanised the ecosystem.

For far too long, Heuer says, companies have been in the business of serving the stock market - not the real market which is made up of their consumers. Serving the real market means tempering profit-making ambitions in order to engage fairly with customers - not lying to customers in order to present their best face, but being more honest and transparent.

This is also about setting free your employees - allowing them to be human - and clearly articulating hyour corporate vision (and sticking to it), instead of swerving or 'fishtailing' between a number of different stated goals. Even then, though, customers may suspect hidden motives behind the information provided by the company - and the corporate response to this needs to be not to shrink from such criticism, but to engage it and respond openly.

Providing large amounts of information, at any rate, creates an opportunity for many more people to discover your brand; however, it also undermines message consistency. So, companies need to offer clear information which is ready-made to be passed on to the wider community by leading users.

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