Simon Mainwaring. The We First Blog.

What brands must do now to engage their customer communities

Image: Majorly cool things

There’s an adage that is an apt description of the new dynamic at work between brands and consumers connected through social media: People support what they help to build. But now that many brands are launching community-driven cause marketing campaigns, the challenge becomes what to do next? Put another way, how do brands stay connected with their communities while also standing out from their competitors?

The answer is a logical extension of what brand leaders are currently doing in the marketplace. For example, Pepsi is doing a fantastic job of funding community generated ideas while also raising the profile of the brand. This strategy is effective because it serves as a powerful demonstration of a brand listening to its customers and valuing what they care about. By supporting these projects Pepsi is allowing their community to become co-authors of the brand narrative.

Moving forward, brands must go one step further. Brands must empower their community to be change agents in their own right. To that end, they need to take on a mentoring role. This means the brand provides the tools, techniques and strategies for their customers to become more effective marketers in achieving their own goals.

Exactly how a brand does this will be specific to each industry or shared value. It might require creating a collaborative platform through which brand loyalists can work together to achieve their goals. It may necessitate an online education platform through which a brand makes expert knowledge available to its customers specific to their goals. It may take the form of technical support that enables consumers to create mobile apps of their own.

Whatever the approach, the goal is to recast consumers as brand ambassadors working to achieve personal goals whose values are in alignment with those of the brand. This has an enormous halo effect for the brand. When a brand empowers consumers to act on their own ideas, it demonstrates not just trust, but an effective transference of responsibility for the well being of the brand to the customers. It also acknowledges how sophisticated consumers are in their use of social technology and their desire to participate in meaningful change. It solidifies a partnership between brands and consumers that drives dialogue, content and community growth. In short, the more brands do to celebrate the success of their customers, the more success they’ll enjoy themselves.

Do you believe brands should mentor their customers? Do you agree this would strengthen their brand communities?

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Social Photos: When a picture is worth 140 characters

Over the last weeks we have witnessed the peaceful demonstration in Egypt that overthrew President Mubarak’s regime. In the last few days we watched the protests it has inspired in Yemen, Iran, Bahrain and Algeria. While I have written about the contributory role of social media in these revolutions, it is also worth noting how we have experienced these events through various media and what it means for the future of social media.

On one hand You Tube videos have provided critical transparency as to what was happening on the ground in real time in Egypt. On the other, a gallery of powerful and singular images shot by media professionals and citizens armed with cell phones, has memorialized each important step on the road towards a more democratic Egypt. These images served as powerful distillations of complex issues and emotionally charged events, yet have they also affected how we will share information in the future?

I ask this question is the context of the sudden rise in popularity of photo sharing apps such as Instagram and Path. As mass media news outlets such as CNN or Al Jazeera English have increasingly incorporated citizen-generated media into their content, and as social media is becoming mainstream for both brands and consumers, how we prefer to consume information is changing. Will the evolution from the written letter to email to SMS to twitter continue to photo sharing apps that let pictures speaks for themselves?

As such social media exchanges would more accurately reflect the multi-screen experience that is becoming the norm for those who spend much of their time on the web. Effectively sharing could become a tireless game of ‘Snap!’ in which we exchange images and emotionally connect when striking common ground.

Obviously there are some who say that photo sharing apps are a fad that they do little more than what already exists through tools like TwitPic but enhanced by social networking into a simple to use app. Yet as demands on our time get greater, as both traditional and social media trade in real-time images and content, and as our appetite for digesting information at pace increases, I can only imagine photo sharing apps will continue to fill a growing need.

In short, how we consumer information is as important as what we consume. As the protests throughout the Arab world have shown us, the value of real-time content is the transparency, authenticity and accountability it affords. While long form content will always exist, I suspect it won’t belong before consumers and citizens expect nothing less than immediacy from the content they consume on a daily basis because of the very values.

What this means for brands, governments and even non-profits is daunting. Institutional inertia will collide with consumer expectations as we experience the life of others as a series of screen grabs. Institutions of all types must rethink how they communicate with their audience and reorganize their structures to make such immediacy possible. The key to success is being clearly defined in the first place so that they can respond authentically consistently, and remain relevant no matter how their customers chose to engage.

Do you think photo sharing apps will take off? Or have we reached a point of intolerance at which people need less information rather than not more?

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Exactly what role did social media play in the Egyptian revolution?

Image: johnvasko.com

The January 25th revolution in Egypt was an incredible achievement by its people and a truly inspiring example of the power of peaceful protest. Yet the work towards an effective transition to democratic government within Egypt has just begun. Meanwhile a debate continues to rage in the blogosphere as to the exact role played by social media.

While commentators such as Brian Solis and myself have argued against the off-hand dismissal of social media by Malcolm Gladwell, Evgeny Morozov and Will Heaven, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen made the sobering point that it’s silly to argue the issue in absolutist terms. Rosen argues “Factors are not causes,” and insists that social media was neither fully responsible for the revolution in Egypt nor irrelevant, and that social transformation is far more complex involving a high degree of mystery.

With sobriety and complexity in mind, I want to take a closer look at the specific role that social media played in terms of scaling awareness and support among anti-government protesters that ultimately resulted in the resignation of President Mubarak.

The role of social media is critical because it helps to spread cognitive dissonance by connecting thought leaders and activists to ordinary citizens rapidly expanding the network of people who become willing to take action. Brian Solis describes this process as creating the necessary “density” of connections, writing “If unity is the effect, density is the cause.” Similarly, Stowe Boyd writes:

“Ideas spread more rapidly in densely connected social networks. So tools that increase the density of social connection are instrumental to the changes that spread. […] And, more importantly, increased density of information flow (the number of times that people hear things) and of the emotional density (as individuals experience others’ perceptions about events, or ‘social contextualization’) leads to an increased likelihood of radicalization: when people decide to join the revolution instead of watching it.”

So how was such density achieved in Egypt and what impact will it have beyond its borders? Let’s consider this question in three dimensions – vertically, horizontally and in the compounding effect social media generates from one country to another.

i) Vertical Threshold: Compared to United States and Europe, social media has little penetration in the Arab world. In fact, there are only 21 million Facebook users across the Arab world. So how did social media play such a significant role in fueling a popular revolution? Let me explain by way of an example.

As many commentators have noted, one of the early catalysts for the January 25th revolution in Egypt was a Facebook page created in honor of Khaled Said, a young man who had been brutally beaten and killed by the police. This page became a focal point around which 470,000 “fans” organized their dissidence while a YouTube video about his murder was viewed by more than 500,000 people fueling further public outrage.

Inspired by the protests against and the eventual overthrow of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011, the Khaled Said Facebook page then became a focal point for the dissemination of popular protest throughout Egypt. As such, the limited penetration of social media within the country was overcome by the fact that it first scaled vertically through key Facebook sites such as those of Khaled Said, 15-year old Asmaa Mahfouz and later, Google executive Wael Ghonim.

ii) Horizontal Expansion: Buoyed by the success of Tunisian protesters and emboldened by the courage of young protesters on their own streets, social media also helped expand the ranks of Egyptians in Tahrir Square from young, well-educated students to doctors, lawyers, judges, Christians, women and finally State TV personnel.

Such alignment around shared values counteracted attempts by President Mubarak to divide local and foreign support for the protestors. Tweets, Facebook posts and You Tube videos flooded the Internet also serving as critical, transparent content for the dominant Egyptian media outlets such as television including Al Jazeera English (AJE).

iii) Compounding Effect: From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria to Iran to Algeria and China, social media is also playing a pivotal role in scaling connections between people, in achieving density, in disseminating courage and in countering misinformation generated by oppressive regimes in many countries around the world.

The most powerful consequence of this revolutionary tide is to challenge the false separation between a country’s ideals and its interests. By allowing citizens from all professions to align around shared values for the sake of their country’s future, they are challenging the monopolies of power that have impoverished the lives of millions allowing them to re-assert their core belief that government officials are democratically elected to serve the interests of the people.

Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, observed thousands of Egyptians volunteering to clean up Tahrir Square in the last 48 hours and wrote about the experience quoting the aphorism that “in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.” As he concluded, Egyptians are now re-taking ownership of their national identity, pride and country after thirty years of an oppressive regime.

Just as Egypt followed Tunisia, citizens of other Arab counties are rising to the challenge of shaping their own futures in the face of political and military might. Social media did not make this happen single-handedly, but by enabling people to connect more rapidly around shared values, it is shifting power back to the people and allowing them to re-align the interests of a country around the values that serve all its people.

This phenomenon and the contributory role played by social media are a powerful demonstration of what I call a We First (as opposed to Me First) thinking and behavior. This mindset involves a fundamental recognition that communities, companies and countries must now embrace and demonstrate an expanded definition of self-interest that includes the greater good. To do otherwise not only threatens their own survival, but invites a revolution led by those united by shared values and connected by social technology.

Do you believe the current wave of revolution will continue through the Arab world? Do you believe such instability is a positive development?

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