The problem for Kodak was that information (a picture) became separated from its means of distribution (film and print) and Kodak’s business model was based around providing the means of distribution, hence the reason its business model became separated from its business.

As some have already pointed out, Kodak didn’t suffer from a lack of understanding of the digital environment or a lack of innovation.  It was a very innovative company and was a leader in many aspects of digital technology – but perhaps this ended up as being a distraction.  Kodak should have focused its innovation on changing its business model, not on developing new technology.

There are many lessons here, not least the misplaced belief that the social media revolution is all about technology and tools and that if you understand and use these tools you will be OK.  The technologies and tools of social media are crushingly simple to understand and use – that’s the whole point.  But the mass adoption of these tools is fundamentally changing the rules of communication and the relationship between citizens / consumers / customers and institutions such as brands, the media and government.  You don’t deal with the fundamental consequences of this change without making some fundamental changes to the way you do business.  Having  a Facebook page, being on Twitter and posting videos on YouTube is not a sufficient response.

Don’t be a Kodak.  Don’t get caught up in the technology and tools.  Only the organisations that understand how social media is going to affect their business model, and adapt accordingly, will avoid Chapter 11.  And this isn’t simply about media or digital businesses – it is about any business that still wants to have a relationship with a customer or consumer.

The relationship a brand, or the researcher representing it, establishes with the people in a focus group is quite a strange one.  Quite often, the brand may not even reveal itself, but the participants are frequently encouraged to disclose highly personal information about themselves, which they do both because they are paid a small sum but mostly because they feel flattered to believe that their opinion counts for something.   After the session ends, the relationship finishes.  It is very rare to return, or even report back, to the participants unless they have been recruited as part of a panel designed to see how thoughts and opinions shift rather than define what those opinions are.  Certainly the brands concerned don’t believe there is any advantage in preserving a relationship with attendees at focus groups or even encouraging the participants to buy their product or service: you don’t sell to the focus group, you get insights from the focus group in order to then sell to the much larger group of consumers or customers.

Facebook, as far as a brand manager is concerned, is basically a focus group and if you want to use it effectively the same rules apply, namely:

• use Facebook as a place to have a conversation with a small group of your target audience in order to work out how to change or improve your product or service,
• don’t waste time and effort trying to sell, or even necessarily ‘engage’ with the focus group because it is never, in and of itself, going to be big or influential enough to significantly move the needle on sales or brand reputation.

Very few brands have worked this out.  There seems to be a belief that because a group is ‘on’ Facebook, some sort of magic social media fairy dust will be sprinkled on it which will cause whatever positive engagement is created to spread throughout the network to all the target consumers.  This won’t happen in 99.999% of occasions.  OK, you may be able to have some level of interaction with more people on Facebook that you would in conventional focus groups – but not that many more, and certainly not enough to make an impact.  OK, those people that you do reach have a better ability and slightly more incentive to spread any positive experience amongst their friends, but again – not that much more ability and not that much more incentive.  And I know that much of the desire to harvest ‘likes’ is driven by data capture and CRM considerations – but this isn’t ‘social’ media it is anti-social marketing.

The basic rule that determines the effective use of Facebook as a marketing tool is this:  If you are looking to use Facebook, in and of itself, as a mechanism to create ‘engagement’ with your consumers, forget it.  The numbers will never stack up sufficient to move the needle on overall brand reputation or engagement.  The only effective way to use Facebook is to use it like you use a focus group – i.e. a tool to work out how to change and improve your product or service (or, if you really must, your advertising).  Thus, if you want to move the needle on overall brand reputation this occurs because you have improved product or service delivery (or your ads) using insights gathered from Facebook rather than because of any magic that happens within Facebook itself.

In other words – you don’t sell to the focus group, whether or not it happens to be on Facebook.

None of this explains the current desperate obsession that brands have with Facebook and the desire to drag their website into the Facebook space, garnering ‘likes’ as they go.  Is there, for example, a single ad, these days, that doesn’t end with the strapline “find us on Facebook”?

I followed  this advice for a car manufacturer whose ad I saw on TV last night and when I ‘found’ their page (something it was easier to do via Google than via Facebook itself incidentally), what I found was basically a sub-standard version of their website.  This was not sub-standard on account of any design failure on the part of the car company, but because a Facebook page will always be sub-standard if you are trying to create mass information / destination site, because a Facebook page was never originally designed to be this.  The page prominently featured the obligatory exhortation to ‘like’ the company and alongside this was a celebration of the fact that the company had now exceeded 10,000 ‘likes’.  Here is a company whose target audience in the UK would be measured in tens of millions, getting all excited because 10,000 people had pressed a little like button.  Whoopee do!  Was there an opportunity to engage with the company in any discussion (i.e. like mini focus groups)?  No – the discussion facility was not activated.  And what was the company actually saying about itself?  Well most of the posts encouraged people to go to its website!  Was anyone, other than the company itself, actually posting anything on the page’s wall?  No, although there were some comments on posts, many of which were negative.  Was the company responding to these comments and/or was there any meaningful conversation or interaction going on at all?  No.  Was this page a waste of time and effort?  Yes.  This company is not alone out there, if one were to form a focus group drawn from the pool of large consumer brands I would suspect that we would find this usage of Facebook pretty representative of the whole.

As I have said many times before, social media is not a channel that you can use to ‘engage’ with your target audience.  It is sensationally bad at doing this.   However, it is sensationally good at speaking to very small groups of people, even individuals, at exactly the right time and about exactly the right things.  Therefore the way you use social media and the metrics and measurement criteria you set all have to be aligned against this fact.

Strategy is no exception to this.  A social media strategy is different to a marketing communications strategy for the following, simple reason.  A marcoms strategy has as its output a piece of communication (expressed as an ad, a press, release, a brochure, a campaign – essentially one single ‘thing’ that is presented to the whole target audience).  However, a (successful) social media strategy has as its output a form of behaviour or a process.

The best way to understand this is to imagine that you are in a room with 100 people who represent your target consumers, customers or stakeholders.  If the only way you have to engage with this group is a 2 minute (or 30 second) slot on a podium, what you will need is a speech – a very carefully crafted piece of communication that conveys exactly what it is you want to say about yourself.  This situation is analogous to the communications and marketing environment we have been operating in to date.  We have very limited (by time, expense or relevance) opportunities to state our case and the only way to do this effectively is through the projection of single, short messages designed to be seen or encountered by all of our audience, often repeatedly.  As a result, our entire approach to strategy has been harnessed around the need (now seen as an unquestioned assumption) that this is the output.

Social media is different in the respect that you are in the room with that same group of 100 people, but this time you are in a social situation.  There is no podium, people are talking to each other.  If you want to engage productively with these people, simply bringing along a speech or a predetermined set of responses to anticipated conversations, is not going to work.   Preparing any fixed pieces of communication, in advance, will be a waste of time.  Success in this situation will depend on your behaviour – your ability to understand the dynamics of the room, join the right type of conversations and, critically, say the right thing at the right time.

This is why social media strategies have to be based around the creation of forms of behaviour and thus harnessed to defining the management processes that lie behind this.  This sort of strategy will look very different from a strategy that is designed to deliver a thing.  It also has to recognise that when you are in a social situation you can’t talk to everyone, all at once.  Social media is actually very bad at doing what traditional mass communication does well.  The benefit from social media (as with conversations) comes from ability to talk to exactly the right people at exactly the right time.  Social media is not about large numbers (Facebook likes, YouTube hits, Twitter followers etc), but the ability to target very specific groups with very specific information.

This means that the elements of a social media strategy should revolve around two things: training and focus.  Training, so that people understand and are motivated, to behave in the right way; focus, so that activity is linked to very specific situations.  Having broad objectives, such as increasing ‘engagement’ or improving brand reputation scores, are useless for social media.  Social media activity is rarely going to move the needle on these in a timeframe, or with an impact, that is likely to be acceptable.  Interestingly though, social media can be used to measure how the needle moves on these objectives – if people like your brand, your Facebook ‘likes’ will go up, but this is not necessarily because of anything you are doing ‘in’ Facebook.  The tool you use to measure something is rarely the tool you use to generate something – but many fail to appreciate this as they chase Facebook ‘likes’ believing that by inflating this score they are having a significant impact on improving the reputation of their brand – when all they are doing is skewing the numbers.

An effective social media strategy requires objectives that are focused on very specific business issues (increase business with X customer, sign Y deal, recruit xx individuals, improve Z product or service).  This is where social media can really work and it is why I now base my social media strategies on five elements: Business Objectives, Priorities (people / topics), Human Resources, Tool Selection, Operation and Management Process (perhaps more of these in separate post).

Funnily enough, it is only relatively recently that I have had this insight.  I have long realised that social media strategies are different from conventional marketing strategies, but I haven’t been able to nail this difference as one that stems from a fundamental difference in output – from pieces of communication to forms of behaviour – until now.  I think the reason for this is that I have recently done a workshop with a former colleague, Paul Burns, ex Saatchi & Saatchi.  Paul does a very good module on how to produce a creative brief and we spent a lot of time discussing how to apply this process to social media.  We realised that the process could be adapted to social media, but only when we fundamentally changed our assumption of what output we were seeking – away from creative things to creative behaviours.  It also resonates with a conundrum I encountered a few months ago, when attending a gathering of creative academics – that is people involved in the teaching of creativity rather than academics who think creatively.  The biggest ‘criticism’ these people had of social media was that they couldn’t see ‘the creative idea’ in social media campaigns.  And the conundrum stemmed from the fact that there is never, in social media, a creative idea that relates to what the people we have come to call ‘creatives’ actually do and thus the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no point in teaching a traditional creative director how to operate in social media, because traditional creativity (expressed as tangible outputs) has no role within it.

It is a shame your blog does not allow comments, because that might be an easier place to have this conversation!  I cannot disagree with anything you say in your reply – it is plausible support for how you might create a keiretsu cooperative.  My issue, however, is not how one might do this, rather why one would do it – or rather why one would do it to create a “publishing and discussion site designed to attract the indie writers we call bloggers”.

One of  the consequences of the separation of information from distribution is that the information then tends to live in digital spaces rather than digital places.  For example, you didn’t come to my blog (digital place) to find my piece on Gutenberg and the social media revolution – you found it “out there” in digital space.  My article lives in a Google search (which is a space) much more than it lives in my blog and its visibility in this space is determined by how people have shared or distributed this article within their own digital spaces not by how many have come to my blog to find it.

In reality, the concept of information living in, or being published by a “site” is dissolving as, indeed, is the idea that there is any collective interest (monetary or otherwise) in the act of publication.  However, there is an emerging collective interest in the act of information sharing and thus there may well be relevance in the concept of  a community (or site) to share information.

Thus, my advice to you would be to take your work on creating a kieretsu coopoerative, which remains relevant, and apply it instead to the act of information sharing, rather than the act of information publication.  There is no longer money to be made in publication, because publication costs nothing.

(Also note: by ‘walled garden’ I did not mean pay-walled garden.  The walls are there to stop the information getting out, not to prevent people getting in.)

Happy to continue the discussion.

I am glad that Google serendipity brought you to my piece.  (By the way – read Eli Pariser’s “Filter Bubble” for an investigation of the way in which Google is stifling serendipity).

Your model of collaborative ownership of media is interesting – but I can’t say that I can give a clear steer on its chances of success.  I wish I knew the answer to the question “what is the future of media”; all I have at this stage are some clues as to what the basic principles that shape this future may be.  The only thing that I am pretty sure about is that whatever this future is, it will look completely different from what we have at the moment (see Clay Shirky’s excellent “Thinking the Unthinkable” piece).  And my sense is that co-ownership of media may not be sufficiently unthinkable because media may be becoming something that can’t actually be owned in a way which allows any form of monetary benefit.

So what are the clues?

The big one for me is the shift from institutions to processes.  Trust is shifting from institutions to processes, as I mentioned in my piece, and this shift is creating a separation between institutions and processes – journalists (representatives of institutions) are now being separated from journalism (process).  This has many implications – not least your idea that there is a benefit from drawing ‘bloggers’ into the essentially institutionalised sphere of journalists and journalism – i.e. the answer is to make these new people part of the old establishment (albeit an establishment that has adjusted itself to make it more amenable to collective or collaborative processes).  Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian has talked about involving “Our Readers” in producing “Our Product”.  The problem is that news is no longer Alan’s product – it belongs to the people (he likes to call) readers and it doesn’t really live in fixed places (websites, newspapers) anymore, it lives in digital spaces (Google search terms).  The only valid role that Alan has is to help these people manage a process whereby they can create and control their news.  News is shifting from being a finished product to being a raw material – and I think the only models that stand a chance of success in the long-term have to be rooted in this insight.

So I am not entirely sure that the bloggers you talk about actually exist – in the way that citizen journalists don’t exist, although citizen journalism does (citizen journalist = institutionalised way of looking at something, citizen journalism = process way of looking at something).  I have a blog, but I am not a blogger.  People-publishers  are defined by their behaviours not by their usage of particular tools (blogs, Twitter etc.) it is only traditional media that defined itself by its usage of a particular publishing tool (print, TV, radio) because it had no alternative.  Undoubtedly conventional publishers will be able to gather about themselves a group of interested individuals who may be prepared to participate in the process of publication – but the issue here is the definition of publication.  Within the Gutenberg world publication was essentially defined as being means of distribution because the means of distribution (and its cost) was the problem publication solved.  Post-Gutenberg, this problem has gone away because distribution now costs nothing and everyone has the tools to do it.  Information is now separated from the means of distribution – my sound bite of what the social revolution is all about!  You don’t necessarily manage the transition into a more collaborative world by adding a gloss of collaboration to a redundant concept – the redundant concept being in large part the idea publication requires and generates money and therefore a stake in that is something of value.  The very nature of publication has changed, a point you recognise in your Kieretsu-Cooperative paper.  This is the shift publishers have to adapt to, and it has a shift from being something that is vested in institutions and places to one that is vested in process and spaces.  Wikipedia is a good example and it is worth noting that the first attempt to get the concept off the ground (Nupedia) that was based on opening up the process to a community of incentivsed collaborators failed.  The idea only took-off when the process was opened up to the community of everyone.

I do a lot of work with consumer brand organisations.  Their equivalent of creating a cooperative community around them is to set up Facebook pages and try and get lots of people to ‘Like’ them and be their ‘friend’.  The problem is that there is only a tiny proportion of their target consumers who are actually prepared to have this sort of relationship with them – and chasing this group creates no sustainable business advantage so long as the relationship you are looking to create is limited to this idea of high engagement and involvement amongst a fixed group of supporter / collaborators.  Most people don’t want to be a brand’s ‘friend’ however much that brand may wish it.  They only want to talk to that brand when something goes wrong or they want to change what it is that brand does.  If a brand can facilitate that sort of interaction (process) – it gains a benefit – provided it is able to respond to the wishes of its consumers.  And that is why I think that focusing on a small group of bloggers / collaborators may be the equivalent of a brand trying to create ‘friends’ in Facebook.  Ultimately an unproductive exercise (as brands are slowly starting to realise) because it is an idea that is rooted in a relationshiread business model) a brand wants to have, rather than the one that responds to the relationship that 99.99 per cent of the brand’s consumers actually want to have with it.

It goes back to the point about community I mentioned in the article you quote in your piece “people will not want to be managed within communities controlled by institutions, they will form communities to manage their relationships with institutions”.

So for me – the future is all about shifting the focus from the creation of new institutions to managing processes, recognising news and information as a raw material not a finished product and understanding the dynamics of the Community of Everyone.  And finally, here are some thoughts I have just published which examine the idea of collective moderation based not on restricting information (old institutionalised publishing model) but by positioning information.

Hope this is food for thought!

(As an aside : it is no co-incidence that the greatest incidence of lying in the British media occurs within the tabloid press, i.e. the area of the media where the BBC doesn’t operate – note the revelations currently tumbling forth from the Leveson Inquiry.)

As a consequence of endemic lying, there is a great deal of focus in the USA on the opportunity for citizens to become involved in fact-checking – note the recent efforts by Jeff Jarvis and Craig Newmark, summarised in this Huffington Post article.  The points that Craig make are all very good, but I can’t help thinking that the solution he is advocating – a huge database or network of networks – may prove unworkable because it represents another form of institution (albeit one managed more collaboratively) to supervise the current institutions which are deemed to be failing.  This seems to swim against the tide of what is happening in social media where trust is being swept out of institutions into transparent processes.   Perhaps, therefore, we already have the tools we need – the databse already exists, it is the social digital space – it is more a question of thinking how we design processes, rather than the technologies, to validate facts.

This brought me back to a slide I presented at a #Phonar workshop at the Coventry University School of Art and Design a couple of weeks ago.  The slide (in all its messy build(ed) complexity) is below.

This was an attempt to use the normal distribution curve to explain or understand the future of media, or more precisely the future of mediation and fact checking.  The basic assumption behind this is that the way institutionalised media has worked to date is a reductive process.  It seeks to cut-away the facts that it sees as not relevant or ‘worthy’ of publication and focus on its own, necessarily restricted interpretation, of what is news or what we need to know.  “All the news that is fit to print”, as the NY Times famously put it – albeit it a more accurate presentation of this might be “All the news that it is profitable to print”.  This because media space is a precious and expensive resource – there is no space within it to contain everything. As a result, the institutionalised media focuses on what it perceives to be “the norm”, that which clusters around a median point which it has set.

But the thing about social media is that it is not restricted – it can contain the entire data set – and the issue therefore is how to create a process that allows us to form a judgement about information that exploits this abundance.  It seems to me that this cannot be a process based on saying “this is right” and “this is wrong”, or setting an arbitrary median point around which to focus, to the exclusion of that which falls outside – this is an institutionalised response.  Rather it has to be a process that allows us to see where on the curve everything sits – based around how many people support a particular fact or truth (the two are different) and sufficient transparency to see who these people are.

The example I used to illustrate this, drawn from an earlier part of my presentation, was the recent #superinjunction furore that struck the UK media in which certain celebrities (e.g. footballer Ryan Giggs) sought, to protect themselves from the intrusive behaviour of the tabloid media via the use of legal injunctions.  A quick examination of Twitter and other social media networks, revealed that the vast majority of people were actually not interested in Ryan Giggs’ love-life.  This, of course, clashed with the agenda of the tabloid media who wished to splash this in salacious detail across their front pages.  In other words readers of the tabloid press saw the Ryan Giggs affair as sitting on a very different part of the curve to that of the tabloid media, who saw it as worthy of acres of newsprint.  This lead me to the observation that one of the reasons many tabloid journalists hate social media is because it deflates their ability to titillate.

What we need to focus on are therefore the processes that allow us to see where on the curve something sits, rather than classifying it as right or wrong, fact or lie.  We also need to take care about what we call truth.  The comments that follow Craig’s Huffington Post piece demonstrate the tendency for many to equate the opposite of a lie as being the truth.  Returning to original exercise, the opposite of a lie is a fact.  Facts and lies are absolute things, whereas truth is a relative thing.  Democracy is about preserving a world that supports many truths – establishing single truths is the business of fundamentalism.

This insight doesn’t give me the answer – I can’t, as a consequence, design a process that allows us to re-establish trust in information presented to us (by the media or Twitter).  However, I hope it does illustrate the direction of travel.

Update: And someone has now given it The Hitler Treatment – brilliant.

First the bacon.  The issue was, it was poorly cooked.  Call me a food snob, but I believe that if you are to serve cold bacon, especially with cold potatoes, the bacon has to be well cooked, so the fat on it is rendered, crisp and tasty.  In fact, I don’t believe this is a matter of opinion, I suspect there is not a single chef of any repute who would disagree with me on this point.   Which is why I was disappointed to find that Eurostar, in its Business Premier class, was serving poorly cooked bacon.  This wasn’t a culinary disaster, but it was an indicator of poor performance.  It was something that, if I were CEO of Eurostar, I would want to pick up and address.

So – I took a picture of said bacon and put it in a tweet to @Eurostar.  Here it is.  I didn’t receive a reply.  This caused me to think about my relationship with the brand Eurostar – my ‘engagement’ with Eurostar to use a term that the social media revolution has now made a permanent fixture in the lexicon of marketing-speak.  Before the bacon incident, I had very little engagement with Eurostar.  I liked that fact that the Eurostar service, or more specifically the Channel Tunnel, had made it much easier to get to Brussels or Paris.  It was kind-of groovy in its early days, especially as the whole experience was so much more up-to-date than anything else being served-up on the British railway network at the time.  But, ten or so years in, Eurostar had become a purely functional thing in my life.  My engagement with it was low down on the scale – at least on the scale I use to measure engagement, which has at the top end things like relationships with friends and family.  I.e. Eurostar was down there with pretty much every other brand I, or anyone else, is likely to encounter.

And then came the bacon incident.  The bacon itself merely confirmed my view of Eurostar as being a brand which didn’t merit any particular consideration in my life.  And then, there was the lack of response to my tweet, which cranked them down a further notch or two.  Frankly, I didn’t expect a response.  But then I thought what if @Eurostar had replied.  Suppose they had said “Thanks for this, we will pass this onto our catering team”.  If that had happened, my view of Eurostar would have gone up quite considerably.  My ‘engagement with Eurostar’ to use the marketing speak would have significantly increased.  I wouldn’t have even cared if they hadn’t passed my comment on,  it was the simple fact that I knew they were listening that would have done the trick.  In fact, my ‘engagement with Eurostar’ would have risen to a point that was basically about as high as it could realistically expect to get, short of actually significantly improving the service (which is something marketing directors, unfortunately, are rarely empowered to do).

Creating the Expectation of Listening

And that is when I got my answer about mass consumer brands, social media and engagement.  There are actually lots of sorts of engagement you can seek to generate, but the only one that is likely to pass the test of both impact and the ability to scale is the engagement that comes from creating The Expectation of Listening.  Create this and you have something of more enduring value than almost all of the campaign driven activity that brands are seeking to build in social media.

(Note: I am probably being a little unfair on @Eurostar.  If you look at their Twitter stream, they do actually seem to be listening and responding, perhaps they thought my bacon tweet was just too pretentious.  However, the basic point still remains).

(Update: After this article was posted and, perhaps more to the point, a version thereof also appeared in the Huffington Post, I received a reply @RichardStacy Hello Richard, sorry we missed your tweet regarding your meal. We have passed this onto our catering team to investigate.)

A lot of brands are spending a lot of money at the moment stampeding into the social media space – setting up Facebook pages, building brand communities, creating YouTube channels, ‘getting into’ Twitter.  I am sceptical of this approach, largely because what brands are mostly doing when they get into social media simply replicates what they were doing in traditional media, ignoring the social bit.  I was expressing this scepticism when speaking at the DigitalAge conference in Istanbul last month, and in the lunch break I was reproached by a marketing director from a large Turkish brand who said “Facebook is great, it really works for use.  For example, I can use it so see what people think of our new ads”.  This floored me, since she was right.  This usage of Facebook is exactly how a brand should use it – to listen to their consumers.  But the idea of using it to listen to what people think of their advertising, rather than their product, seemed out of kilter.  And then I realised that what she, and probably most other marketing directors, are actually doing when they set up Facebook pages is using social media to measure engagement with their brand, not to generate it.

Using social media to generate, rather than measure, engagement

Commenting on an ad qualifies as engagement, but the problem with it is it the wrong type of engagement – or rather it is the right type of engagement but in the wrong context and thus not the type of engagement that is going to generate sufficient scale to significantly move the needle on how the majority of consumers feel about the brand.  Confusing.  Here is what I mean.

When marketing directors talk about engagement, the mean something that sits somewhere between noticing a product (seeing the ad) and actually buying it.  The act of purchase is seen as pretty much the peak of engagement albeit there still is some work to be done to encourage repeat purchase (create brand loyalty as marketing folk like to call it).  The problem is that we are using the wrong type of language here.  Words like engagement, loyalty, et al are completely out-of-place.  In the real world of real people these words are attached to concepts that have real meaning and importance: social relationships, genuine emotions, important stuff.   When was the last time you felt ‘passionate about’ or ‘engaged by’ a brand?  Our choice of soft drink (or toothpaste, or even mobile phone) is never going to be as important to us as our choice of friends.  No-one really cares about the difference between Coke and Pepsi, despite the huge amount of marketing effort designed to persuade us that we do.  At heart, marketing directors understand this, because they know they don’t need to generate genuine engagement, they need to generate just enough to make the marginal difference necessary to tilt us towards their product at the moment of purchase, when we are confronted by a range of products that are all, in essence, functionally identical.  And thus all this titanic marketing effort is worth it (and probably accounts for the desire to misappropriate big words like engagement and loyalty).

The scale problem

But for this type of low level engagement to work, it has to have scale.  It has to work across the whole target audience at the same time.  And here is where the problem with social media starts.  Social media is not very good at communicating with all of your audience all at once.  It is a conversation, not a speech.  Also, social media is social – i.e. it operates in the place where engagement is associated with real, important and significant things and where the traditional marketing definition of engagement ranks as insignificant.  Or to put it another way, when you are operating within social media that which might otherwise count as engagement in the traditional marketing world (Facebook ‘likes’, YouTube hits, comments on ads etc) is never going to happen at sufficient scale to create an effect and you are never going to be able to operate at the level of engagement (i.e. real social engagement) that will qualify as being sufficiently social, often because your brand is, and always will be, fundamentally low interest.

Brands are trying to counter this by creating activities or campaigns that will be seen as sufficiently interesting to become worthy of genuine ‘social’ engagement and are thus more interesting than the product itself.  The problem with this is that it can end up as a giant distraction exercise.  A good example of this is P&G’s 2010 Old Spice campaign.  This was cited as being a hugely effective usage of social media (37+ million hits on YouTube, 1.7 million Facebook likes etc).  It created scale, but if you actually analysed the conversation that was taking place, this was all about the ad, or the people imitating the ad, or the Old Spice Man.  There was no conversation about (or engagement with) the brand, and the only way the brand was seeking to represent itself in this conversation was by pretending to be the Old Spice Man.

This is not to say you can’t use social media to support conventional one-to-many mass marketing initiatives, but you are likely to find that traditional one-to-many mass marketing channels will still be the most effective tools to use to make this successful.  Social media will just be the add-on, often an add-on that enables you to measure engagement with the campaign.  And you will not be using social media in the way for which it is best adapted and which is likely, of itself, to generate a meaningful level of engagement

Which brings us back to the bacon.  If a brand can create the expectation that when a consumer wishes to speak to it, that consumer will be listened to – this represents the best and probably only way to use social media to generate commercially useful engagement.  This is because it is a) likely to qualify as sufficiently social and, b) be sufficiently sustainable to create a measurable effect over time.  Getting consumers to tell you what they think about the ad, or even the product, or about themselves (so you can more effectively target them) is a useful activity, but it is not a necessary activity and certainly not a sufficient activity to generate commercially useful engagement.

This may seem like a rather passive or mundane activity – especially compared with the glittering,  expensive and proactive activities that brands like to launch in pursuit of engagement.   However, it is not.  Listening effectively is difficult.  It requires a level of commitment and resource, especially to generate the scale effect – which will not happen overnight, but will happen in the medium term once people realise that they are dealing with a brand that listens, as distinct from one which simply speaks.

The four key spaces of social media

So, by all means, use Facebook to understand what people think about your new campaign, but recognise that the benefit that comes from this is only relevant to how you change the campaign.  You will only generate genuine engagement with your brand (rather than your campaign) when you start listening, and responding to, what people actually think about the brand.  And this is why, rather than spend money trying to recreate your website in Facebook, or ‘viral’ YouTube videos, or extensive social media campaigns, by far and away the most effective thing to do in social media is to listen to the space where people are talking about you and respond appropriately (bearing in mind that response may not simply be trying to join the conversation, but by actually changing the product or service).  It all comes back to managing the four key spaces of social media:

• the space where people are saying good things about you
• the space where people are saying bad things about you
• the space where people are asking questions for which your brand is the answer
• the space where people are making suggestions as to how to make your brand better.