Tagged: blessed trinity

The blessed trinity of social media behaviours

Blessed Trinity of Social MediaI have written before about the blessed trinity of media (the Bought, the Earned and the Wholly Earned) and why this definition may not be sensible or useful.  I also think there is a blessed trinity which relates to the three activities that correspond to the principle behaviours of people in the social digital space.  These behaviours are:

  • Talking to friends
  • Looking for information / asking questions
  • Complaining / protesting

If you think about it these behaviours account for probably 90+ per cent of what is actually going on in social media (think about how you use social media yourself).  The interesting thing, from a marketing perspective, is that responding to these behaviours does not correspond to 90 per cent of what most brand’s social media activity is about.

Talking to friends is a space that is virtually impenetrable to brands and you can’t enter it by trying to turn yourself into ‘a friend’ of your consumers.  A person will never have the same relationship with a brand as they will with a friend.  This leaves the other two spaces and it is astonishing how few brands are really aligned against responding to these behaviours in a way which is likely to generate any significant, sustained and measurable value – despite the relative ease of doing this.

Isn’t it time brands mapped their use of social media against the way it is being used by the people they wish to ‘engage’ with?