If you’re a company, band, organisation whatever, you want people to love your brand, message, products, whatever it is that you do. You know this already. If you’re reading this page, you most likely have caught on to the fact that social media is an incredibly powerful tool for brand immersion – getting people to respond to your brand, even if you aren’t sure exactly how to leverage it.
On another tangent, which will make sense in just a minute, I am a newly converted Facebook addict. For me, it is the first platform which is actually useable (MySpace was always a bit to grubby for me, Friendster seemed like a competition to see who could get to the most friends the fastest, which never really seemed like genuine networking anyway).
One of the best things about Facebook is that (theoretically) non-human entities cannot have profile pages – so there is no adding Coca Cola, or Nike or anything to your friends list (although there are great applications for people in bands to advertise with).
Facebook does have groups, which can be dedicated to anything from Hi fives to common names to brands.Why is this important? Well, lets take an example from my part of town. Satay Kingdom is a cheap and cheerful Malaysian restaurant/takeaway. (not a novelty in Wellington, within 2 blocks of Kingdom there is: Satay Village, Satay Noodle House, Satay Malaysian, and a few other Malaysian restaurants which don’t have Satay in their name.) That’s just Malaysian restaurants, in the same price range there are a half dozen kebab stands, 4 Indian restaurants, and more than 10 cafes serving food. A seriously saturated market which seems to have scared off the big chain fast food restaurants from that part of town. There are only 2 big burger joints in the quarter, and a KFC.
How does a needle in a pile of needles like Satay Kingdom get out there? Through the brilliant use of social media? No, they don’t even have a website. They don’t advertise, they don’t do free seminars, none of that stuff makes any sense for them. All they do is make food which is good, cheap, and fast. That’s their social media strategy- do their thing well, and assume people will talk about it.
And they do. A search for groups in Facebook reveals the Satay Kingdom Appreciation Group, which has grown by a hundred members since I joined a week ago, to 423 members at the time of writing. That’s more than any single group for Burger King, KFC, Mc Donald’s, and hundreds more than any other food outlet in Wellington that I can find. Now, admittedly Facebook hardly represents the internet, but I was astonished to discover that a budget takeaway had a social media platform which compares favorably in any part of the internet to those of the largest food corporations on earth.
And this without a single employee knowing what Facebook, or social media ARE!
And this is my point: if you do your job well, social media will do its thing. Sure, there are additional things which Satay Kingdom could do the leverage their presence further; start a discussion online, find out what people like, what they would change (I’ve always found the Roti bread a little greasy at times), etc. But the hard work is always done for them, because people like them enough to submerge themselves in the brand.