Establishing and maintaining a consistent brand personality is a crucial component of any marketing strategy. Yet, while most successful companies manage to achieve this with their traditional mass marketing campaigns, a surprising amount do not succeed in extending it to their social media presence.
The main reason for this is that social media is a fast-paced, reactive medium. Employees are often placed in the position of speaking on behalf of your brand, and there is no time for each bite-sized message to be filtered through the usual marketing channels. Even if they post with the best of intentions, the post might not be consistent with your brand voice, and in a worst-case scenario, could be catastrophically off-message and require some serious PR smoothing. If you’re lucky, you can avoid something like this being posted on your behalf:
“All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We’ll be doing some Gap.com shopping today. How about you?”
Unlike many social media gaffes, this was not a hoax, but a genuine promotional tweet coming from a Gap employee in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Needless to say, piggybacking a cheesy sales message onto a tweet about a hurricane that had cost 253 lives and caused around $65 billion worth of damage did not go down well with the online community. The clothing giant issued a formal apology and donated $1 million to the Red Cross, but the damage was done.
Of course, this is an extreme example, but it shows you the potential for getting things wrong on social media. The transparency that comes with actively engaging in social media can pose its own dangers, as Gap found out to their cost, but it also presents many opportunities for social-savvy companies to build consumer trust and grow their market share.
In recent years, the banking industry has had more ground to make up than most in terms of consumer trust. The financial crisis, coupled with events such as the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal of 2012, has made consumers increasingly distrustful of banks, and the financial industry as a whole. Social media provides a way to rebuild some of that lost trust, yet very few banks in the UK have managed to implement a successful social strategy.
One of the few banks that have managed to achieve this is first direct, an online and telephone-based bank with no physical branches. Without face-to-face interactions, banks of this nature have to go the extra mile to establish trust, and this is something that first direct has succeeded in doing. In the past, this has been achieved through a combination of consistent branding and putting a concerted effort into recruiting and training skilled communicators to handle the customer service end of their business.
This approach has been successfully transferred to their social media presence, but the company has recognised that this brings a whole new set of challenges. To this end, they commissioned a report to look at best practices for establishing a consistent tone of voice in a communications medium where voices can’t be heard, as well as highlighting the brand management issues that an organisation faces in the social era.
Check the full report which was authored by social media consultancy.
The report argues that social media has entered an era of maturity, and has become an integral part of everyday life. Customers have come to resent their personal interactions being hijacked by marketing, and are more likely to trust personal communications that come from employees or informed experts than mass communications from authority figures such as senior managers and CEOs.
This means that a company has to be able to rely on its employees to communicate the right message in the right way when speaking on its behalf. However, if too much emphasis is placed on creating an artificial brand voice, it might make it difficult for employees to come across as being genuine when they communicate with customers. This erodes trust, which is hard to establish in the first place, and can have an alienating effect on consumers.
The key is to create a strategy that enables employees to communicate in a natural way without compromising the brand. Ultimately, human qualities such as humility and, where appropriate, humour have to be allowed to shine through, and you need to have a strong sense of what your brand stands for and how that can be implemented in the social age.
This post is guest blogger post by Samuel
About guest blogger
Samuel is a passionate personal finance blogger, who regularly writes for financialconfession.co.uk. His favourite topics are career, investment, saving and insurance.
8 replies on “Maintaining a Consistent Brand Personality in the Social Era”
There are definite things that people should not do during certain times…. that GAP Tweet is a big example of what not to do. I know that a lot of people will insist on a total silence, but it is ridiculous as it is saying that life should stop. It should not stop, but it should continue in a respectful manner.
Maintaining a brand is not difficult unless you have no idea how to run a business or have no idea how to act right.
Hi Nile,
Thanks to Samuel for this guest post.
I like what you said about life should continue in a respectful manner. I think this is a really great point for embracing social media into a business.
Thanks for stopping by
Hi Okto,
Really strongly agree with the sentiment of this post. There are SO many businesses out there who are trying to build an online presence, and without really understanding the implications of their words – innocently or not. Especially in writing, things can be quite ambiguous and taken the wrong way.
You’ve shared a LOT of great links and information in this post for both sides of the coin – it’s imperative really that people understand the need for consistency and authenticity in social media. This is why personally I advise ALL my clients and people around me to do this internally – for the life of me I can’t understand why you would pay a complete stranger to manage your Social Media activity. Nobody knows your business like you do, and in cases of getting it right and avoiding a PR nightmare you MUST be in complete control of your social media voice!
Clair
Hi Clair,
Great point you gave in comment.
I believe if we can do everything ourselves we should be in complete control for our social media voice
Words are powerful things and we should remember that, they can build or destroy reputations and businesses very easily.
Social media is new territory for many businesses and with many of them wanting their employees to say nice things about the company and not post things that can be detrimental to the company, this can bring up a lot of grey areas.
When you work from 9-5 you are in company mode, after 5 you are a free individual, you should be able to say what you like without it being unlawful and libellous. If you have signed a contract and agreed when taking the job to not mention anything in your social media about the business then ok but as I say outside hours is yours.
It can be very dangerous to manage this, many countries are supposed to be based on freedom of speech, how does a company monitor and control the actions of one or two disgruntled employees from making a post that could go viral and do harm without the Governments coming and taking away more freedoms and liberties.
It isn’t always the company that can do harm with badly worded social media updates and it is those that are going to be the hardest to control.
Hi Andi,
I think social media will always keep it social function and many companies start to realize that. I believe it’s not an easy thing for those who are reputable enough in representing a company to easily talk in their free hours.
Well, let’s say if Matt Cutts say anything in social media, many viewers will associate it to Google or SEO matters. So it bit complicated as you said and I do agree it going to be hard to control. May be it’s like trial and error process for companies who try to embrace social media, they’ll carefully look how others make mistake and will not do the same thing.
Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Social media are a great way to communicate, but require more experience and expertise in the field of communication and marketing.
A television spot along 30 or 60 seconds is much less challenging than a tweet or post on facebook as in social media there is not always time to think and a click made, at the wrong time can ruin months and months of work on the brand and reputation
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