The world has changed. The crowd is empowered now more than ever before. The people share and mobilize themselves to topple regimes. Being social has never been more powerful, and social media is the greatest democratizing force in human history, since the invention of the printing press. The new social platforms will change the world in ways we do not yet know.
A case in point is Wikileaks. For the first time in a long time, there is a new force to counter the power of the business and political elite. Social sharing has democratized power and made leaders more accountable. Expect more of this to come. Expect the outings of hundreds of corrupt politicians and immoral business leaders. The crowds will help enforce a new global standard of ethics.
Another case is Twitter and Facebook. The self-immolation of a single Tunisian youth, coupled with the writings of a hermetical and technophobic intellectual called Gene Sharp, have changed the way we think about power. Sharp’s core philosophy is that all dictated power depends on, and devolves from, the subjects’ obedience to the orders of the ruler. His pamphlet on Civilian Based Defense provides a field guide to the youth movements that have toppled Middle East regimes. When citizens can organize themselves in a flash mob using social sharing platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the fundamental framework of a despot’s intelligence apparatus and power is rendered useless. When political action is guided by informal networks, rather than the state apparatus, the state loses control over the minds of its subjects. By creating a world where like-minded people can openly congregate and debate political and social issues, governments will find it hard to maintain media domination and tyranny.
So the world has changed, and social media has rewritten the rules for engagement. This applies to both the realm of politics as it does to marketing. At RBM we believe that an equally amazing opportunity exists to harness the power of social media to dramatically change a company’s digital landscape.
Not only tyrants are at risk of being toppled by the democratizing power of social media, but the brand paradigm established with the advent of color television is also teetering.
The model of an unquestioning brand that projects itself unilaterally, uninterested in the voice of its consumers, will find a hard road ahead. Old-world brands beware. The new brand paradigm is imbued with the crowd. To manage brands successfully, marketers must listen to the crowd, and make use of technology to better understand the multi-dimensional constituents within the crowd. At RBM we call these constituents “archetypes”, and we like to leverage social listening data to clearly better define these archetypes and hone our communication strategies. Brilliant social media execution needs to be subservient to consumer passion points, which we map to archetypes. That is why our social media programs are so consistently effective. We know that the better we know our archetype, the more effectively we can tailor a brand dialog to engage them. The more we can find a unique voice that resonates with these constituents, the more we can aggregate them to share with each other in a brand infused dialog.
Ironically, in the new paradigm, inequality is a condition for social marketing success. A democracy assumes all votes are equal. For social campaigns, often a few voices make all the difference. According to an old broadcast model, all TV receivers are essentially the same. All have the same unit value and it is their sum of these TV’s that created the concept of mass media. In the democratizing world of mass media, any one voice can be an amplifier of brand content and messaging. Communicating with these key influencers about their passions and pain points can create amazing scale for marketers. This is the magic of the new social media environment; targeted campaigns can be developed to better understand constituents, so that customized messaging strategies can be crafted, with particular emphasis on the influential few.
So what is your social media strategy? Who are your core constituents? How can they be empowered? Does your brand stand to be toppled? How can you guide the revolution rather than be its victim? These are tough questions marketing leaders should be asking themselves.
