What do you think of Foursquare? If you are a marketer, your
answer to that question is likely to be somewhere on the spectrum from “I’ve no
idea what you are talking about” to “I’ve joined because I keep hearing about
it on Twitter, but I haven’t really done much with it yet”.
Me too. I joined today. It’s a
fascinating experience, the badge-earning instantly addictive. I found myself wondering, though, whether it had
any relevance for consumer brand marketing. Then I started to reminisce. I’ve
been on Twitter since June 2007, which in social networking time is about a
thousand years. When I joined, though, to be completely honest I didn’t see the
point. Not only did I not know many people who were also there, but I couldn’t
really see the application for all these
micro-blog posts.
Wind forward to today and, whilst there is still a healthy
debate in some corners about whether tweeting constitutes a healthy pastime,
there is no debating that Twitter has become a major media in its own right. It’s
a great way to sample opinions on any topic under the sun, and (critically for
the marketer) a powerful way to connect with your customers. The holy grail of
CRM has to be a great two-way conversation you have with your customer which
has the potential to be overheard by thousands of others who can be suitably impressed
with your responsiveness. This “one-to-one-to-many” communication has become a
major part of the marketing mix for those businesses which “get it”. I’ve
certainly experienced brands who invest in creating empowered groups of
tweeting staff to champion them online, and get a great return from it.
Increasingly the brands which are not present, or which only tweet their PR
announcements and don’t respond to their customers, look old-fashioned and out
of touch.
And it’s not just Twitter that provides a venue for this
kind of marketing. I was struck the other day when standing in one of the UK’s
largest retailers that the banners over
the aisles advertising their new own-label product had, as a call to action,
not a unique URL but a Facebook page. When I checked, that page had over 30k
friends – a great platform for customer interaction by any measure.
Now, a note of caution. The fact that some social media
sites like Twitter and Facebook become important business tools and powerful
marketing media does not mean that they all will. I have no more insight than
anyone else about whether Foursquare is the new Facebook, or a flash in the
pan.
But there is a key point that as marketers we should reflect
on. What online social networks have in common is their ability to bring groups
of like-minded customers together. They can genuinely and quickly build tribes,
not just of people who are friends “in real life” but of people who share
hobbies, careers, geographies or interests.
Those tribes can be influenced, carefully, by active brands
which choose to make themselves part of the social network landscape. But they
can also form and share opinions about brands without any input at all, and in
a way that can spread fast and wide around the tribe. Foursquare, chock full of
tiny reviews of bars, restaurants and businesses, is a case in point.
So the question for us is this. Do we want our brands to be
talked about behind our backs? Or do we want to be there to state and defend
our case. And if our choice is the latter, how are we going to mobilise our
teams to make it happen, and when are we going to start?
