With individuals and brands producing an overwhelming amount of social content, sometimes it can seem like there are two warring camps (brands v. consumers) facing off on a battlefield of social content. In this battle for hearts and minds, the generals in the marketing business are observing their brand troops in the field from their position on the hill, using their hefty war chests to build creative, engaging social media content for consumers to experience.
And consumers are taking what brands are bombarding them with, and using it in innovative ways and creating their own content in the melee. The armaments are the same for both camps (blogs, tweets, videos) but the brands have the big bucks to manipulate the “free” tools in powerful ways that the consumers can’t match.
Entering into this big battlefield are a new kind of soldier of fortune (the vendor), who, like German Hessians, are hired by brands to help line up the flank of attack on consumers in a more orderly marching pattern. These vendors are taking all the social platforms consumers use and organizing them in one place for the brand to make sense of the social content they are both receiving and pushing out. They promise scalability of attack, measurement of success, and a turnkey solution that slices across all social platforms like a bayonet through butter.
Take one such vendor, thisMoment. They’ve aggregated the social graph of people who are engaging with the Kia Soul car so, when you visit the Kia Soul YouTube channel, thanks to thisMoment you will see tweets on that YouTube channel about the brand. And, when you visit the Kia Soul Facebook page you can see the tweets, watch the videos on YouTube of the hamsters driving cars, etc. On their backend, supported by Google, you can see how consumers are engaging with the brand across platforms. Who doesn’t love dancing hamsters. Nice job brand marketers!
Putting all social footprints together in one place for consumers isn’t really that new. I’ve blogged about it before as Mirror Marketing. But, there are a lot of new vendors emerging to enable marketers to control all the social streams from one interface, push content across social platforms, and be a turnkey workflow and measurement tool to get content to consumers. Awareness is one of the companies doing it. They want to enable companies to be gatekeepers of who is using the social channels for a brand, ID the most influential consumers, and build a social graph of the users so you know how they’re receiving what you’re selling. Unfortunately, their pricing model is such that they’re probably only appealing to some of the biggest brands.
Another is JitterJam. Unlike Awareness, JitterJam adds the social activities of consumers to their mobile, and email contact with a company, essentially creating an entire social profile of an individual with their tool. Who is the person posting most on the Facebook wall, how often does she tweet to your brand, and has she emailed about that new offer? JitterJam measures all this, is a distribution hub for sending content, and they’re used by BBDO and AKQA.
I was impressed by their demo as a CRM system that profiles all the individuals that touch a brand, and measures their clicks to sites, and measures sell through, and I think that they’re on the right path. They will even build a tab in Facebook that enables consumers to select how they wish for brands to reach them, so you don’t have to blast to everyone when you can target them how they want to be reached. Check out this Connect tab.
As brands increasingly require social agencies to prove the ROI of social, these vendor tools that put a dam on your social streams will become more important. But they will never stem the tide of content as the battle rages – they will only help the generals on the hill perform more tactical maneuvers that bring the combatants to their side.