Extreme Makeover: Getting unsexy or difficult brands onto social media

My latest post on Memeburn is up:

Social media as a marketing platform was all most marketers could talk about in 2009. Helped by mass worldwide adoption, as well as wilting marketing budgets in the face of the global economic meltdown, every chief marketing officer was under pressure to ‘get on Facebook’.

As the dust settles, companies have burnt their fingers in their forays onto social media platforms, many because they operate in industries that don’t lend themselves to the free visible flow of customer interaction. Some have suggested that these brands should give social media a skip, but there are examples that have lit a path to success.
I’ve been consistently amazed at the haphazard rush that many local corporate brands have taken to get involved in social media, without a true understanding of their product and customer environment. Many of these have been in the more demure financial services industry, which has a predominantly higher level of ‘grudge purchase’ products.

These brands, especially those like short-term insurance and medical schemes, offer products that are usually complex, and that customers choose because they feel they have to have them as a defensive purchase, rather than buy them for more positive reasons. However, there are plenty of other brands that fall into the ‘simply unsexy’ category, which have had trouble ‘glamming’ themselves up for social media.
For these brands, social media is a difficult prospect. Firstly, and most obviously, customers don’t necessarily want to have a relationship or interact with a brand that they’re not entirely happy about buying in the first place.
Secondly, these brands often offer complex products that customers don’t understand, and there are proportionately more customer complaints than in other industries, merely because these customers don’t understand what they’ve bought. Ultimately though, this is a scary prospect for corporate Boards, where any service weaknesses are aired very much in the public domain.

Very often, these brands end up trying to use social media purely as a customer service channel, which can open up a deluge of customer complaints, which more often than not gets ignored altogether or negatively affects the brand. There are those that have persevered and succeeded though, and one of the most successful social media campaigns in the UK offers some insights into creating social media experiences in these industries.

Read the rest here.