Sustainable challenger brands need to look at social media with ’soft eyes’
If you look at social media with “soft eyes” you don’t get blinded by the presentation layer, you get to see it for what it is: An open, honest, and personal database. How valuable is that?
In the popular HBO TV series The Wire the character Bunk Moreland explains to Kima Greggs that she needs:
“soft eyes to see everything at a scene.”
If you focus too hard all you see is one tree, not the wood. And if you look at the explosion of social media with soft eyes you see a vast – and valuable – store of personal data. And it’s better than that – every bit of data is input by the population. For free. And updated. And connected to friends.
WOW.
Here’s three great examples of brands that have managed to see everything in social media by hooking into users’ profiles:
MoMa with facebook
MoMA in New York ask visitors to log into their facebook profile and then uses this data to construct a personalised exhibition schedule. Who knows exactly how detailed it is, but it works.
Secondly, VW will give you a personalised car recommendation using your twitter feed. An execution borrowed from the plethora of Twitter apps that use keyword searches to reveal something (from a simple tag cloud upwards – not denying of course the tag clouds are useful visualisations of your content compressed over time and showing relative volume of words). It’s the ‘horoscope’ paradigm: no one believes them but everyone reads them. Thanks to Alexandra for this piece @petite_a
Stockholm Pride and Twitter
Lastly, Stockholm Pride – Sweden’s largest Gay festival – have a great promotional device that purports to tell you how heterosexual you are by interogating your twitter stream (like VW above).
Is this the start of the eradication of personal data silos? The ability to take your ‘friends group’ with you? Or even the start of the pervious personal database that holds all of your facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube, google, RSS, newsletter, MSN, Yahoo, and x amount of other ‘identities’ in one big pool. A bit like in real life?
The rip in the fabric of marketing caused by the explosion of social media means that ’soft eyes’ can see ways to engage consumers way beyond the confines of traditional advertising. And with the disorganisation surrounding the move to a low-carbon world sustainable challenger brands have never had a better time to upset the status quo. Never.
Bookmark, share, or comment on this post below.
Want to write for The Hunter blog under your own byline? Tell us.
Related posts:
- Digg those ’soft eyes’: The pervious social media database
- We’re loving this Slideshare presentation – What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
- World Wildlife Fund uses the hive
- Twitter means business: products that give you feedback
- The Guardian Sustainable Business blog: Food for thought
- 5 incentives that create sustainable behaviour
Phone us on 0843 289 2901
http://mydayat.moma.org/