One of my favorite blogs, Fresh Networks, has a recent post with a great video of Matt Rhodes presenting his thoughts on how to approach social media in Europe. His overall point is that a multinational brand should not attempt to create one single global social media strategy and apply that to all countries.
Click here to view the embedded video.
I agree with Mr. Rhodes that you cannot take a single social media strategy and apply it globally with success. Each country has it's own mix of culture, social activity preferences, and social landscape - therefore each country should have it's own social media strategy.
While I do agree with him that each country should develop an approach that is optimal to it's mix, I do NOT think that means that a multinational brand should approach social media without some form of unified strategy.
Keeping Mr. Rhodes' valid points in mind, I propose that a global brand should take a rational Fixed/ Flexible approach to developing their global social strategy.
Fixed (Global):
- Policies (What you can & cannot say, PR issue escalation, etc)
- Operation Protocols (Centralized CRM acquisition, Analytics, Naming conventions, etc)
- Social Voice (My approach to this is to personify the brand as a center point and create a halo range from that - various individual and country authentic personalities can live within that range)
Flexible (Per Country):
- Environments (FB, Twitter, YouTube, Ning, etc)
- Engagement Strategy (Q&As for Germany, Blogs for France, etc)
- Social CRM (Flex business rules for evolving relationships)
Finding the right Fixed/ Flexible ratio would take time and would constantly need to be monitored and revised to remain optimal, but I think if a multinational brand were to take this approach it would be successful. They would be able to maximize their social media efforts per country while still ensuring that each country's individual efforts was contributing to the brand and business goals for the global company.
What do you think?
What global brands are doing something like this (or a better model) well today?