I recently attended a conference given by Steve Irvine, Senior Business Leader at Facebook Canada where he mentioned an excellent analogy to explain how social media changes the way that we as brands deliver messages. I find that visual analogies are very powerful to communicate shifts in the way that our industry is evolving and this is a great one.
Bowling shows how we have traditionally communicated with consumers, with the brand (the bowler) rolling a ball (the message) towards the pins (our target group.) Clearly this is a very direct one way approach.
He suggests that social media is more like a game of pinball with the player (the brand) sending the ball (the entertaining or useful shareable concept) into the game area where it is thrown around by those online, and occasionally it will come back to us. At this point, we as a brand have to use the flippers to interact and throw it back into the social media sphere.
If we as brands do not feed the social media sphere by flipping communications back, the ball will drop through the flippers and the longer term, two way relationship between consumer and brand will die.
Going forward, let's just think about allowing for two way communications in order to build and maintain brand momentum.
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