Brands become your friends

Facebook have announced changes to their fan pages, which essentially mean that they increasingly become more like friends. Ian Schafe explains in more detail what the changes are on his blog.

As Alan Wolk says on his blog, this will be of limited use to most brands. Those brands that customers only have a limited relationship with, like most FMCG and service brands, will probably struggle to make this work in a meaningful way without annoying those people that they’re trying to make a relationship with. Do you really want your toilet roll popping up in your home page feed all the time? Probably not.

However, as Alan notes, there are a limited number of brands that can make this work. He calls these “prom king brands” – those brands that people do have a real connection with. Luckily, I think charities can fit into this category. Charities – because of the nature of our work and the connection we can make with people’s values as a result – do have the possibility to make a meaningful connection in social spaces.

The move by Facebook can only be a good thing for charities, as it gives so much more scoping for developing meaningful relationships on the platform.

Valley of death

I was lucky to attend a presentation by the ever-great Alan Clayton. One of the things he mentioned was “The Valley of Death“. The Valley is the gap between changing demographics on an organisation’s database following a rebrand. Here’s my child-like drawing:

Chart showing the danger area in a rebrand

The chart shows time (the x axis) against the volume of an audience. The black line is the current audience. The orange line is the new audience. The pink area shows the gap between the two – the period when you may be floundering as the old audience drops away but the new audience hasn’t come in, giving money or buying products, to replace it. The trick for marketers is to make the valley as short and painless as possible. But how?

Well, for me the answer is social and digital media.

Social media lets you connect with your new audience quicker. As in any new relationship you need to get to know each other. You’re not at the stage where you can fart in bed and leave the milk out with only a mild telling off. You need to get to know them. What they like. What they don’t. When it’s ok to not pick your dirty pants off the floor. How do you get to know this?

Well, talking to people and spending time with them usually helps. And with social media you can do this. Join the conversation with your new audience. If they don’t talk back to you, try again but in a different way. Ask them what they think. Get their input. It’ll avoid costly mistakes – such as spending massive amounts on developing offline materials, only to put them in the bin when you find that you haven’t quite got it right.

What’s better – if you do this in enough places and with enough people you’ll have a ready-made audience who feel like they’ve got a stake in your brand. Ready-made brand advocates.

In the future, the brands that perform the best during a rebrand will be those that spend the time talking to people online. Who knows, the valley of death may be a think of the past!