As we’re moving into our project to open up our organization to social media, I’ve been struck by how quickly and energetically different individuals have adopted the tools and begun to stake out their social footprint for themselves and their business.
This energy has led to very logical questions about how to create and manage the different social identities suggested by the different roles people play in their personal life, their business life and in relation to their business brand.
For NCI, there are some subtleties that can bedevil a neatly organized effort. NCI is a parent company with multiple national brands, such as Apartment Finder or The Real Estate Book. Each one of those national brands has a specific local implementation. The relationships and content created in each local market is unique to that market; that relationship is largely owned by a local market representative who is affiliated with the parent brand.
We have these kinds of brand manifestations in more than 600 local markets.
As we guided people through how to use Twitter, they logically asked: What name should I use?
I’ve attached a short deck of slides that lays out an approach to organizing the different social identities in this dynamic. In thinking about how to define your social identity, the first step is to define the engagement factor in your brand relationship.
Within the context of your brand, you’ll have a wide range of connectedness. As Mike Arauz demonstrates in his spectrum of online friendship, this can range from passive interest to investment. In the case of our brands at NCI, the individual at the market level is the embodiment of the brand experience for the advertiser, and the product at the physical level (the web service or the printed magazine) is the primary manifestation for a consumer. To create social identities that retain and enhance the brand identity, our local markets will have to create multiple social identities that resonate for their multiple constituents…without turning the entire process into a time hog or a stale presence.
The process looks daunting at the outset and that is the focus of the final slide of my deck. As a company, we’re developing processes for assisting our local markets in generating the content and disciplines they’ll need to have to leverage social media. The important work — of developing identities and building networks of connections — is theirs. It’s local and scalable.
I’ll touch on one other concept in a later post: the relevance of prospect-focused distribution to NCI’s expansion into the social web. At NCI, we’ve always prided ourselves on the way that we think about and build our local distribution. We look to saturate a market with locations for our magazines where consumers will come across them as they move about their day — gas stations, convenience stores, dry cleaners, real estate offices, malls, restaurants. We’ve always believed that the best service we can offer our customers is to distribute their advertising widely.
We carried that philosophy into how we developed our internet distribution and it’s that philosophy that will give us an advantage in building distribution the social web. There are no shortcuts to great distribution: you do it location by location and person by person. Just like you build networks of connections on the social web.
{ 0 comments }
At the current run rate, magazine revenues will drop $9.5 billion dollars from 2007 to 2009. Ad pages will decline by 400,000. That means editorial pages will decline by something close to 500,000.
[For those of you not familiar with Twitter conventions, you have to read the dialogue from bottom to top.]
