The State of the Social Brand

Picture by the brilliant Paul Clarke for Headstream

Steve Sponder, Chris Buckley and the great team at Headstream have pulled together an index of Social Brands for the first time this year, the Social Brand 100.

They kindly invited me to be a part of the process and judging panel and discuss the findings to an invited audience on Friday and this post is a collection of reflections and observations from both the event and the report itself.

The Social Brands 100 was a crowd-sourced project in part, with nominations coming in from across the Twitterverse initially that were then assessed by the judging panel and researched by the Headstream team, with Brandwatch as monitoring partners.

It follows in the wake of some significant league tables, most notably Altimeter’s Engaged Brand Index and iCrossing’s Connected Brand Index. I think we’re still only taking the very first steps to where social brand assessment will ultimately lead and the opportunities for data curation and social performance are wide open given the scope for real-time reporting, destructured organization, storytelling and new parameters for value and business management.

As an addition to these resources and the latest statement on the state of the social brand, Headstream’s The Social Brands 100 Index makes for interesting reading for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it tends to suggest that for many social brands the emphasis is still primarily on social media rather than social business.

There are a few notable exceptions of course. Dell, the No 1 brand ranked on the list, took up the social brand mantle in earnest as a result of a public outage of poor customer service from Jeff Jarvis in a tweet in 2007. That moment created a successful turnaround of its business and of brand perceptions, the kind of turnaround Dell would have had to have previously spent a huge amount of advertising to buy, but that word of mouth has fueled instead.

Dell is a good example of social media success and deserves to be at No 1, because without network effects and a deep-level business reappraisal, Dell’s social brand reputation would not have been possible.

Giffgaff, the brand that CNET’s been quoted in the report as describing as ‘O2’s bonkers-barmy crowd-sourced network’, comes in at No4 because it’s reinventing the way a social business can run itself. Starbucks is worth another mention for the way it has been embedding incoming conversation and co-creation into its business model.

Having said that, the vast majority of brands on the list cannot yet be described as businesses that have integrated user partnerships into the way they structure and appraise how business performance is being developed.

Social media is still skin deep for many, and the big tussle at the moment is whether social media will be subsumed into the way things have always been done, (one panelist describes it as ‘just another channel’, for example) or will it be a pivot for the emergence of social business models that offer thicker value in the longer term?

So here’s a question or two: What’s the appropriate blend of transactions and relationships when it comes to doing business in the 21st Century, and how does that vary sector by sector?

One of the key audience moments of the launch event was when during the Q&A Virtuous Bread met MuddyBoots during a conversation exchange. It was a real-time demo of how people as brands are enjoying connecting with one another. So it’s worth considering to what extent is that kind of affinity going to create a world-wide mesh of collaborative business interests in the future and will automated non-friendly transactions still be done by people? Ted Hunt wisely raised the issue of ‘socialwash’ about how deep many brands will allow the impact of social media to be.

The next line of enquiry is how only one charity was mentioned in the Index, the brilliant netroots charity Child’s i Foundation of which I have to disclose I am a Trustee (shameless plug – if you aren’t aware of what we’re doing, please check us out.)

How could this be, that only one charity is nominated, when such a core part of a not-for-profit is its volunteering base? It’s puzzling that this is an entire sector dependant on social and philanthropic participation, yet none of the major charity brands seemed to be recognized as socially engaged ones. One possible explanation is that charity brands have to work that much harder at being recognized for raising the quality of engagement and performance using social media. In a way, there’s a similarity to the Big Society argument, the people involved have always participated. Perhaps this is something for not-for-profits to bear in mind, and public sector organizations; when it comes to being seen to be engaging with people, they themselves have to be the change.

Retail, FMCG and consumer product brands on the other hand (which between them made up 54% of the overall index) are more noticeable for stretching beyond their conventional, transactional ways of inter-acting when they become more social. The move away from broadcast is more palpable. This may be only a temporary state of affairs though, as notions of value shift beyond consumption and, economically speaking, this is highly likely. With no health or pharmaceutical brands in the Index at all, it certainly appears that social definitions of well-being may be changing.

What’s heartening about the Index is that, firstly, it shows that established brands with brand equity and a heritage built up over the years can sit equally well and side by side with young, digital and quintessentially ‘unstructured’ brands like giff gaff and Child’s I and be social brands. The objective for all brands then is how to make the transition as effectively and elegantly with as minimum an amount of operational disruption and as much reputational value as possible.

The second element of the Report worth highlighting is that inclusion within Headstream’s definition of a social brand is that a social brand has a ‘moral centre to its purpose’. By including a crowdsourced element within the nominations, this Index has looked at brands from the user’s perspective as well as from the brand’s point of view. For them, it’s not all about the money even though, when it comes to adopting social media, the CEO might like it to be. So this is an Index that illustrates how social brands require a set of operating objectives they can defend with ‘blatant integrity’ able to handle interest in them from all quarters in order to develop the kind of quality of engagement that makes them stand out for being social.

Of course this touches on the visceral issues of social brand fitness and the critical point of friction in social brand management, the one that every social brand must now incorporate: To what extent will social media start to shape the creation of strategic business opportunities and how social brands develop their business models?

Developing business from this perspective is going to be key in helping social media managers go beyond the channel management of social media into areas of organizational development in a way that brings enhanced value into each and every brand in this Index, and beyond.