Corporate brands and the multitude social movement

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What is happening to brands under the multitude storm?

Why do corporations create brands in the first place? A brand is a complex, it is a construction meant to trigger feelings, emotions about some product or service, to trigger desire. It usually has a name, there is an image associated with it, a slogan, a story, values, some cultural elements, etc. During marketing campaigns all these elements are associated with the name and the image - a logo, so next time you see it, or hear the name, you "salivate". To put it simply, a brand is Pavlov's bell, and we are the dogs...

And how can you make a brand effective in increasing sales? There are branding specialists, not everyone can create a successful brand. A brand must stick. It must mark you in a significant way, it must be intrusive and create persistent associations. Normally corporations use sensitive cords, they follow general popular trends. A brand acts on an individual, but it is created as a tool for mass manipulation, as a social construct. The brand builder must understand the population it addresses. Sometimes they use sex, environmental issues, fear, good feelings, the desire to be powerful, ..., whatever ticks in that society at that time. So if you want your brand to work for your business you need a message that sticks and spreads, you need a powerful meme.

With the advent of the social media (Fecebook, Youtube, LinkedInetc.), corporations think that they can now use these new communication channels to increase the spread of their brand. So they changed their strategy in building brands. They make them viral. They realize that the population is now strongly interconnected, and that everyone is able to broadcast his own ideas. Therefore, if your message if effective enough, some people will spread it on behalf of the company, without even getting payed for it. Make the message funny enough, for example, put it on Youtube, and it will spread.

But there is a problem with that. Corporations don't control what people are sharing. Sometimes, somebody out there, in some circumstances, can take a logo and modify it. The new message can become even more powerful than the original one, more sticky, more pervasive, more viral. The marketing campaign of the corporation backlashes. It's message was hijacked. Every time people will see the logo of the company other feelings/ideas will surface, not the ones originally intended by the corporation.

What is the lesson of all this? You cannot say one thing and do another anymore. If you don't stand by your principles, which must be good principles, you are screwed. This brings back some ethics into the corporate world, for the time they're going to be around....    

Here's what I think about brands. It is becoming and old concept. In the Twitter era the reputation of a product emerges instantaneously from users of the product, which are connected and expressive. People share their experiences, and they are very effective in doing that by using popular buzz channels like G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The reputation of a product emerges in an instant and it is based on value, whatever that value is, functionality, a social cause, design, etc. Corporations have less power to manufacture an image for themselves. The image is given to them by the multitude, according to what they have to offer. This is the new reality, where the narratives are now controlled by the multitude.

See also the campaign led by Green Peace "Behind the logo"

By AllOfUs

Social media, a deadly place for corporations

The starting point of this reflection is the fact that corporations are going full speed and head first into the new social media hype. They are using these new tools to engage the masses in the process of design, evaluation, and marketing. The goal is to understand the dangers corporations are facing in engaging the masses through social media. I am getting my "data" from different social media outlets (forums, mailing lists...) where executives exchange ideas on how to best use the new technology to gain market share and to increase profits.


The "2020 Social Workshop on Social Media for Non-Pofits" article bellow explains why the adoption of the new media will gradually kill the corporation. In this article I explore another class of adverse effects.



Two important observations

• companies don't control this new media (the social media)
• the message is spreading through multipliers or evangelists which are not part of the organization
  

The social media space can become a bloody battleground for corporations
No one controls social media. Anyone can spread his own ideas at very small costs. Anyone can pollute your message, anyone can directly attack you. Moreover, social media is not regulated like the classical media. You cannot sue Facebook because a group of people wrote negative comments about your company, and freedom of speech is applied differently on social media than on classical media. It is very possible to see social media becoming a battleground for corporations (individualistic and highly competitive entities, not very keen on sharing, openness, and collaboration), leading to a carnage. Because they can, because it is possible, and because it costs almost nothing, some corporations might choose to attack their competitors using social media. They can decide to take a hidden approach by inciting other entities to carry out the actions, for example to pollute their competitor's marketing campaign, to incite other groups to boycott their competitor's products by providing them with negative information about it, etc. Or they can take a more direct approach, putting themselves in front of their actions. Dirty fights are seen in classical media, I think social media is the perfect breeding ground for this sort of actions.

This is actually good news for those of us who don't believe in hierarchies (hierarchically structured private endeavors). Open and collaborative systems are now competing with classical hierarchies, in this new environment shaped by the new technology. The new technology rewards collaborative networks to the detriment of individualistic and overly competitive hierarchical organizations, because it naturally enhances sharing and cooperation. On top of that, it seams that this new environment might encourage hierarchies, that is corporations, to express their individualistic and overly competitive nature by killing each other on the open "piazza".

The same social media can be used by the public against a corporation
How can a corporation with a bad reputation survive against a swarm of activists behind its tail? As corporations learn how to use social media to increase their profits, activists also learn how to use the same technology to attack corporations. The question is, given the nature of this new technology, who can extract more potential from it? Who will benefit the most?

After thousands of years of social evolution good ethics still rules the world. Even though, in most cases, bad people are running our societies, good ethics is what keeps societies together, and these corrupt leaders go through a lot of trouble to convince their subjects that they stand on the right side. The Internet technology transforms the entire planet into a small village, in the sense that anyone has access to who you are and to your past. This is especially true for public entities like a corporation. It is hard to hide if you are a really bad guy. Until recently, in a large city, one could screw someone here and hide in anonymity two blocks away. That is because one could get away with it, because people didn't have easy access to who the identity of the individual. Thus, if the gains are larger than the risk involved the individual can repeat his immoral actions, and even get imitated by others. In a small village setting, everyone knows everyone else. If someone screws someone else once his ability to screw anyone else again drops dramatically. One's ability to extract advantages from his community diminishes after a bad move, because people will marginalize this individual. So everyone gets it: if you screw someone you'll be shunned, it's not worth it...

That's why crime is low in small communities, not because people are different there, but because good behavior is reinforced by the way people are constrained to interact with each other. In the small village context, reputation becomes a very important asset and it is measured against accepted ethical norms. The same regulating mechanism operates in a highly interconnected world, i.e. in a world with Internet. If a company knowingly sells an unsafe product sooner or later this will come out, and a few dedicated individuals can literally bring this company down. A few passionate individuals have the means to destroy its reputation using the same social media it is using to market its products. See the Boomerang, a new way to fight work related injustice, how one person can take on a corporation.

In my opinion, by transforming the world into a small village the Internet forces economical entities to act ethically, or at least according to what the majority perceives as good ethics.  


By AllOfUs

Large corporations implement web2.0 applications for internal use

Large companies, especially large conglomerates, are starting to use web-based social networking tools for employees. These tools will certainly improve communication within the organization, and will help solidify its internal culture. Moreover, cross disciplinary communication and collaboration, which will be facilitated by these tools, will also increase the creativity and the efficiency of the organization. There is one major shortcoming, these social networks are usually closed, they are only accessible to employees.

These new measures are the living proof that corporate managers are recognizing the need to manage the organization not as a machine, the command and control paradigm, but more as a community. Cool, the human factor is slowly coming back into the picture... It took them quite some time to realize that an individual needs more than just material gratification; that if you treat a human being as a replaceable and disposable piece of equipment, a "human resource", you will not get his/her full cooperation, and you will not benefit from his/her creativity. It is also about time for them to re-realize that groups are not merely clusters of individuals, and to give them the freedom to organize and to collaborate is far more advantageous than to divide them to better control them.

These big corporations are too late in trying to use the new technology to better their business. But their fundamental problem is not even there. It is their structure. They are hierarchical, closed structures. Please visit our Economical alternatives section to understand why open organic networks are economically far more superior to closed hierarchies, in the context of a knowledge-based economy.

Lockheed Martin gets social with a private network
By ANDY ROSEN, The Daily Record
Published 07/15/09
BALTIMORE (AP) — Lockheed Martin Corp. is setting up a private social network for employees to use in the course of business as a means to discuss tasks from projects to purchasing. And though the network itself won't be open to the outside world, the program that supports it will be.
Company officials are preparing next year to launch a program — tentatively called Eureka — that will allow workers across the defense contractor's large network of locations to connect with each other and talk about work. Before that happens, Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin also plans to make the computer programming code...

All of Us

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Corporations and social media

Smart managers of vertically integrated firms are beginning to understand the potential of the new technology, and use it tot their advantage. Not a surprise that this new scheme comes from ING, a
virtual bank. Yes, the new technology can be used to control masses better than was possible before. however, short sightedness is a hereditary disease of modern corporations, and these people don't understand that the techniques they are developing will shortly turn against them.

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