Metz, The Social Concept

The Brand Lies Down On Broadway

March 23, 2009

[What follows below is the unedited copy from the introduction of my next book, tentatively titled, The Brand Lies Down On Broadway. Even if the title doesn’t survive the next round, I’m fairly confident the content will.]

“Early morning Manhattan, Ocean winds blow on the land.
The Movie-Palace is now undone, The all-night watchmen have had their fun.
Sleeping cheaply on the midnight show, Its the same old ending – time to go. Get out!” – Genesis, 1975

There are so many paths to take, and so many ways to screw this thing up. This thing, that I speak of, is a consumer brand’s social web strategy. If you want to cite the 10,000 Hour Rule as the criteria for being an expert on a given subject, I pass that test. I’ve been writing social web strategy, full-time, since early 2006, and part time, since 2005 – when you add up all of the time I’ve spent working on behalf of my clients and employers, you get about 10,000 hours. What I’m saying is, I think I can safely call myself an expert on the subject.

Being a “social media expert” or “social media consultant” may only be a passing “title,” in that I’m fairly certain that this occupation will change names and duties over the coming years, but I’m fairly certain that people who engage in crafting solid brand strategy will be around as long as there are brands, and customers who purchase the goods and services provided by those brands. (Incidentally, I think this work will simply be called “strategy” in only a few months time, and the term “social media” will be looked back on as a quaint afterthought, much like the profession descriptor “milkman” later gave way to more general tranporation-related job descriptions, like “truck driver.”)

Consumer brands have been engaging and hawking their wares on the internet since the pre-Web days. I remember seeing consumer-branded content online the first time I logged on to Prodigy, one April night eighteen years ago. As the web evolved, some brands jumped on earlier than others. My pal Chris Heuer crafted the world’s first online chocolate storefront for Leonidas chocolate, back in 1994. Other brands, like airlines, waited until nearly 1999 or 2000, to bring their offering to the digital space. In the last three years, with the rise of the social web, and read/write “Web 2.0” technologies, consumer brands have found themselves at an awkward fork in the road. Some brands desperately want to engage with their customers and prospects on the new social web. Some are deeply fearful. Most are somewhere in between.

I spoke with Lorelei, a senior-level hotel executive last week. She was really unsure about whether deploying a strategy for one of her properties would be a good idea. And this is exactly what she told me.

“From everything I’ve heard, the travel industry and hotels in particular are still having challenges monetizing social media.  I can completely understand how important it is to manage customer feedback on [travel review] sites like TripAdvisor, but I’m having a very difficult time figuring out how I could sell my company on spending money on a social media strategy when I have no data to prove that it will work.”

Well, it’s a tough question, but it’s one that I can answer, in about 250 pages. This book will sell the value of executing on the social web in the first chapter, and then it will go on to diagram how to craft impeccable strategies for those consumer brands, for the rest of the book. This book is obviously a book that will need to be re-written and re-visited every three to five years, on a tactical level, but the guiding principles that have shaped this strategic advice are thousands of years old. Only the tools are new.

The rationale is the easy part. More established, non-assessable communications mediums like radio, television and newsprint are falling away, and matter less and less to consumers every day. Even if only the forms of media consumption (i.e. watching TV, reading the news, listening to music) are shifting online, there is a clear case that the way that people under the age of 50 has are consuming media has drastically changed since 2006, and you don’t need a Forrester or Pew Internet & American Life study to tell you that.

That said, the very nature of this so-called “content consumption” has profoundly changed. People don’t just “watch TV” anymore – they stack playlists of their favorite shows, comment on them, share them with friends, and vote on them by using SMS5 on their mobile phones. The same profound changes have happened to the way consumers research their purchases (like Lorelei’s Hawaiian resort hotel rooms) and the way they complete those purchases (by purchasing movie tickets on their iPhones, standing on the corner).

[to be continued…]

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