Obama, brands and disco dad

An interesting question raised today was whether UK politicians will try and replicate President-Elect Obama's online strategy - engaging the young and politically disenfranchised to get involved or donate through social media.

The strange thing is that it's hard to see how that could/would happen with the current leaders of the 3 main UK parties. And that got me thinking about brands.

Obama succeeded in exploiting social media successfully because, as a 'product' he could naturally exploit digital media: he's young (well for a presidential candidate, anyway), he's different (his African-American background) and he's the challenger-brand (not rooted in the current establishment but an advocate of change).

In essence he had the brand credibility to be able to use digital media as a natural channel to communicate his message to his audience.

And it's much the same with brands. Not all brands will automatically be able to exploit social media in the way that say Apple, Radiohead, Innocent etc have. These brands have the intrinsic credibility built into their values that mean, like Obama, social media is a natural extension of how they communicate with an audience who are social-media-natives.

Other brands need to work hard to establish how and why they can get involved. Social media can't simply be a "me too" approach grafted on to a brand's communication strategy.

Consumers are far too savvy to accept that and those brands that try to muscle their way in end up looking like a dad at the disco (as one of my colleagues called it the other day): just like Mssrs Brown, Cameron or Clegg on Facebook, Twitter or Myspace.

The changing face of networking

One of the biggest developments over the past 18 months in the consumer space has been the rise of the social networks. This rapid consumer adoption of sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook has been quickly picked up by the business community with B2B social networking sites such as LinkedIn which, after seeing a slow start to member numbers 3-4 years ago, has doubled in size over the last 2 years on the back of the social networking boom.

The prediction is that consumer focused social networking sites will evolve away from their current generalist nature towards more specialist communities; whether that’s related to shopping (Yub.com), pets (fuzzster.com) or student travel (statravellers.com). This will become increasingly relevant for the B2B world where communities can be easily built on industry sectors. It’s always been true within the interactive and software world, where developer forums have been a key means of product development and solutioning, but these more specialist social networks are popping against wider industry sectors:

• MedicalMingle.com for Healthcare professionals
• Sermo, where doctors can seek advice and get access to relevant content
• INmobile.org - a network for senior mobile telecoms executives
• Adgabber - for the advertising community
• E-Factor – a European-based network for entrepreneurs to share knowledge and advice
• Damsels in Success – a women-only professional networking site, focusing on career and business issues.

B2B brands will need to understand how to ensure that they can leverage these new networks to drive awareness, seed content (as with the B2C world) and build customer advocacy.

Online PR is important here – the ability to get news out quickly, targeted to your specialist audience and often through trade bodies, can enhance influence in the marketplace and so improve the ability to get new customers considering you as an authority in your space.

And outside of the social networks themselves, the personal Blog has also been adopted by the B2B community. One of the most famous examples of B2B blogs is Darren Strange’s “Officerocker” that he created in the run up to the launch of Office 2007. Darren is the UK product manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and is credited with changing Microsoft Office into a personality rather than a faceless product through blogging. Since setting up the blog two years ago, “Officerocker” has allowed him to build a dialogue with customers, partners and press attracting around 250,000 hits each month.

Potentially one of the biggest (but currently most under-utilised) communication areas is RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to subscribe to an information feed from a website and view it within their own browser. What’s important about RSS feeds is that (a) the user has actively subscribed to that information, and (b) unlike email, there are no ISP issues to be navigated, so RSS means 100% deliverability of information to the user.

Some 80% of internet professionals are already using industry or sector-specific RSS feeds, and more than half of them (54%) have personalised homepages. [Source: E-consultancy / Convera, Nov 2007]

Amazon - The First 10 Years

Amazon in the UK is 10 - it opened for business on 15th October 1998 and earlier this year opened a massive new warehouse in Wales.

There are many companies that claim to have changed the way we live – but few who, in reality, have ever done so. Amazon truly can claim to have changed the way that the world shops, forever.

What has Amazon achieved?:

• It’s almost solely been responsible for driving mass adoption of online shopping (according to IMRG’s figures, 17p in every £1 spent in the UK was spent online in the first half of 2008)
• It invested early, shunning short-term profits to develop technology and infrastructure that have giving it a long-term advantage over its peers
• It pioneered and refined ‘collaborative filtering’ in the e-commerce space both in terms of website recommendations (‘customers who bought X also bought Y’) and also in terms of personalised email communications based on purchase history and items/categories viewed
• It proved how the online business model could be extended from music, books and films to include almost every household item – in fact Amazon's logo is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing its to sell many products
• It evolved it’s business model to
• Allow 3rd parties to sell ‘new’ and ‘used’ goods on their site (often in direct competition with Amazon itself)
• Allow 3rd party advertising to completely monetise it’s daily traffic
• Allow 3rd party companies to make use of it’s server capacity (storage and CPU) through charging companies on a per-usage for accessing its APIs (Twitter, for example uses Amazon for it’s server requirements)
• It’s taught everyone how a usable, e-commerce operation should work – it’s the benchmark for online e-commerce site design

Where does it go next?

• Clearly an untapped market for Amazon is in the B2B market – especially for office supplies, equipment and furniture
• Amazon Prime (it’s fee-based one-day delivery programme) goes someway to locking-in its high value customers – but with price comparisons for any product just one-click away, Amazon will need to consider how it maximises its share of customers’ online wallet

It’s biggest challenges?

• Gaining a foothold in the download marketplace as more and more media moves from physical formats to purely digital – this is one area that Amazon has not pioneered or kept pace with allowing iTunes and other providers to steel a march (Amazon feels like a follower here)
• Ensuring that it can continue to exploit tax loopholes for certain products (eg music/books/dvds delivered via offshore operations such as Jersey) to ensure it’s price advantage
• Competition – other online companies (eg Play.com) and bricks & mortar businesses (eg John Lewis) are sharpening up their online offerings and now provide real price and service led competition