WE DO IT

Crowd Culture: Social Media's Trend. Extract from: Douglas Holt. In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago, most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factors became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the excitement, such efforts have had a very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong? To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as highly effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowd culture. Crowd culture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work, and which do not. If we understand crowd culture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media. Historically, cultural innovation flowed from the margins of society—from fringe groups, social movements, and artistic circles that challenged mainstream norms and conventions. Companies and the mass media acted as intermediaries, diffusing these new ideas into the mass market. But social media has changed everything. Social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. Now that these once-remote communities are densely networked, their cultural influence has become direct and substantial. In Summary Consumers are more interested in following a certain crowd that interest them than the whole mass and using influencers with similar brand message other than the company's brand themselves makes them stand out. Ability for a brand to understand its customers as people with interests and key into those attributes makes the brand closer to its target audience.

By Veleta Hayles