7 Guidelines To Taking Your Global Brand Local Via Social Media. And Vice Versa

A visitor to Starwood's Preferred Guests Facebook page can log on and, if he so chooses, change the language setting to Spanish, German or Chinese. As he does, he'll watch the language on the Free Weekends promotion tab change as well. A simple thing, no? No, actually. Global brands trying to introduce their products and services to local markets via social media are finding many of the platforms' tools lacking in sophistication and even in some cases, basic functionality. Fragmentation is the rule of the day, with the result being a customer able to pull up a Starbucks U.S. page, Starbucks Deutschland, Starbucks UK, Starbucks Canada, and so on, each with a different set of followers and no central theme or branding. Facebook itself hasn't provided much help; in this particular case Starwood deployed an add-on called +GLOBAL, launched by Buddy Media in Summer 2010. Essentially it allows global marketers to maintain a single, unified Facebook presence across multiple countries and languages. Companies can combine their global Facebook assets into a single brand page and single URL, while still allowing individual country brand managers to tailor the language and content of their country's page. This social media fragmentation is more than just a design issue, Buddy Media says. According to one of its many surveys, it found that fragmentation makes it impossible to aggregate and analyze engagement activity, all of which was pulled from multiple, 'siloed' sources. Many Moving Parts, Many Steps Having the necessary tools to manage this process, though - and their numbers are growing, albeit too slowly for many marketers - is just one piece of this picture, which consists of multiple, moving parts. In short there are several steps a brand must follow if it wants to reach this dual goal of central control over the message but with a local tone and content and color. The good news is, many of the principles developed over decades for successful localized advertising and marketing campaigns can be tailored to social media. And more good news: these same principles can also be used as a firm rolls out local mobile and, to a lesser extent, search strategies from a global perch. They also work in reverse — want to appear global even if you are a ten-person shop based in New York with agents working out of their homes in Paris, Sydney and Frankfurt? Follow these guidelines. Guideline #1: Social media in any market has certain characteristics in common. Get these down pat starting with the most important: If there is one characteristic social media is taking on in country after country is that consumers see themselves as equals to the companies. That means no preaching, no overt selling, maintaining a conversational tone. "Consumers want a dialogue where brands listen to what they have to say rather than just push their messages out without taking into account what consumers think, feel and want," comments Rob Hernandez, global brand director of market research company Firefly Millward Brown, which recently published a study on this topic.  "They dislike gimmicks and want companies to be honest about their products and services, warts and all. Consumers' biggest fear is that marketers will turn social media from a community into a marketplace." Guideline #2: Don't recreate your homepage in social media, Firefly Millward Brown goes on to warn. Consumers want to see something new, fresh or different from brands – not a rehash of the same information they can get on the brand's official web site. Guideline #3: It is time-consuming but campaigns do have to be customized for each market. Spend the necessary resources, which may entail hiring a local agency or finding local influencers. Guideline #4: Give your brand a local face. Brands often suffer in social media because they don't have anyone that answers to the consumer, a face for the brand and it prevents many consumers from actively engaging with companies in social media, Firefly Millward Brown also said. Pick local ambassadors or spokespersons - better yet local celebrities - who understand the local markets and consumers. Guideline #5: And let consumers talk for you, Firefly Millward Brown urges - brands get more respect when consumers take the initiative and advocate them. "The recent Toyota campaign, where real people talked about their stories on Facebook and were then featured in a television ad, is a great example of how a brand can build relationships by encouraging customers to participate in conversations, rather than by overt sales efforts." Guideline #6: Pull it all together by thinking of your headquarters as an agency. This is advice adopted from, and slightly tweaked, comments made by Gayle Weiswasser, vice president of social media communications at Discovery Communications (via SmartBrief's social media blog) In an interview with SmartBrief she spoke about how Discovery manages its social media outreach, which about 70 Facebook pages and 13 Twitter accounts, each representing the individual networks and television shows under the Discovery umbrella. Each network has to be developed according to its individual needs and accounts have their own strategy based on their content and target audience, Weiswasser said, while Discovery Communications works with each individual network to meet their promotional goals. "We're almost like a little agency," she said. Like an agency, the "accounts" or fan pages are treated separately but equally. Their common goal is to establish strong relationships with fans and get people to watch the shows. How they go about doing that is where they differ. Guideline #7: Don't automate, especially from headquarters. Better to build a local social audience slowly by hand then sending out automated tweets that say "Thanks!" and so on. At the most, use tools that allow you to schedule tweets, such as HootSuite, SocialOomph and CoTweet. Source:http://www.marketingvox.com/7-guidelines-to-taking-your-global-brand-local-via-social-media-and-vice-versa-049296/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink