Typically, when it comes to attracting customers, people think about advertising, public relations, and brand management, but in truth these fields are all becoming blended to the point where trying to define each by their differences is difficult. This is in large part because they are built on the same basic principle: positive differentiation. These fields, which I will refer to as the communications fields, since their practitioners are commonly referred to as communications professionals, all exist to help a company demonstrate, highlight, or publicize the positive things about them that separate them from their competitors. BMW highlights the top quality of their cars, the ultimate driving machines. Volkswagen instead highlights how much of bargain their cars are, with surprisingly ordinary prices.
I liken corporate competition over market share to a game of American Football. The communications fields are the offense and the company itself is the defense. The job of the communications fields is to score points, or build market share, by helping companies pull customers away from the other existing brand choices, or by helping introduce customers to a product that they didn’t realize they needed. For example, a company that spends a lot of money on supporting green initiatives within the company will do well to advertise this fact to the world, thus attracting the growing market of conscientious consumers looking for brands whose ethics appear to match theirs. Once the communications fields attract the customers, it is up to the company to keep them. To fall back on the sports metaphor, it is the company’s job to run a prevent defense by maintaining the lead once its been built by the offense. Often this is accomplished by simply having a good enough product that new customers don’t get turned away as soon as they try it. That is, until the opposing team starts making plays.
When the opposition fights back, things move in the direction of an entirely different metaphor, an arms race. For companies who exist in the same market but serve a different submarket (BMW and VW from before, for example), each establishes their niche and courts their audience and that’s that. However, if the two companies serve the same submarket (BMW and Audi), any time one company takes the lead, the other needs to catch back up or risk going out of business. This is why Coke and Pepsi are locked in a multimillion dollar advertising war that has, when averaged over the last few decades, amounted to nothing more than a dead heat.
One of the biggest trends in modern communications fields is to promote what is commonly referred to as corporate transparency. Jeff Rosenblum, an executive at ad agency Questus and the documentary filmmaker behind The Naked Brand, says that the traditional advertising world of Mad Men is fading as a result of ad blindness, and that the future of advertising is in marketing a corporation’s ethics, in addition to its products. Not surprising, coming from a proponent of a multi-disciplinary approach to advertising, but there is plenty of evidence to support his claims. The fact that rapidly proliferating social media outrage can convince NBC to change its broadcast plans for the closing ceremony of the Olympics at the 11th hour, or that mounting negative reviews on Amazon can destroy a product’s, or even a company’s, reputation, demonstrate that keeping customers happy is arguably more important than it has ever been before. While having a solid product and treating your customers right have been tenants of small business ownership in the United States since the 1800s, large companies have not traditionally embraced these ideas. Small companies face the wrath of their local community if they behave immorally. A small town auto-shop that gets a reputation for screwing its customers will soon go out of business. Big companies, up until very recently, didn’t have to worry about that level of accountability, since only a national newspaper could out their negative business practices to enough people to make a difference in their sales. Now, thanks to the Internet, a big company’s transgressions are immediately available, so accountability for them now exists. However, the idea of accountability shouldn’t be the end of what a company does. Giving consumers the ability to impact the way the company operates can have an amazing impact on building a consistent customer base. Creating a system where people can offer input on what kind of ethical behavior they value most will help a company select what they should focus on to maximize the impact of their transparency. Similarly, creating a system where people can offer feedback on a company’s products or services will help the company make decisions about how to keep customers happy with what they’re buying, in addition to happy with the company’s ethics. Putting all of these concepts together represents the model for modern transparency, and with the new tools provided by the Internet, every aspect of this transparency is within every company’s grasp. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, blogs, Reddit, and many more give companies the ability to interact with the global community, touching current customers and potential customers alike.
Back when blogging was relatively new, one of the first ways that companies attempted this model of transparency was to create a corporate blog, often written by the CEO or another top ranking official, which covered the goings-on at the company. It was such a trend in Silicon Valley that it received a cover feature in Wired magazine. However, these efforts were short-lived. The idea was to speak openly and publicly about everything that the company did, and every decision that the company made, thus eliminating the presence of negative PR. Rather than let the press get a hold of every shake-up at a company to dissect in a vacuum, CEOs would offer their rebuttal up front. “Company X is abandoning Project Y because, after spending so much time and so much money, it is clear to us that it simply isn’t a viable product or service. A totally reasonable and logical conclusion.” However, this did not last long as a fad, and although no one knows for sure what made it go away, there are some believable theories. One theory is that, because CEOs maintained the blogs themselves, and since they lead very full and busy lives, they quickly forgot that they were supposed to keep their blogs updated on a regular basis. Another theory is that companies came to regret the idea of total transparency. While posting about what projects the company was working on might drum up interest in the outcome amongst consumers, publicly stating what otherwise might be secret or proprietary information is obviously a dangerous move, and similarly many couldn’t handle the corporate shame involved in big projects being publicly scraped. In the end, while many companies still maintain blogs that talk about what the company is up to, they are mostly used to show off how fun the place is to work at by highlighting the talents of the employees or to make big public announcements like product launches. This is fine, though, as this fits with the new model of transparency that Rosenblum was talking about. These blogs now highlight the ethics (promoting a creative, fun work environment) and the accomplishments (new product launches) of the company. The idea of putting everything out there and letting the world decide, however, has basically died.
Taking the reigns of corporate transparency that blogging used to hold are social networking tools like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. There are many ways in which these methods are superior to blogging. Twitter and Facebook require way less time to maintain. Once the pages are set up, the status updates are character limited, so the amount of time needed to write them is very low. In the blogging age, where there were no character limits, the expectation was always for longer, more thoughtful posts of several pages, which is, of course, very time-consuming. A busy CEO doesn’t have time to write that much about the workings of the company, but writing a 140 character announcement takes very little time or thought at all. Even if social media for the company isn’t handled by someone who is a ranked official, shorter form social media lets those employees focus on social media only part of the time, or opens up the opportunity to cultivate multiple social media avenues at the same time. Another big benefit is that Twitter and Facebook are push notification, instead of pull. While blogs can be set up to be push using RSS feeds, most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to make this work for them. On the other hand, “liking” a page or “follow” a user is much easier to understand, especially when the updates are placed in a feed on the homepage of each site. When you visit Facebook or Twitter, the first thing you see is all of the most recent posts by the friends, businesses, fan pages, and interest groups to which you are subscribed. Finally, because of the limits on posting, the information posted is bite-sized. If there is more to be written about the subject, the headline version can be posted with a link that directs to a longer blog post or press release with the full information. This offers the reader a choice of simply skimming the information, or going a step deeper if their interest in the subject is piqued. This way of communicating fits perfectly with the concept of modern transparency by giving a great point of direct contact from which to publicize the efforts a company is making towards the kind of ethical decisions consumers are looking for. Starbucks gives a million dollars to save the rainforests, so they send a little tweet about how awesome it was collaborating with whichever foundation they worked with. Twitter and Facebook also provide a limited two-way street of communication. Twitter’s @ tagging for targeted tweets and responses, as well as retweeting, gives a company ways to interact with consumers, address questions, and bring to the forefront the positive things people have said about their products or services. Facebook pages allow company reps to respond to wall posts and the like button also allows them to highlight areas the company wants to draw attention to. I have experienced this first hand. I tweeted about how underwhelmed I was by Path.To, a job-hunting site, after I made an account. Since I @ tagged the company by name, they were alerted that I mentioned them, and within a day I received a response from the company letting me know they take constructive criticism very seriously and providing an email address to send a more detailed listing of my complaints. Talk about great customer interaction! The weakness with these services is that the same character limits that make Twitter and Facebook an excellent place to publish also limit the length of responses a company can write. A way around this is to use Twitter and/or Facebook to provide questions in real-time, sometimes referred to as live tweeting, but to answer them in another format. Many live web shows use this to allow the Internet-based audience to send in their questions for the host to ask in an interview or discussion/debate show. If a company already had a company video or podcast series, they could easily incorporate this into the show’s formatting to unlock that better transparency and customer interaction that longer responses to questions and criticisms would allow.
An oft over-looked way to interact with the Internet community is through Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) trend. Reddit is a social linking and bookmarking service that uses upvoting and downvoting to let the user-base determine what they feel is more valuable to the community and deserving of front-page attention, and what is unwanted or spam that should be shunted to the bottom. In a way, it resembles what Digg aimed to do, but Reddit does it better by splitting the site into many subreddits, each with a front page, that allow users to group around common interests. For example, there are subreddits for Starcraft, DIY, and the TV show Castle. These subreddits also nest, so the Starcraft subreddit is a subreddit of Gaming, which is a subreddit of Reddit itself. In this way, things that get many upvotes rise from the front page of their niche, to the front page of their niche’s subject area, and so on until they get to the Reddit homepage. The AMA phenomenon comes from people posting on Reddit “I am ____________, ask me anything…” This could be “Hi Reddit, I’m the lead designer of Call of Duty, ask me anything…” or it could be “I’m Yvette Nichole Brown, and I play Shirley on NBC’s Community, ask me anything…” The AMA format has users submit questions on any subject, and the personality on the other end of the AMA chooses what questions they want to answer. The cool thing about this is it creates functionally a town hall meeting on the Internet. Want to know something about the work they do? Ask it, and if its something they are at liberty to talk about they probably will. In many ways, though, it’s even better than a live town hall meeting. Thanks to the structure of Reddit, more relevant questions will usually be upvoted, pushing them to the top where they are more likely to be answered. The inverse is also true; the more offensive or trolling the questions are, the more likely downvoting will push them to the bottom of the page where the personality won’t even see them. This is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to create that two-way communication with a community interested in what a company is doing. There are some downsides, however. One is that Reddit tends to be narrow in its demographic appeal, leaving other target markets underserved. While subreddits attract different demographic mixes based on their particular niche, Reddit as a whole is largely male and largely 20-30 somethings. Another is that AMAs generally draw the most attention when the personality is a known commodity or associated with a known commodity. Joss Whedon will draw lots of attention, whereas Bryan Fuller will draw a much smaller amount, even though they are both writers who have worked on cult hit TV shows. A small company looking to touch base with its customers in this way will struggle to get front-page attention, though posting to the right subreddit might still help them reach their target market. Finally, AMAs are terrible for business-to-business specialists. Reddit AMAs are for interesting people to answer questions about interesting things they do. Enterprise solutions, regardless of how powerful and impressive they are, generally fail to meet this description in the eyes of anyone who isn’t themselves involved with either making or purchasing enterprise solutions. A better way to establish a business-to-business brand is to demonstrate that the company is an industry expert. While this can be done somewhat using Twitter and Facebook, if one wants to keep the power of the question and answer format provided by the Reddit AMA, companies should consider putting their senior employees, or a ghost-posting proxy, on a dedicated Q&A site like Quora.
Quora is a website where anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer. Like a mixture of Reddit and Wikipedia, answers that are posted are evaluated, critiqued, and edited by other users in order to ensure that the answer or answers provided are as true as possible. Unlike sites like Reddit, or other question and answer sites such as Yahoo Answers, users log in with a Facebook or Twitter account so the answers they provide are directly tied to their real world personal or corporate identity. The great part about this is that a company looking to establish itself as an expert in its field can go on and answer questions related to their business and those answers are clearly tied to the company. Say, for example, a company makes electron microscopes that are bought mostly by circuitry companies for nano-level quality assurance. By going on Quora and answering knowledgeably all of the questions about everything related to their business, from nano-technology to atomic physics, they create a record of insight and intelligence that anyone who also uses Quora, and to a lesser extent, anyone who finds their answers on Google, can look at and see the value in. That kind of credibility is valuable to specialty companies, especially business-to-business companies, and question and answer services like Quora have made establishing that credibility easier than ever.
When it comes down to it, there are many ways that a company can create positive differentiation, and each of those ways now has many tools that help companies accomplish their goals. Communications agencies, using brand strategy, advertising, public relations, or marketing, can help a company actualize their plans and avoid the pitfalls, but ultimately the company needs to understand how to maintain the lead they have created for themselves or it won’t last. A great way to do this is to embrace the new transparency, to sell your corporate ethics and not just your product. When you can turn consumers into fans based on what your company stands for, you have created a customer loyalty that is less likely to waver. There is an old joke that people are more likely to change religions than change toothpaste brands. If this new transparency can bring even half the loyalty that toothpaste brands have, it will have done its job.