Hosting parties and making friends

One of my favourite quotes is:

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you” – Dale Carnegie

That quote has long sat on my Facebook profile even before I started to understand Social Media and it’s underpinnings.

There seems to be a recent trend of brands owners running out to their creative shops and getting branded social networks built. The brands that are taking this somewhat hasty approach seem to think it’s the answer to ticking another box in their advertising/media check list.

There are even white label social network platforms available on the web, which provide easy, low cost, out of the box platforms for brands owners to start building their own social networks. The popular ones of course being Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn and new to the white label arena is Groupsites.

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So…the platforms already exist, with a bit of savvy they can be quite easily customised and this is already being done quite successfully.

For some brands, however, I do not think branded social networks are the most suitable and immediate solutions. Social Media is all about creating a dialogue between brands and consumers.

Brand owners need to start conversing with their audiences in baby steps, listening to them, participating in conversations and providing them with content and dialogue which delivers value.

The best way to start doing this it to go where the conversations are taking place such as existing, blogs, social networks and interest groups. This is a very labour intensive exercise, however, it is a sure fire way of “making friends”. You’ll now understand how my Dale Canergie quote fits in to all of this.

It’s not just about talking either, listening is massively important too, what are your new friends saying? what do they want? how do they feel?

As result of all the socialising and listening, brand owners should develop what audiences are asking for. A branded social network only becomes a realistic option if it is part of greater solution which addresses understood audience needs, if it is not a viable option then brand owners should consider alternative solutions such as:

- Product feed back or suggestion mechanisms, Dell Ideastorm is a good example of this.
- Branded applications and utilities
- Branded content on websites

Owning branded social networks is akin to hosting a party. You can’t host a big party without knowing lots of friends and finding out what they’d enjoy or whether they’d want to come at all?

In every case brand owners should start off small and evolve their social media strategy in a Darwninesq manner, branded social networks should really appear during the maturity stages of a brands social strategy and not at the start.