As established platforms become more mature, they’re looking for new ways to engage with consumers via enhanced, immersive shopping experiences and creative tools. While one might argue that it is in the platforms’ best interest to engage users for longer periods of time, many users are realizing the negative side-effects that come with keeping up appearances on social networks, like heightened anxiety and depression. Users still want to connect, but in ways that are complimentary to desires around mindfulness and well-being.

A trend report from JWT Intelligence provides three areas where platforms are doing better to meet (and try to exceed) customer expectations. It’s wise for brands to stay savvy about growing new ways to connect with customers before playbooks are developed and best practices are known – it can be a fantastic way to test new ideas and break away from the competition.

1. Social Enrichment

With many platforms offering brands ongoing new tactics for reaching customers, the original intent of the social platforms (to provide ways that connect people) can get lost. Here are two examples of platforms going back to their roots to facilitate connections.

• Snap launched Bitmoji party, a multi-player game that allows users to play live games with their own avatars inside the app. “We wanted to build something that makes us feel like we’re playing a board game with family over a long holiday weekend,” said Will Wu, Snap’s director of product, at the company’s Partner Summit. “Something that makes us feel like we’re sitting with friends, controllers in hand, looking at the same screen.”
• Feiliao (FlipChat) was launched by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, calling it an “interest-based social media app” offering a more targeted resource for social interaction as an alternative to WeChat.

2. Social Shopping

China is where it’s at for examples of how social apps are reimagining what it means to do eCommerce. By fusing commerce with social tools, brands have new opportunities to foster communities, generate content and create myriad ways to engage.

• Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) is one of the faster growing apps for discovering products and brands. While it was launched as a platform for advice on duty-free shopping, it’s expanded into a user-generated content hub for fashion and beauty tips and reviews. But brands and influencers work within strict posting guidelines to protect the integrity and trust with the platform.
• Depop (Pictured) is growing in popularity with Gen Z. Last month, they raised $62 million in Series C funding and plans significant expansion, expecting to reach 15 million people in the US. Depop is comprised of bedroom entrepreneurs that buy and resell handmade or thrifted clothing on their profiles, building a following that’s based on their personal style.

3. Creative Inspiration

With much of our digital world driven by algorithms, some platforms are emerging to offer spaces where self-expression and creativity can flourish without judgment.

• VSCO was launched as a photo/video editing platform that has removed upvoting and validation, encouraging everyone to “fall in love with their own creativity.” It’s getting a surge in popularity from Gen Z as they are looking for an alternative to Instragram and the social pressures that come with wanting to be perfect on that platform. VSCO’s Vice-President of product, Allison Swope, says, “The younger generation are very smart, they are very perceptive, and they actually value their mental health and their overall wellness, and they know what serves them. People don’t feel a pressure when they share on VSCO and it’s a thing that they value very deeply, in addition to the quality of the tools.”
• Instagram is rolling out an AR toolkit for users. The SparkAR feature will allow virtually anyone to create their own AR filters for their Instagram. Other users can access the filters by following the creators. The result is an entirely different look from those that can be found on rival Snapchat.

While there is an argument to be made that these platforms are connecting us but we are not connecting, ironically they are helping us learn what consumers want, need and expect.

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Stefan Heinrich, head of global marketing at Tik Tok says, “Musical.ly and TikTok currently operate in complementary geographies without much overlap and as both platforms continue to grow rapidly now is the time to bring them together.”

What makes this union unique is the potential to bridge a gap between Chinese platforms and the rest of the world. Despite the huge successes of Weibo and WeChat, Chinese social platforms for the most part have not gained much penetration outside of China. Tik Tok could change that and put pressure on the likes of YouTube and Snapchat.

Data from Sensor Tower indicates that TikTok was the most-downloaded iOS app in Q1. Two years ago, Snapchat surpassed market leader Facebook as the most popular social network among U.S. teens, a trend that researcher eMarketer predicts will continue. Snapchat will add 1.2 million new users in that age group by 2022, while Facebook will lose 2.2 million.

As reported in Mobile Marketer, “fashion brand Guess partnered with TikTok, the short-form mobile video platform that merged with and replaced Musical.ly, on a viral campaign targeted at millennials and Generation Z. As TikTok users open the app, they are directed to the #InMyDenim challenge that urges them to post videos with the hashtag.”

The Guess campaign marks the first promoted hashtag challenge on TikTok in the U.S. and the official launch of the app’s U.S. brand partnerships program and ran in early September. Guess is promoting the challenge with the support of popular content creators such as @ourfire, who has 2.3 million followers, and @madisonwillow, with 983,000 followers, among others.

Edward Park, SVP of retail and digital at Guess, said in a statement, “These digital natives’ tastes and desires govern the future of social media and culture. A cluttered brand space demands unique, engaging content and integrated participation.”

In a crowded fashion and retail space and targeting young adults and teens who enjoy sharing images of their latest looks and fashions on social media, unique engagement and experiences are a must. Fashion brands and retailers — such as Forever 21, H&M and Nordstrom, among others — have enjoyed success reaching out to consumers using influencers and celebrities on social media platforms to increase engagement and drive purchases.

New platforms aren’t for every brand, but it’s important for brand marketers to stay aware of quickly-emerging opportunities to gain an advantage over competitors. It will be interesting to watch TikTok and learn if an eastern alternative to western social platforms can gain traction and market share in the west. The innovation happening in China especially, will eventually unseat one of today’s dominant platforms, it’s just a matter of time.

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Fast forward a decade and we find today’s marketing community seemingly obsessed with influencer marketing and its power of persuasion. Almost identical to Word Of Mouth marketing, influencer marketing can be seen as its 2.0, this time on a different scale and with new buzzwords. The proliferation of social networks and the advent of mobile technologies has enabled (many) ‘everyday’ consumers to become social influencers. This has turned into a $1B advertising industry, as brands and their agencies see in social influencers a way to reach sizeable audiences with an authentic and personal message.

Speaking at the OMMA (Online Marketing Media and Advertising) conference in Los Angeles, Jessica Clifton (U.S. Managing Director, Strategic Growth and Development, Edelman) brought to light a shift from celebrity to peer-based influence. Indeed, Edelman’s trust barometer shows a sharp decline in trust in celebrities, CEOs and other people that have had power to influence in the past.

While I too am enthusiastic about the power and potential of influencer marketing, I suggest taking a step back from all the excitement to outline some fundamentals and propose best practices for engaging with influencers.

What Is Influence?

Too often, marketers evaluate social influencers solely on their number of followers. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell defines influencers as people who are credible experts in their domain and cultivate a relationship with their followers.

Influence is not only defined in terms of reach (number of followers) but also affinity with the brand and strength of the relationship with the followers.

Ranking Influencers

Influencers can be classified in 3 categories: Micro, Macro, and Mega.

Micro-influencers have 500 to 10,000 followers. Maria Sipka, Co-founder and Chief evangelist at Linqia notes that micro-influencers boast much higher engagement rates (about 10%) than high-reach influencers (1-2%). Indeed, micro-influencers are able to engage with their audience in a personal fashion. They often take the time to connect with their fans one-on-one. Micro-influencers are also more budget-friendly to brands that can’t afford the likes of Kim Kardashian.

Macro-influencers boast 10,000-1 million followers, but deliver lower engagement rates. That said, they also reach up to 10 times more people than micro-influencers, so they can be useful depending upon the goals of your campaign.

Mega-influencers reach over 1 million followers. While these influencers offer the highest reach, they are often just as inaccessible to the average person as Hollywood celebrities, making them (ironically) less influential.

Prior to engaging with social influencers, brands need to ask themselves:

Are these fees affordable?

Are these fees justified?

Does the influencer align with my brand positioning?

How To Hire Influencers To Promote Your Brand

Brian Salzman, Founder of RQ agency warns brands that an influencer too focused on money is not a good influencer. It is tempting for some of influencers to endorse too many brands and in turn become disingenuous.

You should instead curate influencers by watching the content they produce and identify deep roots of engagement. Then, you must spend time with the influencers you retain to make sure they understand the ethos of your brand. Is the influencer already using your product? If not, you should introduce them to people who make the product to understand how the product is made. Lily Kunin (Founder, Clean Food Dirty City) stresses that influencers must ultimately use the product so that the endorsement comes across as authentic.

Last but not least, one-off engagements with one or two influencers will likely yield disappointing results. Salzman urges brands to build an influencer network of 2 or 3 dozen influencers that do not solely rely on social media.

As with all marketing efforts, I recommend measuring success through a combination of engagement metrics (such as click-through rates and conversion) and brand health Key Performing Indicators. Only such measurement tools will enable you to validate if influencer marketing delivers on its ambitious promise: to drive both sales and positive sentiment towards your brand.

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In fact, at the end of this article, you might be ready to tear up that social media marketing deck entirely. Here’s why.

I have to admit; this is a strange place for me. In 2007 I accepted a new role at Avid Technology, the market leader in software and hardware for the media industry, where I was already neck deep in product marketing for Avid Xpress Pro video editing software. Management had taken notice of my eagerness to engage with our up-and-coming customers on community forums, blogs, and nascent social media channels like MySpace. They offered me the newly created position of eMarketing Manager in order to spread that digital engagement across all of the company’s business units. With that, I became one of the first social media marketing managers in enterprise software and quickly converted our passionate worldwide customer community into a large social media fan base—the largest among our peer group of companies producing tools for the creative media professional.

Fast forward to 2013. We were already experiencing diminishing returns from social media networks, even as the content itself racked up insane impressions for a B2B brand (check out the views of this Pro Tools video from 2010). The squeeze was on. Facebook’s increasingly intelligent algorithmic News Feed and a public stock offering in 2012 left brand marketers with a fast-closing window to reach a collected fan base through organic means. Paid placement was clearly the future of brand awareness on social. Sound familiar?

Now I hate spending money on paid media. And I certainly don’t want to pay for promoted access to customers who’ve already opted-in to receiving communications from me on these platforms. We needed our own platform to publish on and connect with customers. A blog would be a good start, but not a typical company blog, which is often a dumping ground for the PR team and the odd bit of content that doesn’t fit on the corporate site. We needed our own branded storytelling platform with an editorial voice and a Media Publishing strategy. Thus my first marketing newsroom was born. In April 2013, to coincide with the company’s largest global tradeshow, I launched Avid Blogs. Built on self-hosted WordPress, the site served as the new daily storytelling hub where customers could learn what’s new in the world of Avid, explore creative techniques from other users, and discover how to make the most of their investment in Avid systems. In my two and a half years as Editor-in-Chief, Avid Blogs rose to become the most trafficked Avid web property outside of Avid.com proper.

Launching a standalone storytelling site isn’t enough to tear-up the social media plan, a proper marketing newsroom requires three digital disruptions.

1. The willingness of a marketing organization to rethink present and future staffing. My own role changed from Social Media Manager to Editor-in-Chief. In a marketing newsroom, other roles like Field Marketing become Field Reporters, PR Managers add Featured Columnist duties, Demand Generation Specialists become Audience Growth Managers. To succeed with an editorial approach to audience development on owned platforms, organizations must invest in new skills training (visual storytelling) for existing staff and write job descriptions that find candidates who can tell a story, rather than launch a campaign.

2. Stop what you’re doing. You can’t campaign your way to an engaged audience. That email campaign, that infographic, that press release, while part of an “integrated marketing campaign” is NOT how customers are conditioned to consume content. Take a lesson from the biggest consumer media brands and create episodic original content. Think like Netflix with Stranger Things or Amazon Prime Video with Transparent. These are stories told in chapters, over time, with a narrative arc that entertains and builds affinity for the content provider. In your case, you’ll create “edu-tainment’ or content that both entertains and informs.

3. Buy-in from above. Like any transformation, there are those who can understand immediately the benefit of disrupting “business as usual” and others who are highly averse. That buy-in will only come with a plan (‘playbook’ in marketing newsroom parlance) that lays out the editorial strategy, individual responsibilities, technology requirements, interlock with Sales, publishing process, amplification plan, and much more. This is where you tear-up the social media deck! Its replacement, the Marketing Newsroom Playbook, is your daily guide for creating audience you own.

This is a preview of the marketing newsroom framework – The Blake Project’s approach to building highly differentiated brands in a digital world. We’ll outline each of the working parts of the framework in upcoming Branding Strategy Insider articles. Or, experience the marketing newsroom live at The Un-Conference, coming up in May 2017 at The London in West Hollywood.

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Social media now is much more complex and unique as businesses become more social by design. Social media practically runs modern business organizations when you speak with the most disruptive of marketers. Yet at many organizations, CMOs still designate social media as a small business unit, staffed by interns to control.

Even at Apple, one of the most relevant brands in the world, they have only recently paid more attention to social media. Some of the most progressive organizations were adopting its usage back in 2006 or 2007 as it became more commercial. All one could do then was simply amplify. A lot has changed. So what are the six areas of social media in 2016 and how should they play into your brand’s strategy?

1. Paid Media. Why do so many brand strategists not realize that 90% of social media is about paid amplification using targeting tools? The best platforms to test messages in a variety of formats (video, imagery, text) is on social. TV may be big, but it’s expensive and there are no ROI analytical measurement tools like there are on social platforms.

2. Influencer Programs have only grown in size and scope the past few years. But this is because of the spread of the social web and the ability to influence niche groups of people habituating the web around social, interest and economically-driven graphs. This is best done in one-to-one, personalized communication, not via mass, blast your 1 million followers with spam status updates.

3. Social is a testing lab as much as it is a place to communicate. The best brands test creative on platforms before they figure out what may work best for the brand overall. Instagram isn’t just a photo sharing network, but one of the best creative labs available in the modern era. Snapchat isn’t just a place to update followers in the moment but a forum to experiment with the moving image. If you’re not using social to test creative, you’re missing the point of a feedback loop in real time.

4. Vertical imagery, live video, podcasting. Almost everything that has become mainstream the past few years in communication broke with how people have hacked the user experience on social media. Just like the creative feedback loop, if you’re trying to embed innovation at your company and are not developing products or communication strategies that are social by design, you’re missing a huge relevant focus group ready and willing to give feedback in real time.

5. Top brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi don’t just monitor social media for brand mentions but words people use with their brand. Coke noticed so many people used the word pizza with mentions of their brand that they made more co-op marketing deals with pizza restaurants and chains. There is a ton of intelligence in social listening yet too many organizations aren’t set up to use the tools necessary for their competitive advantage.

6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is why Salesforce and Google are interested in purchasing Twitter. CRM and customer service happen more on social media than ever before. But not only is the action of customer service that’s important to retain customers but tying in listening with CRM can help you improve your business and elevate your brand. As Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

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