As people grow older and become busier, somehow making genuine friends becomes really difficult. Last week The New York Times tried to address this common lament with an article that laid out the key drivers of friendships and gave advice on how to make genuine friends as adults and avoid the trap of having too few inner circle friends and too many surface level acquaintances.
As I read through the article, two things struck me: first, the pillars were eerily similar to social media strategies and second, the how to advice were things that we all learned in first grade. Let me explain…
When we were in high school and college, friends were abundant and decades after graduating, these close friends remain to be just that: close friends. The drivers of these truly genuine friendships were: proximity, frequent unplanned interactions and comfortable environment to disclose information. For marketing executives out there, let me translate these friendship pillars into your social media must-have themes.
- Close proximity: Be where people are (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc). Be on Mobile. Do things so that you make sure you are always seen (default home page, auto log-in, one click anything, etc)
- Frequent unplanned (two way) interactions: Post status updates (or better yet get Kim Kardashian to tweet about you). Make your app geo-local. Create content that is deigned to be a featured video, blog or post so that people will click or better yet adopt a push strategy. Hire a social media analytics firm to monitor your social media assets, and have them respond to complaints and compliments.
- Comfortable environment to disclose information: Credible privacy policy and messaging that you are not going to be a sell out or sell off their data. Show the good and the bad comments to add authenticity.
These pillars can turn into three nifty buckets to cleanly categorize and provide goals to all the various social media initiatives that you have going on in your company, but don’t stop there because it is only half of the story. If part one is just making sure that you are in the right context, no matter how manipulated it may be, then part two is how you actually behave once you are in a social media setting. This is where the lessons from first grade start to kick in.
Take Leslie Berland, the SVP of Digital Partnerships and Development at American Express. She understood that social media, in all of its game changing glory, was about making genuine friends. First she got into the mindset of being the new kid at school (the school being Facebook) and for the first 9 months, American Express did not spend a dollar on advertising, but rather it sort of hung around and tried to take in the community. This is the first grader that that doesn’t run up to every kid during recess and tell them they should be his friend, but rather the kid who took the time to notice that the boy sitting next to him in class has the same Spiderman lunch pail. In the AmEx example, the Spiderman lunch pail turned out to be their Small Business Saturday Movement. With 9 months of building an organic base and listening to their users, they knew that the Small Business Saturday initiative was going to be a hit with their friends on Facebook. As she recounted in her Fast Company interview, “Facebook was going to be a side part [but] that was the first time we put a stake in the ground and said, ‘No, this entire program is going to run through Facebook.’ ” It turned out that Berland was right and saw a significant spike of in store sales and increased her “friends” and “likes” on Facebook.
In an innovative partnership, Dr Pepper Snapple Group asked MTV to launch a defunct brand, Sun Drop, knowing that they had to find an engaging way to re-introduce Sun Drop to a new generation. Ross Martin the creative master behind the campaign spoke at a recent TEDx conference on how the best types of work are ones that you do not expect something in return. Or in other words, you don’t force expectations on your friends, but rather you let your friends be themselves and listen to what they do. This sounds like the kind of advice you would give to a first grader in that if you give Stacy half your cookie don’t then demand that she tell the entire class how nice your are. You have to do things in good faith, and be open to the unexpected in return. In the Sun Drop campaign, Martin created the awkward dancing Sun Drop girl and threw it out there – via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, everything. And when people started to spoof the awkward dancing Sun Drop girl, they embraced it by making it a theme in their social media presence and aggregating the responses on their Facebook account. This then facilitated more “friends”, “likes” and other media coverage.
So next time you are in charge of a social media campaign – think like a first grader.