In the era of Facebook, Youtube, and other social media platforms, building branding has become a crucial task to accomplish. You may think that creating more platforms for a brand is the only way to grow a steady rate of groundswell supporters because everyone has that social media account. Or, you may think that creating those various platforms will automatically give you a wider spotlight to use to shine your brand on the people who are active on those social media platforms. The truth is, brands need to build themselves as a personality. They can achieve this by taking advantage of pop culture and trending topics online. It is important to be able to take advantage of various digital cultural opportunities so they can be spread throughout social media platforms. The science behind developing a persona for a specific brand, such as Facebook and Twitter, is subconsciously subdued in how we use and interact with these platforms daily. Facebook has marketed itself primarily as a hub for people to connect at a personal level, whereas Twitter is marketed more during major televised sports events using a hashtag. This idea of branding can lead to different audiences based off of age, with Twitter being used mostly by a younger audience rather than Facebook users. Youtube is now joining the wave of branding by offering a cable free television subscription that offers live TV from more than 40 networks including local sports and news, all for $35 per month. In a nutshell, branding is a set of techniques that are designed to generate cultural relevance among various audiences. If you’re not relevant in culture, then you are not relevant around people.
There are millions of different ways social media can interact with their customers. This is where crowdculture becomes extremely important in building a brand. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding. A company may know what they want represented of themselves to the public, but that image can easily be manipulated and altered by the people who are receiving your message. Understanding how crowdculture unfolds is crucial to the groundswell because it can lead to developing new brand-content strategies that can be taken advantage of via social media.
A recent example of a company that successfully used their marketing model to generate promotional engagement through their groundswell is Tide. In the past month, a new online challenge hit the internet, dubbed “The Tide Pod Challenge.” People who wanted to participate had to record themselves eating a Tide Pod and post it on social media with the hashtag, #TidePodChallenge. Millions of videos were uploaded because of the sheer ridiculousness along with the pure entertainment that the videos were generating. Soon after, there were news reports that doctor’s offices kept getting patients who were severely sick because they participated in the challenge. Not surprisingly, this caught the attention of Tide, in which they tweeted this video with New England Patriots tight end, Rob Gronkowski to address the issue. The tweet received over 97,000 retweets and over 190,000 favorites. Additionally, the post garnered over 250,000 views on Youtube and 158,000 views on Facebook. This is a perfect example of a company using their marketing strategy to maintain a brand name and taking advantage of the attention that was created from the challenge, while using humor at the same time to send a message about what their product should be used for.
Even still, companies have trouble building a brand because of the constant communicational shifts in the social media world. It is difficult for companies to be able to stay up to date with whatever is trending because they rely on basic models of marketing. Companies have to learn to shift their focus towards the digital powers of crowdculture in order to create opportunities for their brands to connect with their target audience. This way, their media content is tailored to be seen by a demographic that best fits their brand name, while also staying relevant in the never ending flow of internet crowd culture.
