Over the past decade, the concept of a "brand" has evolved quickly and significantly, in large part due to social media. Before social media, companies and brands relied on a few meticulously chosen indicators (color, font, images and select catchphrases) to convey their purpose and personality. Nowadays, brands have invaded our personal online profiles and have used them to build complex personas and identities of their own.
Consider the history of Social Media. Friendster, MySpace and Facebook were all developed as virtual hang-out spaces. They were online platforms designed for people to meet and interact with friends - they were not meant for company profiles or brands. Look at the layout of a Facebook profile; you have your pictures, your friends, your personal updates, your profile information...everything that summarizes you as a person. As with anything new, the business savvy looked to this Web 2.0 trend for a market opportunities. It quickly became evident that if brands were going to utilize this highly trafficked space, they were going to have to behave more like individual people and less like large corporations - and that's exactly what they did.
Nowhere is this paradigm shift from a brands espousing a company/sales persona to a personal persona more evident than on Twitter. Twitter, which basically functions as a place to publicly broadcast text messages, thrives on personal wit and clever insight. The most popular tweeters are the ones that show the Twittersphere a 140 character glimpse of their personality.
"Buy my product now #lowprices"
quickly failed to generate responses. Instead, we saw the rise of clever and quirky tweeting like
@Skittles "It's getting warm again, and you know what that means; the squirrels are back. And they want your Skittles".
With that one tweet we know that Skittles is a "person" because they're tweeting about something as it happens in their environment. Social media affords quick and topical advertisement since publication is instant and copy space is limitless and free. With that tweet we also get a glimpse at what type of person Skittles is. We know they like to be outside, but that they are slightly strange and vaguely paranoid, and that they value their snack above all else. Pre social media, creating a potentially polarizing company persona like that would have never happened. Social media has given brands the freedom to experiment with the way they communicate with their consumers, and just like awkward middle schoolers trying to figure out how to be popular, the influential brands on Twitter all have a unique personality....a hook...a thing that sets them apart from all of the other #ads.
@Oreo encourages their fans to get creative with the product,
@OldSpice is snarky and acts like an alpha-male,
and @SmartCarUSA is slightly self-deprecating.
The people who follow these brands have likely done so because those personalities align with their own. This is part of the reasoning behind millennials using brand alignment as personality markers. Individuals and brands can interact in a much more direct and intimate way than they ever have been able to historically, just by sending a tweet.
So my question is....who's retweeting you, and what does that say about your inner consumer?
P.S. for anyone who's curious, the brands I follow are
@THEPROBAR
@Seamless
@FocusFeatures
@BuzzFeed
@StoneBrewingCo
@GeneralElectric
@LANow (The LA Times)
@Chobani
@FastCompany
@Skittles
and
@StarWars
....deduce from that what you will.