If It’s about Facebook and Twitter, We Are All Doomed
7 years back when I founded OMLogic, online business was ruled by two major elements – keywords and technology but I was careful not to fall in this trap. I categorically placed the element of ‘communications’ while making the business and strategy plan. This step also led to the naam-karan of the company – OMLogic, bringing logic to online marketing.
Soon enough we had a team who believed the same and we continued weaving the communications part in the brands’ online approach until one day, we saw that the others were doing the same (which essentially meant that everyone was doing the same thing).
Forward 3 years and we transformed into a social media agency but our rationale was the same. We used the online medium for brand evangelism and to create engaging conversations with the desired target audience. We did wonderfully well but we saw the same trend across the board. Take any vertical and Facebook posts from any brand in that vertical (travel, fashion, beauty, real-estate, politics) and you can’t even distinguish which post belongs to which brand. EVERYONE LOOKS ALIKE. Although the online medium gives us the opportunity for ‘Brand Building’, the ‘Brand Differentiation’ element approach needs a lot of work.
This is indeed worrying and hence my current belief – if social media is only about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we are all doomed. And, I won’t be surprised if over the next couple of years a lot of less active brands on social media bring their social media in-house. Because, according to them it’s all about managing a page or two on Facebook and a tweet or a re-tweet on Twitter. And, isn’t it better for brands to put a smart 25 year old (maybe 2) along with a reasonably competent brand manager who together can do most of what the brand needs?
Thankfully, that is not social media. Social media is about coming up with innovative engagement avenues which relate to your brand and act as a differentiator from your competition. These engagement avenues give the brand an edge and provide them with the ‘Brand Differentiation’ factor which increases their community of brand loyalists.
This is what I love about the work we are doing at OMLogic. For us, it’s not only about existing social media platforms, but it’s about how we utilise each of these platforms and create new and innovative tools/platforms to curate conversations. Whether it is a platform to help brands gain insights and completely transform the value they get from their TV ads, or building a collaboration platform to help innovate conversations and engagement with their customers, or a brand evangelism tool to help them use social to reach out to their hundreds of thousands of existing evangelists to promote the brand; OMLogic is fast positioning itself into an organization that helps brands develop brand differentiators on social media.
Each one of us is aware of the impact of social media and it gives me a sense of pride that even after 7 years, we continue to bring logic to the world of online marketing.
