At Dachis Group, we have a framework for developing branded experiences that are social by design, and we leverage it every single time we concept one of our programs. To quickly summarize the process:
- Determine the business requirements:
- What are the business objectives?
- What are the social metrics?
- What are the social goals?
- Pinpoint the interaction driver(s) for the consumer:
- Emotional connection
- Fame and/or fortune
- Fun and entertainment
- Utility
- Focus on the building blocks of social:
- Identity
- Conversation
- Community
When branded social concepts are created using this process, they can win, but it’s not a guarantee; the process only allows you to see the exercise through the proper lens. As a matter of fact, even if you use the above framework, the program can still flop. When this happens, it’s normally due to the miscalibration of one of the three steps. I.e. you didn’t understand the business requirements clearly enough, or you didn’t have an accurate enough picture of your consumer’s interaction drivers, or you didn’t incorporate 3.A, 3.B. or 3.C effectively, naturally, and in the correct order. Nobody said coming up with large-scale social experiences was easy.
Layer onto this straightforward, but challenging, framework the fact that landscape and technologies of this space change not by the decade, or year, or even quarter, but literally by the minute (a fascination that has resulted in the ritual of live blogging a conference). When there are so many shiny new tactics coming at you from all angles, it isn’t easy to see through the clutter when trying to incorporate social technologies, features, and functionality into a digital branded experience.
That said, there is one ‘easy’ way to tell if your social concept and its associated feature set will be a hit with your consumers, or if it will be met with crickets. I say ‘easy’ because for some folks, this is much easier than for others. It’s call The Sniff Test, and it’s certainly not new. The act of stepping out of your skin and asking, “would anyone actually participate in this?” It’s the gut-check of experience concepting.
We can get very caught up in the movement of the space, and we can get excited about all of the new functionality that may now be at our fingertips, as digital marketers, but without taking a step outside of the theoretical (or physical) whiteboarding room, nearly all of your concepts may seem like heaters. Why? Because they’re your concepts. They have your expertise, your technical know-how, your time and effort contained within them. It’s a bias we all carry. It’s only when you ask questions like, “would I/my friends/my parents/my kids do this?” that you can be confident in a social concept.
There are so many radical changes happening in this space each day, making it even more important to apply The Sniff Test during concepting so as not to go down the veritable rabbit hole of social app functionality. That’s not to say you can make due without a mastery of those new social app functions, or at least someone in your corner who has; you certainly do. Simply that once you’ve equipped yourself with the latest and greatest in the social functionality toolbox, and you’ve established a concept or three using the above framework for developing branded experiences that are social by design, don’t let those concepts out the door without ensuring that they’ve all passed The Sniff Test.
“The sniff test” is part of the job description of an agency creative director. In fact, it’s a big chunk of what they do day to day. The CD role is generally filled by experienced, highly-skilled craftspeople who are empathetic, idea-generating, critical thinkers.
I’ve always held that an agency model should see the account services teams as the client representative inside the agency while the creative (and tech) services teams, led by the creative director, as the representatives of the end customer inside the agency. If you look at it through this lens, the sniff test actually gets built into the agency process because you have teams continually asking whether this is the right solution for the customer or end user.
It seems this post appears geared towards marketers, so rather than suggest every marketer needs an agency to develop their SM programs, I’ll throw out the idea that perhaps marketers should consider the idea of having some sort of ‘internal creative director’ role.
Thanks for the interesting post.