Is Your Brand A Maven Or A Wallflower ?

It’s official: engagement through social media has created the biggest brands in the world

A fascinating report by Charlene Li, a partner in the Altimeter Group, and Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint, examines the top 100 most engaged global brands as rated by BusinessWeek and Interbrand. It explains how brands fall into one of four engagement profiles depending on the number of social media (SM) channels they have and their depth of engagement in them.

The four profiles are:

• Mavens – brands with seven or more SM channels with high levels of engagement across each. These brands have dedicated SM teams and ‘could not imagine operating without a strong presence in social media’. Examples include Starbucks and Dell.

• Butterflies – brands with seven or more SM channels but lower levels of engagement across each. These brands ‘still struggle with getting the full buy-in from their organizations to embrace the full multi-way conversation that deep engagement entails’. Examples include American Express and Hyundai.

• Selectives – brands with six or less SM channels with high levels of engagement across each. Often hamstrung by the lack of a dedicated SM team, they ‘focus on engaging customers deeply when and where it matters most’. Examples include retail group H&M and Philips.

• Wallflowers – brands with six or less SM channels but lower levels of engagement across each. They are ‘cautious about the risks [of SM engagement], uncertain about the benefits, and therefore engage only lightly in the channels where they are present’. Examples include McDonald’s and BP.

Li and Elowitz apply their findings to the BusinessWeek/Interbrand 2008 list of the top 100 worldwide brands – and the results speak for themselves. The top 13 places are all filled by Mavens. The first Butterfly (Oracle) appears at number 14, the first Selective (H&M) at number 23 and the first Wallflower (Coca-Cola – surprisingly, perhaps) at a lowly number 51.

For the record, the top 10 are:

1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. eBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Intel and Yahoo (joint result)

The most successful brands, by a proverbial country mile, are those that actively engage with their customers through a number of different social media channels. This doesn’t mean employing a vast SM team (Starbucks has just six people overseeing 11 SM channels), but it does prove that simply setting up a Facebook fan page and asking your customers to ‘like’ it isn’t enough.

Engagement is the cornerstone of relationship marketing and this report should provide food for thought for anyone who continues to doubt the engagement-creating opportunities offered by SM marketing.