Go Global, Local or Glocal?

National and global brands are faced with two potentially equally appealing options when it comes to managing their brand presence across social channels: have one global presence or create movements at the local level with brand platforms customized by locale.

There really isn’t necessarily a right answer, but there are certainly considerations.

Challenges with an Expanding Social Presence

Brands in the social space are forced to contend with multiple networks, profiles, languages and cultures, even if their presence is only limited to the national level.

One potential solution is establishing a single, unified brand presence across social channels. This helps to keep communication consistent, the team efficient and the look, tone and feel on-brand. However, social media’s greatest opportunity lies in its ability to engage people on their terms and turf online. One unified presence trying to connect with everyone will feel generic at best as the brand is forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator when it comes to communication.

The other option is equally as appealing and imperfect. Brands can mobilize multiple teams to manage their social presence at the local level. This brings the benefit of being able to connect with people on a deeper level while providing more relevant content, leading to higher levels of engagement. The challenge is having different teams, operating independently and potentially fragmenting the brands’ overall social presence.

Go Glocal

The ideal route if a brand can pull it off is a hybrid approach with a single, centralized global team coordinating overarching brand goals, objectives and guidelines, while making local teams responsible for contextualizing content, executing local campaigns and addressing the community.

In order to execute this effectively, among other things brands need:

1. A Style Guide: Create a framework to ensure all teams are able to be flexible with their social media efforts while remaining consistent on tone and message.
2. Profile Consistency: All brand profiles should have the same consistent look and feel and be connected with each other to improve profile SEO. Local teams should have the freedom to customize certain elements based on geography and audience. An overarching social media strategy and voice is needed to act as the filter through which all teams can operate freely while staying on-brand.
3. Workflow/Roles/Responsibilities: Establish a workflow with roles, responsibilities and protocols laid out.
4. Local Freedom to Explore Opportunities: Use local teams to your advantage by asking them to identify social media opportunities at the ground level.

Different platforms require different levels of detail and effort. Facebook, in particular, makes a glocal approach fairly straightforward. Brands can target posts by geography, and the recently launched global pages allow brands to create a centralized global Facebook Page that displays differently depending on which country a user is viewing the page from.

Evaluate your current approach. Is a single presence connecting at the local level like it should? Do you have the necessary framework to execute at the local level? It’s not easy, but moving toward a glocal approach provides a big opportunity for both national and global brands.

Things I’ve Learned from Lately #7

“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Going Local With Social – Clara Shih of AdAge writes about how brands can make their social efforts succeed at the local level: aligning internally, claiming social-local pages and empowering employees at the ground level.

Key Takeaway: Success in any social effort, whether it’s local or something else, requires the fundamentals. Shih’s article lays out three key steps that any brand should do for any effort. You have to have internal alignment, your social properties accounted for and employees able to deliver on the promise you communicate through social channels.

Consumers Rely on Reviews – eMarketer shared the results of a study showing that consumers trust brands that offer reviews more than brands that do not. In fact, “84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources.”

Key Takeaway: A brand’s word isn’t enough anymore, and making reviews hard to find means consumers will probably just look elsewhere for what they need versus making a purchase without question. Brands are being shaped by what others have to say as much as they are shaping themselves, which means embracing consumer reviews will make a brand stand out from the crowd and build trust with existing and potential customers.

The Power of Social Data – A new algorithm has come out that’s able to use Twitter to predict whether or not you’ll get sick in the next eight days with 90% accuracy. The algorithm comes from researchers at the University of Rochester after analyzing 4.4 million tweets with GPS information over the course of one month.

Key Takeaway: The amount of data we’re generating is staggering. If we can do this with the flu, imagine if we could use social data to predict when someone will run out of a product, allowing us to proactively reach out to them. That’s just one example of the power of social data and why listening and analyzing is essential.

Twitter’s Bold New Path – We’ve discussed Twitter’s recent lockdowns on its API on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn regularly on the Brave Ad World podcast. AllThingsD breaks down some of Twitter’s latest moves, the reasons why and the path ahead.

Key Takeway: Nothing in this space can be taken for granted. Brands that invest too much in one platform will find themselves scrambling when and if that platform changes as some Twitter app developers are right now. It’s important to be both wide and deep when it comes to social media investment.

It’s difficult to say with absolute certainty what Twitter’s future holds. It’s burned some bridges with developers but at the benefit of becoming a more attractive advertising platform. However, users have been accustomed to their third-party apps. If Twitter cuts them off, there may be some backlash.