photo credit: willem velthoven
Marty Weintraub gave me a call yesterday. After talking to him for a bit I realized that I should probably cover a response to the concepts, the meat, of his brand ambassador discussion.
Where does one draw the line in building “real,” fictional, and hybrid social profiles? How much should be man…how much machine? What does “authentic” really mean? What are the ground rules? What are the golden rules? At what point does any given methodology in creating corporate brand ambassadors cross over to unacceptable, immoral, or unethical? Certainly the tiers of transparency and various approaches to building social media brand ambassador avatars should be carefully evaluated according to the tactics undertaken and the potential benefits and risks.
First some definitions I like from Three Types of Social Media:
- Identity Media: Content that is produced under the authors real name and fully backed as their work.
- Alias Media: Content that is produced under a screen name.
- Anonymous Media: Content that is created outside a registration wall, with no verifiable personal information.
Obviously brand ambassadors are never going to be anonymous media; you need to establish a relationship to be an ambassador. But there are places for both identity media and alias media in ambassador relationships.
Two Examples of Brand Ambassadors:
Dan@Sprint.com - Sprint has had very bad press over customer service, fraudulent charges, and other poor customer dealings. So, they made a commercial with the CEO, Dan Hesse, and put an e-mail at the end of the ad spot. Dan@Sprint.com is an alias for customer service. People get a phone call from the service center to help resolve their problem. Dan is whoever is next on the roster at the call center. Dan Hesse is a personality front for Sprint Customer Service, he is a hybrid of real humans backing a televison/online persona, this is conglomerated alias.
@Zappos (CEO) - If you are on Twitter @Zappos is Tony Hseih. He is use Twitter, I suspect he loves twitter. When you talk to @Zappos you will often get real interactions. Everything from give aways to invitations to karaoke. Tony has made over 800 posts, most showing who he really is, as identity media.
These brand ambassadors work because there are real people behind them. That is the real requirement, people. Any business choosing to create social media content has to make a decision of putting a person out, Tony Hseih, or a persona, Dan@Sprint.com, what they should not be doing is creating person-less shills.
If you have one persona talking to another owned by the same entity, person or company, you are likely being deceitful.
There are definitely times when an individual will have multiple identities for legitimate reasons (e.g. representative for a community/company and a personal persona) in the same space. But, ethically, those personae should not be directly interacting.
Business that are create brand ambassadors have to make a decision around how they plan to use the the Internet as a medium. If you have your representative be their self the relationship with the community changes when they step away form the position. If you have a persona for the brand then you need to take the time to craft a corporate voice that they will maintain as brand ambassador, and rules for how they will engage the community.
User generated content can be very useful for any company, but customer backlash is not an enjoyable experience. The point of social media, with rare exceptions, is to interact. You do not need to be 100% you all the time on the Internet; many people share different parts of themselves in different communities, but they are sharing themselves. Companies should not join communities unless they are willing to invest real people into maintaining their presence and they should be up front about who they represent.
