Fear of the unknown seems to be a handy leverage point for many companies in the social brand monitoring space.

Ive been doing quite a bit of due diligence on various social media brand monitoring solutions of late. As a result, I recently posted an article on my corporate blog www.affinitidigital.com.au regarding what seems to be an emerging polarity in the way that brands are being “sold” the notion of social media – and of brand monitoring in particular. Sure, in any emerging media there will always be extremes. Zealots, like those espousing the virtues of the internet in the late ‘90s, will inevitably ring in yet another new order and tell established marketers that everything they know is wrong. Despite the extreme nature of this approach, it is atleast positive – and is infinitely preferable to the zealot’s evil twin who instills paranoia and fear.

Unfortunately, there are a growing number of companies who seem to view and encourage their clients to view social brand monitoring purely for damage control and without any intention of customer engagement. There is an inherent risk with this approach. It focuses attention upon tools rather than outcomes. Brand monitoring often falls victim to this. Whilst it forms part of a broader strategy, monitoring the “social conversation” is not an end unto itself.

The problem with a fear-driven approach is that it treats monitoring purely as a defensive tool and therefore encourages brands to simply find new ways to be evasive, protective and guarded. This conventional PR lock-down thinking is the antithesis of what the social ethos is about – and it gets brands into trouble.

Read the full post on www.affinitidigital.com.au.

Image: Fotolia:© Charles Dykstra

(Tip of the hat to Adam Singer’s Fear Nothing post for adding fuel to the fire whilst I was writing this.)

As consumers we are supposed to be getting smarter – or at least more rational.

To help with this evolution, the internet offers an endless array of comparison and peer review sites designed to help you locate the ultimate house, camera, insurance policy or nanny – all with a few mouse clicks. These sites are intended to remove emotive brand triggers and bring consumers back to the empirical fold.

Purists hold this as the ideal model because it provides an empiric, non branded comparison environment which places the emphasis on features and price. In doing so, in theory anyway, it reduces or removes the less tangible emotive qualities that give branded products a level of dominance that sometimes outweighs the product’s tangible features. These emotive factors are frequently dismissed as noise.

There’s no doubt that this style of rational purchasing behaviour is very popular. In fact, according to BIG Research, 89% of consumers making in-store purchases in key retail categories have conducted online research prior to purchase. This would lead you to think that we can all look forward to becoming far more sensible consumers.

However, it may be that our own method of reasoning may work against us.

Earlier this year, accomplished author and Wired journo Jonah Lehrer reviewed a paper by Leonard Lee, Dan Ariely, and On Amir published in the Journal of Consumer Research which suggests that consumers who use their emotional reasoning are actually more consistent in their decision-making.

As Lehrer relates; “It is possible consumers would be much happier with choices based more on their emotional reaction. For example, if one buys a house and relies on very cognitive attributes such as resale value, one may not be as happy actually living in it, as opposed to a person who attends to his or her emotional reaction to the house prior to purchasing it.

Indeed, our results suggest that the heart can very well serve as a more reliable compass to greater long-term happiness than pure reason… subjects who relied more on their emotional system made a more consistent set of decisions.”

He goes on to say that “The scientists (Lee, Ariely and Amir) speculate that the internet leads consumers to engage in more rational deliberation, since there are fewer affective cues…and yet, this sort of thinking might also lead to consumer inconsistency.”

The irony, as Lehrer observes is that it may actually turn out that the more we try to be rational, the more we come to rely on our less tangible natures.

A lot of social media discussion about blogging assumes that readers have a common understanding of what blogging is in 2009 (nearly 2010).

I know that from a personal perspective the term “blogging” evokes mental images of my favourite niche blogs – all of which are best of breed publishing websites in their own right. So, it came as a shock recently to find that the term “blog” often generates far less positive perceptions in broader corporate circles.

I find myself frequently detailing the virtues of various social media components as part of a well-rounded digital strategy. The discussion generally includes the creation and management of blogs; in part as a means of handing control of the website content back to the comms team, introducing dynamic distributable content back into the website, and introducing an engagement mindset for the brand.

Now, its still relatively common for larger brands to have static web 1.0 websites. And it’s not uncommon for content on these sites to be locked down by draconian change management cycles that require a strong belief in reincarnation. So you would think that clients desperate to unshackle their websites would embrace blogging with gusto, yes? No. Instead, the momentum of the conversation starts to falter.

I started to wonder if the term “blog” evoked a different understanding amongst those who have better things to do than follow the evolution of social media. So I started asking what “blogging” meant. I asked friends who were brand managers. I asked media agency contacts. I asked SMEs who were starting their social media journey.

I discovered that the word “blog” consistently summoned mental images of post-puberty journals, emotive Dear Diary litanies and complex, detailed accounts of less than complex lives. Any wonder that some corporate clients reach for their blackberries and start checking their email whenever the topic comes up.

Whilst there is no doubt that Blogspot and WordPress.com play host to terabytes of personal musings that may have been better left as passing thoughts, the craft of blogging has itself evolved into something quite different.

Most of the blogs at the upper end of the Ad Age Top 150 bear more similarity to dynamic niche magazine publishing websites than they do to the traditional “weblog” from which the blog derives its name. It only takes a cursory glance at mashable.com,problogger.net, sitepoint or any number of top tier blogs to sense the vast distance that the apple has now fallen from the tree.

Unfortunately, the perception amongst the broader business community has yet to catch up with these changes – and makes me wonder if the “blog” terminology short-sells its legitimacy.

Since most of my clients are very familiar with mainstream media I decided to borrow from magazine terminology. I discovered that when posts became articles, bloggers became columnists, features editors or publishers (depending upon the style and application of the blog) something interesting happened. Blogs became something very different and far more deservingly legitimate in the mind of the client.

I’m sure that some of you will say that clients should get it without having to change the terminology – that marketers should keep up with developments. Maybe they should – but they don’t. I read an article earlier this week that suggested that any marketer that didn’t have a strong understanding of digital should not be in the job.

My experience is that plenty of very competent senior marketers rely on external parties for guidance and maybe don’t always get the advice they need. Understandably, some are reluctant to ask possibly embarrassing questions.

Either way, not all clients have the same understanding of what blogging is. I have found that drawing parallels with what is familiar and comfortable changes that understanding and introduces the appropriate level of legitimacy.

If you sense that you and your client are thinking different things, using the publisher comparison is one way to create some common ground with non-digital marketers and create an area of comfort in which the client can ask questions – and hopefully embrace new opportunities.