There is no denying that — for non-Luddites, at least — Facebook and Google have drastically transformed the way we communicate, interact, and navigate online.
Because of this influence, Facebook and Google are at the forefront of public debate around the intersection of free speech, privacy, and technology. And as the Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook and Vice President of Legal at Google, respectively, Monika Bickert and Nicole Alston are often the ones doing the talking.
We connected with Bickert and Alston at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival to learn how they keep pace with the rapid rate of change in brand communication today. From our conversation, here are three over-arching trends for marketers to keep top of mind, plus a few predictions for what will come with the next decade of social media and communication tools:
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TRANSPARENT STORYTELLING IS ESSENTIAL TO EFFECTIVE BRAND COMMUNICATION.
When asked about their approach to communicating on emerging tech issues, both Bickert and Alston agreed that the days of stoicism and opaque, robotic press releases are numbered.
“If you just watched our session, one thing that you may have seen was that people don’t necessarily understand the scope of the issues that we grapple with on a daily basis until we do engage in some storytelling,” said Bickert.
“When we tell people what it’s like to walk through a decision as to whether or not a piece of content stays up or stays down, and we talk about the various nuances of that decision, through that story, people start to understand the real issue. That phenomenon is something we see occurring every day, where people are engaging in discourse or debate on services like Facebook.”
For Google, Nicole Alston noted that taking a proactive approach to sensitive issues like personal data is essential to their communication strategy:
“I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings that exist right now around Google, particularly in Europe, and we recognize there’s so much more that we can do to tell our story. If you look at things like data, people are nervous about what data Google has or what they’re going to do with it. Transparency through storytelling is the way to solve that problem.”
“I think that people understand the complexity when they actually understand real-life examples of the types of requests that we’re getting, why they’re difficult, and how we think about them. That only comes from telling the story so that people can understand, and with that understanding, people just get a lot more comfortable with everything that Google’s doing, or Facebook’s doing.”
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INDIVIDUALS HAVE MORE AUTONOMY WITH ONLINE CONTENT CURATION — AND IT’S CHANGING HOW BRANDS CAN INTERACT WITH THEIR AUDIENCE.
For marketers, it often feels like Facebook is introducing a new algorithm change or experimenting with the psychology of social sharing on their platform on a daily basis. When it comes to estimating organic reach or establishing best practices for reaching your audience, we just have to accept that dynamism is the new status quo.
While this is frustrating for marketers who have put in the hard work to amass a large number of Facebook fans, Monika Bickert offered this reminder that users will see greater control of the content they are exposed to on social networks in the years to come:
“One of the things that I think you see from looking at the history of social media and products like Facebook and YouTube is the evolution of tools that allow people to see what they want to see, and share how they want to share.
If you remember back to the way Facebook looked a few years ago, it was very different. There were fewer tools to individualize your experience. Over time, we’ve learned that people do like to shape the experience that they’re having online, and there are ways that we can help them do that.
If you are on Facebook, your News Feed is not just a replication of what all of your friends are posting. It is based on content that you’ve interacted with, things that you’ve liked, things that you’ve commented on. So our tools can help people, but really the bottom line is to give people control over their own experience. They can filter to see what they want to see and share what they want to share.”
In short, keep in mind that the power is with the people. As the Facebook algorithm continues to evolve and provide more relevant content to users, getting your content seen by audiences on Facebook (and other social networks) will require more work, more budget, or more of both than ever before.
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EVEN SOCIAL NETWORKS THEMSELVES HAVE CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING STRATEGIES.
As each hot new social media platform arises, there is a virtual gold rush. Brands clamber to explore the capabilities each new platform offers to engage audiences in innovative ways. (Here’s looking at you, SnapChat.)
While each new platform won’t be an ideal demographic fit for every brand, the fact remains that omni-channel marketing is a necessity. Even the social networks themselves have cross-platform brand presences, as Nicole Alston noted:
“Using YouTube as an example, YouTube has its own personal channel on YouTube, but we also have an account on Twitter. We also are on Facebook, and sometimes we see more activity on Twitter or Facebook than we do even on our own channels, which we’re working very hard to actually change.”
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CONCLUSION: HOW WILL THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF MARKETING CHANGE IN THE NEXT DECADE?
Since the theme for the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival was to “imagine 2024,” we posed the following question to Bickert and Alston: “How will the strategic role of marketing change by 2024?”
Monika Bickert:
“One thing companies can do is be more interactive, and services like Facebook and YouTube allow people to do that like never before. If you think about what the experience was growing up and watching a television commercial, you had no role in that message.
Then fast forward to today, where if I’m interested in buying a car, and I think, “Maybe I want to buy a Jeep,” I can go to Jeep’s Page on Facebook, and there are ways that I can interact with Jeep’s content on Facebook and understand the product in a way that I would never be able to do by watching a television commercial.
The social media tools are out there now for advertisers and for business people. Even the smallest and most independent of businesses, they can market very effectively using these tools.”
Nicole Alston:
“I think that marketing initiatives really require you to get to know your users. If you’re going to innovate and provide products and services that are useful and create positive experiences for users, then you do have to do that marketing and engage with your users, engage with your constituents, understand what their concerns are, and address them.
You can only do that through marketing initiatives. It’s so very powerful, and I think that Google has learned to do more and more of that over the last couple of years, and I think you’ll see a lot more of that in the future.”
Monika Bickert and Nicole Alston spoke at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival on a panel moderated by Jeffrey Rosen, Presdient and CEO of the National Constitution Center. For more from Monika and Nicole, watch the complete session, “Facebook, Google, and the Future of Free Speech,” on The Aspen Institute’s YouTube channel below:
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