Image by Danndalf

This post has been rattling around in my brain for many months now, never quite finding its true form. It was not until yesterday that I realized my frustration in finding the appropriate expression was not due to my own cerebral impotence, but because the question posed in the title is, in fact, one of the most difficult marketing questions of our time.

If we are more connected than ever before, why has it become more difficult than ever to make a connection?

Please note that I am making use of the varied definitions of “connected.” We are more connected, in that we are more “joined”, or “linked,” but a true connection (“association; relationship”) is harder than ever to establish and maintain.

By alancleaver_2000

The vast majority of posts here on Context Over Dogma deal with social media specifically with respect to use in marketing. But as we all know, social media has implications throughout our lives and across numerous business and personal disciplines. Every so often, we like to address a non-marketing facet of the social media world in which we live and play. These issues will, in some way, affect us all.

Early last week, I came across an article that detailed goings-on at The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. During a recent job interview with the Department of Corrections, Officer Robert Collins was forced to give up the password to his private Facebook account. Rallying to Officer Collins’ defense was the ACLU, which sent a particularly scathing letter to the Maryland Department of Corrections, in which it called the move “a frightening and illegal invasion of privacy” and stated that “[n]either Officer Collins nor his Facebook ‘friends’ deserve to have the government snooping about their private electronic communications.”

I shared the article with my own Facebook friends, and watched the comments roll in: “NO!”, “$%*& NO!”, “%@#&#* &#*&@!” etc… If colorful metaphors can be taken as indication, clearly, a nerve had been touched.

Image by NickNguyen

In business, I hear a lot of talk about “touch points.” Consumer touch points, customer touch points, even employee touch points.

Touch points are important. The more you “touch” a consumer, the deeper your brand gets embedded into them. This, however, works with both good touch points and bad ones. A bad customer service experience is still a touch point, and will leave a lasting mark in the mind of the consumer.

But I think we need to also talk about “trust points.” Rather than looking at how many opportunities we have to touch a consumer (i.e. engage with them somehow), let’s look at how many opportunities we have to deepen a consumer’s trust in us (a “trust point”).

This is something I have been thinking about lately with our own clients, but I urge you to munch on this morsel as well. In a typical week, how many trust points do you have with an average consumer? With all of the social media tools available, brands have more opportunities than ever to gain trust and keep it. Unfortunately that means brand also have more opportunities than ever to mess up and lose a consumer’s trust. But that’s for another post.

Don’t just increase touch points, increase trust points.

Image by Beverly & Pack

If I had a nickel for every time someone brought up “brand voice” in a marketing meeting over the past year, I honestly think I’d be a millionaire. “Brand voice” is one of those concepts that’s easy to say, but hard to correctly put into practice. Over the past few months, however, it has occurred to me that a discussion about “brand voice” isn’t even the right discussion to have. We need to be talking about “brand voices”

Oh…that’s right…plural!

There has been (and still is) entirely too much emphasis on creating a massive, omnipresent Voice with which a brand communicates to all consumers at all times; as if consumers would rebel and lose faith in the absence of this Arch-Voice to guide them along the dark paths of the modern world. This is absurd, and its silliness has become even more apparent as conversational mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, YouTube, and blogs increase in importance in a brand’s communication plan.

I’ll start this post with complete honesty: I do not have an answer to this question. Indeed, I hope to elicit some good discussion in the comments because this question has been on my mind for some months now.

The background to the question is simple. We all know that the social media landscape is changing faster than most can keep up with. For the most part, early-adopting consumers tend to be the first to jump cannon-ball style into any new technological pool. Once the waters are proven safe and comfortable, other consumers join in, all eventually followed by large, lumbering brands that want to join the party. We’ve seen this with Facebook, Twitter, mobile applications, etc.

The sheer size and labyrinthine organizational structure of most large brands has pretty much prevented them from being the first to splash into any new pool. Lately, however, I have noticed a distinct increase in the speed with which many brands are jumping on various new media bandwagons.