Just finished lunch with Marc Gobé, friend, mentor, and the man behind Emotional Branding (where I’m an advisor):
emotionalbranding.com
The topic of conversation was largely…conversations. The conversations brands have with their customers, the conversations customers have with and around brands, and how to aggregate the conversation in a way that makes sense. For instance, I’m working my way through and testing the available Twitter tools so that I can ask a question both here and on Twitter, and bring the various comments and discussions back here in one place, making the discussion more immediate and vibrant.

The conversation idea is of course not new. It’s the tools we have to engage it which are multiplying. But does every brand need a conversation? If I’m P&G and a majority of my brands improve various areas of the home experience, I’m going to build something successful like homemadesimple.com . This is an ongoing engagement with my customer and although my brands are present throughout, it’s not blatantly brandcentric nor intrusive, and in fact it’s possible to completely miss the branding (this is a good thing). So, P&G and Tide, Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Febreze, etcetera, definitely benefit from having this conversation and so do their consumers.

Marc and I wondered, though: does a company which makes, say, galvanized pipe for irrigation need a brand conversation? What attributes does pipe need to have besides being strong, not leaking,  and being well-priced in its market? It would seem ridiculous to have social actions for a pipe manufacturer, right? Well, yes, and no.
For the sake of galvanized pipe discussion, I looked at Morrill Industries . Turns out there are an awful lot of attributes to galvanized irrigation pipe, none of which are probably fascinating to brand people- but they definitely justify a conversation about “Couplers, Tees, Crosses, 90° Ells, 45° Ells, Hex Bushings, Bell Reducers, Reducing Tees, Street Ells……..” – in the right venue.
Facebook’s the wrong place for this, as is any broad-based social application which is difficult to shrink to a specialization- but an aggregated Twitter discussion group could definitely work. Morrill could have the only hex bushing for particular situations, and its audience would never know that if it were not engaged in the conversation. (I have absolutely no idea what a hex bushing is, btw.)

Moral of the story: yes, Dorothy, you can engage social media, but not in a paint-by-numbers way. Find the right destination; don’t just toss darts at Twitter and Flickr; and if what you do/sell is specialized, corral that community even if you do so within a larger social context .