At Brains On Fire we’ve been fortunate to see a brand bring it home. Getting to witness online chats between crafting tool engineers (men) and crafters (women) was and continues to be a brand changing experience for Fiskars.

Chris you’ve said it before “the first one there owns the game.” Three years ago it was fairly easy to start a new party of conversations. But now parties of conversations are everywhere and a brand really has to ask itself “can I really bring something new to the table?”

Some brands are now asking for a community to be born, crawl, and walk in a traditional-media time frame. This thinking really doesn’t help our cause, trying to get customers, fans to start to trust a conversation with the brand.
All that said, I think brands do have to make sure they “get some credit” for the conversation if they go down the social media path. Just slow down.

Maybe a loose paraphrase of the general message (which for precision’s sake I’m just going to say is “close enough”) is that with all the dispersed commenting and activity going on around a brand, it’s going to be important for brands to develop both goals, and the flexibility (skill, insight, adaptability) so that they can take advantage of everything that’s going on like you’ve given examples of (strong community voices) and be able to tie it back in to the goals.

I leave out the idea of “bringing it home” in that statement because it seems appropriate that “bringing it home” and doing something integrating foreign comments or tweet backs onto your own site seems more appropriate as something a brand might want to do to, and not necessarily something every company *should* do. Funnily enough this is the 2nd time this week I’m excited about trying out a product coming out soon called UberVU which gives conversation monitors that power.

To take a very simple example, a brand could send out a video, assuming they get it right – think Cadbury’s Gorilla or Doritos Crystal ball – this will start a lot of conversations.

They then need to listen out for these conversations and connect in an open way with the people who are having them. For a video this might include joining in with a hashtag discussion on twitter and answering questions about who came up the idea, what’s next etc. This all needs to be done in such a way that it reinforces brand values – and many of the conversations started in this way will have the brand in question as their focus point.

This is a very basic take on how I think a brand could start to engage with its’ customers – I am sure that many sophisticated techniques will develop over the coming years enabling brand owners to connect in a meaningful way and en mass with their audiences. But it will only work if they are open, helpful, learn to reply quickly and have humans at the other end of the interface – this will be a painful change for a lot of brand owners to make.

Hang onto your hats – it’s going to be an exciting journey and we are only just scratching the surface at the moment. Like Malcolm I’m also open to the idea that I’m totally off track here, but thanks to Lynne and Chris for once again starting an interesting discussion.