GETTING GOOD CHAT

So we’ve established that marketing using social means is about conversations. Today I’m going to share my thoughts on how to go about driving good conversations.

In principal, it’s quite simple... you just behave like a shop keeper - a real person, having face-to-face conversations with potential customers. Let’s take John James Sainsbury, the founder of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain, for example. He started his career with a grocery store at 173 Drury Lane in 1869.

John’s guide to good conversations

Here’s three lessons you can learn, from John, about how to start good conversations.

Relevance

Number one is called relevance.

Let’s imagine John James Sainsbury is sat in this cafe opposite these two, who are clearly on a date. John overhears him invite her to come home with him for some dinner. At the till, ‘date guy’ bumps into John. This is John’s opportunity to start a conversation. Does he start telling the guy about the new check-outs he’s installed at the store? No. That would just be weird. Instead, John slides a napkin over to ‘date guy’ with John’s all time winning recipe for impressing a ‘lady friend’. The guy takes a look, thanks John and leaves the cafe with confidence.

“YOU’RE INTERRUPTING. THIS BETTER BE INTERESTING”

We’ve learnt to put some effort into the chat that you put out there. In social spaces, people are not sitting back waiting for marketing messages, they’re going about their social lives. Brands are interrupting. So if you’re going to interrupt, you better have something good to say, or you’ll just get ignored, or worst still, rejected in the long term for being annoying.

Here’s an example to make it more tangible: We were asked, by Barclaycard, to start conversations about PayTag. Instead of directly approaching people with product details, we started a conversation by asking people if we could buy them lunch? And guess what? Lots of them didn’t mind this interruption to their social lives and were willing to have a conversation about getting something for nothing.

he conversation started in advance of the ‘Lunch on Us’ day, when we talked about what we had planned, were asked where people could find us. Chatter exploded on the day and continued days afterwards as potential customers talked to friends about how they got a free lunch paid for with the new product.

ContextBack to John. His next lesson about good conversation is about context. Let’s imagine that a new super club has opened around the corner from his Drury Lane store. Does he rush down there on opening night to tell all the cool kids about his cheese counter? Nope. Again, weird.

DON’T FORCE A CONVERSATION

John creates conversations only where those conversation make sense. So you shouldn’t ask a brand to create a strategy for Pinterest, unless you have a conversation you want to start that naturally fits there. Perhaps John might look at the super-club and decide to start selling kebabs in his store, after hours. But for the time being, the conversations that he wants to start don’t fit naturally there, so he’s not going to force it.

An example where a brand has gone about this in the right order (conversation, then platform) is Guess. They wanted to start a conversation about their new denim spring colour range. They decided to make it about their customers – ask for their point of view on each colour. What’s your favourite and show us what this colour inspires within you.

In this case, Pinterest was a perfect place to have this conversation as the social atmosphere is all about expressing creativity and sharing your findings. So they asked people to create a board of at least 5 items that inspire the colour and fashion bloggers chose what they felt were the best expressions.

Empathy

The final lesson from John is about empathy. Do you think that John has one of these under his shop counter to ‘take-out’ anyone who tries to start a conversation he doesn’t like? No, that would also be weird. And illegal.

IMAGINE THEY’RE STOOD IN FRONT

OF YOU

We should behave in the same way online. Just because there are keys and wires between you, rather than a counter, does not make the merchant-consumer scenario any different to a face-to-face conversation. Deleting their comments on your Facebook page because you don’t like them creates a scene that other people may find distasteful.

Remembering that ‘the customer is always right’ , is a much more sensible way to behave. That way, it’s not even ‘bad conversation’ as you look helpful, responsive and compassionate – which can’t be bad for the brand.

...thanks, John

But before I go. Just one last thing. It’s quite important. This is about impact. It’s tricky to make an impact without much scale. Let’s imagine this guy is the best speaker the world has ever known. Even if these 5 in the audience are really influential within their own networks, it’s going to take much longer for his amazing words to spread than if he’d had a hundred influential people turn up. I guess the learning here is that, if you want to drive good conversations, it’s worth thinking about what you want these conversations to be about right from the minute you start investing in marketing, as this is the quickest way to kick start a conversation.

It’s about thinking about whether your marketing ideas are a conversation starter or not. Cadbury have been doing it since the 80’s, before the guys that created the big blue network were even born, with their ‘how do you eat yours?’ campaign.

Now we have tools at our disposable to guide people towards a natural (online) place to have a conversation (like the hashtag)... And, remember, not all conversation starters need to be a question. This campaign for Nike implicitly stimulates people to share conversation about their new year’s fitness resolution without explicitly asking them.