What Lady Gaga knows about Social Media that we don’t:

Every time I hear this phrase, it reminds me of Captain Kirk’s famous catchphrase ‘Beam me up, Scotty’. From the much popular TV series Star Trek we all grew up with. Ironically even Scotty would have scoffed at this request in today’s time of Social Media driven marketing initiatives.Looks like, ‘’ ambition is becoming more contagious among practitioners than the campaigns themselves. But is it really to do with our respective digital fluency, strategies, game plans, tools deployed & execution techniques, or simply the brazen truth, that we don’t own the ‘Brands’ in the Social world. Real People do.As Kevin Alloca, Trends Manager at Youtube points out that “the videos that go really viral [over 1 Million views] are surprisingly the ones that were never posted with that intent.” However he is quick to add that “what made them really go viral was the element of ‘unexpectedness’ about them which caught the attention of ‘tastemakers’ and online communities who accelerated the social sharing process [and not the originators of these videos].”While buzz concepts of Crowd-Sourcing, People to People Marketing, Testimonials, & User reviews, Nurturing Communities and Social Engagement all sound nice and proper,Welcome to the, over here ‘content’ is the only celebrity, ‘brand deeds’ the only competitive edge, ‘making the conversations flow’ the only strategy and ‘accepting & admitting to flaws’ your trump card to applause. Lady Gaga would agree, real people hangout here, so show-up with make-up and act yourself, they might just find you interesting.The magic word I guess for all of us in this virtual-real world as aptly pointed out by Trendwatching.com is Mature+ Naturalism = Maturalism or what I call ‘Being Human about a Brand’. Interestingly enough, increasingly brands are getting mature about their online worlds and embracing the no make-up policy when it comes to breathing online.Few inspirational cases that walked the talk on acting Mature & Real:This is the story of how Johnson & Johnson won back its outraged women customers protesting against the news of their popular O.B. Ultra tampon product discontinuation. Instead of acting smart, cheeky or conventionally clever, they decided to be human. They did what any man would do to win back his love who was upset with him. They choose the power of romance and dedicated a ballad apology video exclusively to her, where-in each lady could fill in their name and see her personalized power ballad apology video.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-GrX0zE5H8[/youtube]Conventionally any brand would have defended its position when faced with widespread dissent about its product quality that got triggered by an inappropriate employee conduct video that went viral. But Domino Pizza chose to be brave about the whole episode by turning the situation on its head. They used it to delight customers with a ‘Transparent journey into product re-invention’ shared openly with customer across social media platforms. In fact they went ahead and took New York’s Times Square for a month to live-stream all (good and bad) customer feedback tweets onto the digital hoarding, in the process winning the customers back.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag[/youtube]

Here’s the story of another brand who took an extremely bold stance of everyone can’t become a fan of your brand. Kraft Foods’ Miracle Whip brand launched a campaign in February 2011 with the slogan, ‘We’re not for everyone. Are you Miracle Whip?’ The brand’s YouTube channel featured celebrities expressing their love (or disgust) for the mayonnaise-like condiment, while viewers could vote for whether they loved or hated the sauce. By February 2012, 60,000 people had ‘loved’ the brand while only 4,000 had ‘hated’ it. In process they build admiration among both users and non-users for off-course different reasons.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbfIZrNC7c[/youtube]

Sure Social Media world can go Gaga over our brands too, provided:a) We embrace maturity of purpose: Being Human about brandsb) Ditch the make-up and show the real, vulnerable selfc) Don’t aspire to be flawless, rather embrace limitationsd) Take a stance, the social world would respect us for ite) Just cool technology stunts would not propel our brandsf) Don’t aspire to go ‘Viral’ but go ‘Unexpected’And gladly our Scotty would ‘beam us up’.