Scenario mapping and social media

Pete Blackshaw, a keynote speaker at this year’s DMX Digital Marketing conference, has a reassuring old-school starting point when navigating new media. “It’s about knowing your consumer deeply, it’s the timeless fundamentals of marketing,” says Blackshaw who flew into Dublin for the conference from his base in Switzerland, where he is vice-president of digital and social media for Nestle.

The company produces approximately 1,500 pieces of content daily across social channels from Twitter to Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Companies don’t have a choice, he says, when it comes to engaging with social media, because it’s what consumers expect.

“Consumers have moved to these centres of attention so they expect a response, just as you’d staff at a call centre, customers expect a company to have an ‘always on’ media centre.” And while in the early days many companies considered they were “looking after social” by getting an intern to tweet or do the occasional Facebook posting, Nestle’s social media strategy is all about planning. The idea of a “content calendar” is embedded in the strategy.

“Let’s say the target for a brand is to put out 100 items on social media a month – 60 per cent of that will be planned long in advance, the rest will be contextualised by events.” He cites the example of Kit Kat – a Nestle brand. When the new Apple iPhone was launched there were soon several reports of it bending. Kit Kat was quick to upload a message to the effect that Kit Kats don’t bend, they break. It was, he says, shared by hundreds of thousands of consumers who got the joke – and the brand message.

He talks too of “scenario mapping”, noting that in the early days of social media there was a high level of “immediate response”, a lightning speed facilitated by the nature of social media that was not always wise. There is, he says, a “massive fragmentation of channels” so the challenge is to “keep the brand essence and character” across all those channels. For a global brand, operating in multiple markets with thousands of products working with a new media that is as Blackshaw says “cross geography” and “agnostic” is always challenging. That is he says where local brand managers come in, people who understand regional sensitivities. It’s also important, he says, that companies understand that engaging in social media gives them “a deeper insight into their customer”.

“These online conversations are very revealing of brand value,” says Blackshaw.