What yeswecan said, but to expand: people like brands - they will gladly and openly declare their brand allegiances on their profiles. We saw this before Pages even came out.

What people don't want to do is to be constantly bombarded by bullshit communications from said brands. In many ways, openly declaring your brand preferences is signaling - the "liking" of brands is for their friends, not an enthusiastic wish to receive "special offers" from you. What they dislike even more are the highly intrusive ways brands are marketing themselves on Facebook.

It's great that you're running a promotion for a brand I like. No, I will not let you post to my wall as me. No, I will not spam 15 of my friends with your stupid offer before actually receiving said promo. No, I don't want to be forced to "Like" your stupid brand before I can even look at your page.

Brands, I want to receive pertinent information from you. If Starbucks is opening a new store in my area, I totally want to hear about it. What I don't want to hear are bullshit "news stories" concocted by your marketing department that is entirely content-free and screams like a cheap attempt to keep your name in my head.

But it works, which is why they do it.

I work with some brands on trying to measure this and in many cases I'm not sure it does work.

The typical process works like this:

1. Brand creates facebook page

2. People who really, really love the brand connect with the page.

3. The brand observes that people who have connected with them on social media are excellent customers.

4. The brand tries to increase the number of connected users by offering promotions and similar.

5. The new connections do not have the same value as the originals because they are attracted only by the offers and promotions. Which the brand then needs to keep offering otherwise "engagement" and other similar metrics drop off.

6. The original connections, the brands best and most enthusiastic customers, are now trained to only purchase when a discount is offered. Margins suffer all round.

It can appear that social media offers an easy way to create revenue. The long term effects are much harder to measure (because there is a huge lag between action and measurement) but they are often negative.

Everyone stops thinking about it after 4, because connections are measurable and thus reportable by the media planners at whatever agency the brand has hired to do their social. It's simply a metric and few people at real companies think about it, they just see the numbers and think it's working. This is because agencies tell them it will and that's the worst part about it all.

Social's value is seeing how people react to your brand, absorbing their feedback, connecting directly... but the planners have reduced it to numbers, like they do everything, and sucked the life out it.

I completely agree. It looks like it is working and agencies/whoever is running social don't look any deeper because why would you when everything is fine?

Social media is by no means a silver bullet, but that's not to say that it doesn't have it's uses for brands. Raising awareness, however, is something that social media can be particularly useful for.

I agree. If you look at it on a CPM basis it is possible to get insane value out of social.

However, the main way I've seen people do this so far is with viral content. Producing something that can go viral is very difficult for some brands - their culture does not support the risky, balls out attitude that does well online.

(If you have examples of viral content that does not fit this pattern then please let me know)

Some of The Muppets videos went viral on YouTube in the past few years.

Other short form work also tends to go viral, YouTube is often credited with rejuvenating SNL, despite NBCs insistence on taking down every clip

People are brands too. I almost only watch talk show interviews in clip form.

You should write this up and submit a link.

I can see myself keeping a copy of this post to show to clients for years to come. Well done for crystallising something I've been floundering to put into words.

^-Can also be described as a summation of why Groupon will not last in the long run. Well said Sir or Ma'am.

Perhaps if you conflate "users want to associate themselves, from time to time, with brands" and "users want to interact with brands".

kind of ironic to say hackers are above branding, when here we are arguing Apple vs Google vs Facebook!

I'd argue that this discussion isn't at all branding - it's about something more fundamental — user expectations, privacy actual fact. We're not arguing that Facebook is bad because it's Facebook. If Apple and Facebook switched places tomorrow, we'd still be "arguing" (though I feel this is the wrong word) about the same basic points.

But the reason people identify so strongly for or against is because of the branding.