Relationship Marketing 105: The Brands Get Personal

What’s in this article:

• The 5th installment of PostFunnel’s Relationship Marketing series
• A look back at social media marketing and the evolution of smartphones

At the beginning of the new millennium, the dot-com industry was booming. The hastening adoption of the consumer internet led to numerous start-ups and established retailers taking their business online, but the good times couldn’t last forever. We avoided Y2K, but early web-based companies still faced a digital apocalypse.

As the market recovered, new technology made it possible to stay online indefinitely. By 2004, those sweet dial-up sounds were becoming a thing of the past. As we covered in Relationship Marketing 104, consumer adoption of Wi-Fi technology meant that many of us spent the mid-aughts contemplating the perfect away message and stressing out over top eights. These social connections defined the early days of always-on internet access; naturally, it wasn’t long before marketers took advantage of these new methods of building customer relationships.

Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside

The brands get social

Dictionary.com defines social media as: “Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” In the early 2000s, participation took many forms: journaling, dating, sharing hobbies, finding jobs, or simply updating friends on day-to-day activities. For a few years, MySpace was the dominant platform, pioneering photo-sharing, and status updates in particular.

Then came Facebook.

The story of Facebook’s meteoric rise is, by now, the stuff of legend; director David Fincher even made a movie about it: The Social Network. Founder Mark Zuckerberg may rest comfortably on a metaphorical and/or literal pile of money, but in 2003, he was just a Harvard college kid coding a website in his dorm room to rank co-eds by attractiveness. Gross origins aside, “Fashmash” soon evolved into “The Facebook” and then simply “Facebook,” which is what it is still known as to 2.8 billion monthly active users.

Zuckerberg and his team first started running Facebook advertisements in 2004 to offset server costs. The platform’s early ads were distinctly separate from the rest of the social network’s content, often relegated to a banner on the side of the page. It wasn’t until 2007 that the company launched a large-scale advertising platform and changed the way brands connect with social media users by allowing businesses to create individual profiles and engage with other Facebook users.

Though the Facebook ad behemoth has evolved quite a bit in the last 14 years, this step paved the way for the kind of organic marketing efforts that are now commonly seen on social media. Businesses began sharing status updates and photos to supplement paid ad strategies, helping them form complex brand identities with recognizable voices.

While Facebook was building its advertising empire, another undergrad at another major American university was building a social network of his own. This time, it was NYU student Jack Dorsey, the creator of microblogging social network Twitter.

Dorsey took cues from instant messaging and LiveJournal, envisioning a service that emulated those early social networks but was somehow “more live.” Backing up this vision was a 140-character limit that kept updates short and sweet; in fact, Dorsey chose the name Twitter partially because it meant “a short burst of inconsequential information.”

By 2007, Twitter was averaging 60,000 posts a day, but the network was hesitant to open itself to advertisers. Co-founder Biz Stone stated that traditional advertising wasn’t a “good model” for the microblogging site, so instead, Twitter began using “promoted tweets” in April 2010. Less intrusive than traditional ads, promoted tweets appeared in users’ timelines and looked exactly like any other Twitter post. Promoted trends soon followed, allowing brands to advertise campaign hashtags alongside the usual trending topics.

Promoted tweets and trends are still widely used today, but before long, the brands took their social media presence into their own hands.

The brands get weird

One of the defining features of the social media era is the ease with which companies can bolster their paid advertising efforts with organic marketing. By the 2010s, Twitter had become a place where brands could reach thousands — if not millions — of potential customers. However, organic marketing doesn’t work if it’s too corporate, so many companies worked to develop a social media presence that was casual and approachable. Others just got weird.

For example, a 2012 Twitter beef between Old Spice and Taco Bell had users following the two otherwise unrelated accounts to see what shots would be fired next. The Twitter account for DiGiorno’s frozen pizza rose to fame by livetweeting NBC’s production of The Sound of Music in 2013. Skittles became sentient.

If you tried explaining any of those concepts to a marketing pro just five years earlier, you’d likely garner some strange looks, but this quickly became the new normal. Social media remains a popular format through which high-profile figures and companies can directly connect with fans and customers. Many companies have at least one dedicated social media manager to keep track of these organic efforts, since maintaining a witty online presence is a full-time job.

Embarrassingly, not every brand got it right; there were plenty of cringe-worthy tweets along the way, like Gap trying to capitalize on Hurricane Sandy and this infamous SpaghettiOs disaster. However, plenty of companies have turned their social media efforts into artform over the last decade. And though Twitter’s character count limit has doubled, brands are inventing new ways to say a lot with very little.

But sometimes, words just aren’t enough.

The brands are never gonna give you up

December, 2005. The Xbox 360 was the hottest gadget on the market. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was overtaking box office records set by Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith just a few months earlier. Jared Leto was better known as the front man for alternative band 30 Seconds to Mars than for his acting efforts (Jordan Catalano forever!). And to cap off an eventful year, a new online video-sharing platform called YouTube launched with eight million videos watched per day.

By July 2006, viewership had reached 100 million videos per day. Naturally, advertisers saw this emerging platform as a massive opportunity, and so did Google, who scooped up the company for $1.65B later that year. While MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter were redefining how people and brands communicated with each other, YouTube was on the verge of a video marketing revolution. And one of the earliest lessons in viral video memes came in 2007 with the creation of the Rickroll.

Two decades after the song’s original release, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” became a hit once again, though for unexpected reasons. It started as a simple prank, but before long, millions of internet users were tricking friends into opening a link to the YouTube video of the 1987 jam. Between May 2007 and April 2008, the video played more than 150 million times, and the practice of rickrolling is still going strong today. Naturally, the brands had to get involved.

In what can only be described as social media inception, brands used their social media accounts to direct followers to the music video. Baseball teams played it to prank each other. The Foo Fighters brought Astley onstage to Rickroll their fans live. Disney used it in a post-credits scene to troll audiences. By 2020, the meme was so mainstream that Rick Astley represented major brands like Frito-Lay in advertisements — all on the strength of a 2007 video of a 1987 song.

While the Rickroll is only a small part of YouTube’s history, it serves as a perfect example of why video marketing plays a prominent role in many brands’ strategies. Sometimes you need more to get the message across; this meme couldn’t have taken off with just a photo of Astley or just the words “Never gonna give you up” posted in a status update. By 2009, YouTube ads had expanded to seven formats, and by 2011, 94 of Ad Age’s top 100 advertisers were running campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network.

Around this time, there was a new wave of social media outlets incoming. Many were focused on photos and aesthetics, like Instagram, which launched in 2010. Once again, the marketing landscape was on the verge of a big change… but it needed one more ingredient first.

The brands get smart

Broadband internet access and Wi-Fi may have increased how much time people spent on the internet, but that was only the start. After all, we had to leave our computers eventually (though those away messages helpfully kept friends and strangers aware of our whereabouts and mood). But what happened when technology evolved so much that most of us were basically carrying computers around in our pockets?

Enter the smartphone.

By the mid-2000s, cellular phones were becoming more advanced. They had better games, data usage, internet connectivity. Some had basic email or web access. But in order for the smartphone, as it would come to be known, to go mainstream, it needed to be adopted by a major brand with a huge cult following.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it was the one to start a revolution. Despite the hefty price tag, Apple sold 6.1 million units of the original model, and those sales have only grown since. Today, the iPhone represents about 23.4% of total global smartphone market share, more than any other single brand.

Whether you prefer iOS or Android, it’s hard to deny the effect that smartphones have had on the marketing industry. In fact, the rise of smartphones helped accelerate social media’s popularity, as suddenly, people could access their Facebook and Twitter feeds or watch YouTube videos anytime, anywhere. Standing in line at the grocery store? Tweet about it. Doctor’s appointment running late? See what’s happening on Facebook. Kids getting fussy in the car? Cat videos to the rescue!

Of course, this also caused another shift for marketers who were already experiencing whiplash over the events of the previous decade. By 2012, over a billion people owned smartphones; today, that number has more than tripled. Brands started shifting to a mobile-first approach by optimizing ads, apps, and websites for the modern smartphone user.

How did it all work out? You’ll have to stop by next month for the sixth installment of Relationship Marketing to find out!