Calling all friends, fans and followers of print … Print21 magazine article

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have become the lingua franca of the online world, the modern-day bazaar for meeting and greeting or simply wasting your time. But can you make money out of these places and what role do printers play here? Alison Stieven-Taylor tries to friend printers in the online world and discovers that social media calls for a whole new approach to marketing communication.

According to one of my closest friends, I’m about to become a ‘twit’, one of the more disparaging labels given to those who are on Twitter, all 185 million of them. But social media used in a professional context is the new marketing frontier, a place where you can build your profile, exchange and access information, and create global networks. There’s nothing daft about that.

Many think Twitter is about validating your existence every five minutes in 140 characters or less. I agree there are many posts that are nothing short of idiocy – ‘I burned the toast this morning’, or ‘am bored and watching TV’ – yawn. But there are many more tweets posted by professionals in all manner of industries and spheres that are topical, interesting and valuable.

The same can be said of Facebook which is a unique vehicle for building brand awareness and value adding, not just for posting photos of your dog and finding out what your peeps are up to on the weekend, although that can also be worthwhile depending on your viewpoint.

For some, social media is the electronic version of the Apocalypse, eroding the very fabric of society and driving people behind their computer screens and away from human interaction. But for those who see it for what it is, a unique communication tool that helps you engage with the people, issues and activities that interest you, the notion of social media being anti-social is incongruous. Social media is the ultimate in one-on-one communication. If you can’t get in someone’s face, then get online.

The marvelous, and somewhat bewildering thing about social media is that it can be anything you want it to be providing certain rules are followed, rules that are created and maintained by the online community. The terminology may be twee – ‘followers’, ‘fans’, ‘friends’ – but once you understand the commercial import of social media the language becomes irrelevant. It is all about currency, engagement and relevance of content. If you think social media is about flogging things, you couldn’t be more wrong. But if you believe it is a space in which you can value-add for your ‘fans’ and ‘friends’ (read customers) then you are on the right track to using a communication conduit that gains you access to local, regional, national and global markets in the blink of an eye. And at very little cost in comparison to other marketing avenues.

Printers have few friends
In the printing and graphic media industry there are few print producers who have embraced social media. In fact I could only find a handful of Australian print companies with Facebook pages and of those, one told me their page was created so that the Facebook administrators could remove a bogus page that had been loaded under their name to defame the company. Strange, but true.

Many of the major suppliers to this industry have Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, but these companies are generally multinationals whose parent company has instituted a social media marketing strategy on a global scale. In the consumer space you will find literally hundreds of brands with social media pages, and may have noticed that Facebook and Twitter logos have started to appear on television commercials and on other marketing materials.

In general terms though, regardless of industry, most companies have “no clue what they are using social media for,” says David Ansett from Melbourne brand design and strategy agency, Truly Deeply. “When it comes to social media I think we are where we were with websites 15 years ago. Companies are in the game without knowing what they want out of it.”

Social media networks are not online shops, says Ansett: “Social media is not suited to short-term sales drives, it is more about building stronger relationships and the long-term reinforcing of brand meaning. Social media enables the telling of brand stories by connecting with fans.”

It is the brand’s ‘fans’, those who are ‘following’ your tweets or are ‘friends’ on Facebook or use YouTube, who are going to share experiences and have conversations around your brand. Social media is the ultimate in word-of-mouth marketing. It is all about developing and building relationships.

“When we look at brand building it is about thousands of tiny gestures - what a business does and what it says – and social media provides a rich environment in which to make lots of little gestures,” says Ansett. “But it is also a neutral environment because it is on shared terms with the people in the space. They have control and choose what they want to be part of. This is far removed from the sales spotlight of other traditional advertising or retail environments.”

Most critically, says Ansett, social media delivers opportunities for brands to listen to their consumers.

“The mistake most brands make in this space is that they talk instead of listen, but they should listen because this is a great tool for building customer service and improving and creating new market opportunities.”

So who’s online in the print world?
Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to engage with your market, but as David Minnett, (pictured) managing director of Group Momentum in Sydney points out, it is also very easy to alienate ‘fans’ with overt sales gestures.

It is not surprising that Minnett’s company is looking at social media. Group Momentum has evolved from a prepress house to become one of the leading digital communications companies in Australia, an achievement made possible by working at the leading edge. Minnett tells me he was in San Francisco recently for the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) conference where he and business partner Graham Ford (ex-marketing director CBA) attended the social media sessions.

“There is still a lot of uncertainty around social media’s role in marketing, but there is a high degree of interest from our clients in how they can monetise that particular channel.”

In answer to the question of whether or not we’ll see Group Momentum on Facebook or Twitter in the near future, Minnett says, “If I took away anything from the DMA sessions, it is that we are having ongoing conversations with our clients and if social media becomes part of their method of receiving information from us, then yes we will go that way.”

He qualifies the statement though: “But you have to look at doing something that is relevant and not do it for the hell of it. It’s about providing information that is appropriate for the forum and for the receiver. Relevancy is critical otherwise it is very easy to piss people off, and once you have done that and they have disengaged you will struggle to get them back.”

Well-known industry marketer Peter Barnet, sales and marketing manager at Print Impressions, comments, “We didn’t ask for the Mars Bar, but we love it and the same can be said for social media and digital communication. We didn’t ask for them, but everyone is using them. If you want to benefit from this revolution you have to get on board, but you need a strategy, as you do with any marketing activity.”

Barnet explains that sites like Twitter and Facebook create viral marketing opportunities that can take your message to new audiences.

“On Twitter, for example, those you are following are obliged to follow you – that’s the premise of the site. So if you are following someone with thousands of followers, automatically those followers are in your network.”

Eastern Press is one of the few print companies in the social media space. While the company revamps its website, Twitter posts keep customers informed about everything from design competitions to websites where customers can find interesting articles on topics that will assist them in achieving their objectives.

“We watch the tweets we are following and also subscribe to various eNews sites and blogs,” says Eastern Press social media guru, Cormac Deffely. “The majority of our tweets are re-tweeting interesting information we’ve found. One in every ten tweets might be about Eastern Press and then it will be celebrating an awards win or similar, but not selling the company.”

Theo Pettaras’s Digitalpress is all over the internet. The company has a Facebook page, Twitter account, blog and a photographic portfolio on new site, wipasnapa. All of Digitalpress’s social media pages are interconnected so when Pettaras posts a blog it is automatically linked to Facebook and Twitter. In the six months he’s been blogging and tweeting, he’s seen the unique visits on his corporate website double from 450 a week to nearly 1,000, an increase he attributes directly to social media and search engine optimisation (SEO). What sorts of posts does Digitalpress make?

“We put up information that supports our positioning. So, for example, the post about our recent purchase of the Pantone Essentials Kit says we are a good resource for colour management. We also post events, articles and celebrate milestones, but we don’t use Facebook to sell any products,” states Pettaras.