"I don’t think we’re being honest with ourselves if we say that people really want to talk to brands on Facebook," Christel Quek said matter-of-factly.
People don’t want to talk to brands on Facebook. Yes, they’re part of the community. Yes, they participate. But to involve them in a long-term conversation – to change perceptions on what a Facebook brand page should be, Quek says we need to build our pages based on "passion points", which could be arrived by the following user graphs.
Personal graph. "It’s about the user. It’s about the heart-ware – core values, beliefs and personality."
It’s a shady area right now – brands having access to devices that could get little bits of information that should only be privy to the consumer and use to remarket experiences to them. "It’s not going distant reality, it’s going to be real – brands and people are able to tell a lot about you and who you are based on this." It’s out there, and one example of such is the famed Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator.
Social graph. This refers to a common data set that depicts personal relations of internet users.
"Facebook is important for this as a default social directory and for your friends to be on it. It’s not an important venue for interaction with brands per se. Yes, you can participate in common passion points and communities. But that might not work in the long run," apprises Quek. "Social is about a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn’t matter how fast you run as long as you’re running."
Interest graph. The gold mine for many marketers. The interest graph is an online representation of what influences the kind of experiences users want, or what kind of products you need to create. It’s about curiosity and how you can turn that into something sustainable. It’s about tastes and preferences.
"Twitter is going to be the most important interest graph," predicts Quek. It’s a good long sustainable platform. It has managed to like up deals with offline new sources like CNN, Reuters, WPP and Associated Press.
Quek sees Linkedin transitioning into a media company. "They have a hail of content to distribute from selected power influencers within their network. All these people are putting content exclusively on Linkedin and distributing it to their networks."
Pinterest has led to the creation of the taste graph, an extension of the interest graph. There are a lot of leads coming from Pinterest in SEO juice, in referrals to websites because of Pinterest boards.
What about Facebook? Should you still care about it? Quek says yes, that’s where your consumers are. "But you need to rethink how to leverage content in communities
Behavior graph. The market is teeming with apps that measure user activities like what you eat, how many hours do you sleep, how fast you run, etc.
All these graphs put together profile the consumer.
The rise of the ‘quantified self’
The quantified self is what happens when products and technology intersect together with big data and the different user graphs to define who you are as a person and collect all this data about you.
The qualified self will allow brands and marketers to understand how to create brand content, experiences and passion points that matter. But Quek stresses that the convergence is not the end point. "If you want to design a better consumer-centric strategy, you need to understand that users always evolve. Trends always evolve. Technology is always accelerating."
And the rise of the quantified self – there’s a reason to this. People always want to improve.
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Christel Quek is the global social marketing manager of Havas Media. The Main Course with Christel Quek was presented by adobo magazine, in cooperation with the Mind Museum, Sodexo, Fairmont / Raffles Hotel Makati, Executive Decisions, WYD Productions, The Philippine Star, IMMAP and E-Learning Edge.
