Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Hootsuite founder and CEO, Ryan Holmes, dishes on why social media is not just important for brands, but for the heads of the brands as well.

When it comes to marketing, social media is often discussed as a channel directive. It is a channel marketers need to cultivate an audience on, and can be used to humanize their brand to an extent. Social—especially in the age of Trump—is now often a medium where brands must defend themselves against major scandals.

But we rarely bring CEOs into the marketing/social media mix.Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO of Hootsuite, spoke with us in the latest DMN One on One podcast. We caught up with Holmes a few days before the release of his latest book, "The 4 Billion Dollar Tweet." Here's our conversation on how CEOs can, and why they should, get savvy with social media....

In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....

...By calling social scores “Influence Scores,” companies like Klout (who’s tagline is “The Standard For Influence”) have set expectations in the market that influence can be measured with scoring algorithms. However, influence is much more complex.

By setting the wrong expectations, social scoring companies have changed how marketing and PR professionals think about influence, and how to identify it. Instead of finding influencers from a context and audience approach, marketing and PR professionals look at metrics like follower count, unique visitors, and social scores to get a glimpse on who’s “influential,” which in most cases doesn’t work – popularity doesn’t necessarily equal influence....