Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw

I have a bit of a bone to pick with social media.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for democratic access to the means of publishing. It may not have rid the world of dictatorship and ushered in a new artistic golden age. But it has given us hours of pleasure watching cute cats ride miniature scooters while their owners reverse expensive cars into elaborate water features.

No, the democratisation of media is just fine by me. What really gets my goat is the way we in marketing have attempted to exploit this phenomenon. Not because the commercialisation of social media perverts the sanctity of the web. But because the way we’ve approached it is just so downright boring.

According to a recent survey by the Internet Advertising Bureau, only a fifth of marketers in organisations including Coca-Cola, RBS and the COI view social media as a core element of their marketing strategy. One reason quoted by the report is the difficulty of demonstrating return on investment. But I suspect there are other factors at work as well.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, whenever a new medium comes along, our first instinct is to force existing content to fit it, no matter how ungainly the result ends up looking. You know the scenario. Someone at the workshop asks: ‘And what can we do on Twitter?’ The inevitable result is a friendless cut-and-shut of form and content.

My first boss called this kind of thing ‘the celebration of technique over intellect’. In those days it was about printing your customer’s neighbour’s dog’s name on a piece of direct mail just because you could, but the principle is the same.

When we’re not blindly putting the media cart before the content horse, we’re doing something even worse. We’re assuming that the customer is as interested in our product as we are. Or rather, that they are as interested in our product as we are being paid to be.

I’m reminded of the wise old planner on a sausage account. After a long evening of focus groups, the planner asked his client what he’d learned. The client thought for a moment, sighed, and said plaintively, ‘People aren’t very interested in sausages, are they?’

If, to quote a sacred text of the early Internet era, ‘all markets are conversations’, then we risk being the person whose main contribution to the discourse is, ‘that’s enough about me, let’s talk about me’.  When the Atlantic Telegraph opened for business in the nineteenth century, someone asked Oscar Wilde what he thought of this amazing media innovation. His response was as relevant today as it was then: ‘It depends whether they have something interesting to talk about’.

For commercial communicators, Oscar’s elusive ‘something interesting’ ideally inhabits the overlapping section on the Venn diagram between ‘the brand thing’ and ‘the customer thing’. This is a devilishly difficult territory to define at the best of times. But doing so should not be an impossible task for anyone who lives in the world of brands and communications.

Until recently, whenever someone asked me to name my favourite all-time great social marketing campaign, I’d nominate The Great Schlep, the Obama campaign’s brilliant grassroots movement designed to mobilise the grey vote in the crucial state of Florida.

However, I’ve just come across another social media case study which is simply staggering in its multi-layered genius. It’s described in a fascinating book by Herbert Lottman called The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire. A little surprisingly for a social media case study, the story starts in France in 1900, when the brothers Eduard and André Michelin were searching for a low-cost way to build their car and bicycle tyre brand.

Their solution, as everyone knows, was to publish the definitive travel guide for road users. What is so impressive is the way in which the Guide Michelin achieved so much of what is great about the best social media a full hundred years prior to the channel’s invention.

It wasn’t about tyres, for a start. It was about something much more interesting to many more people, especially French people; namely food. Yet it was still relevant to the brand on not one but two dimensions. On the functional level, it made road travel more comfortable (just like Michelin tyres). It was also linked in a more lateral way to the brand via the creative property of Bibendum, the bon viveur who (like Michelin tyres) ‘consumes every obstacle’.

The original Guide Michelin ticked all the social media best practice boxes. It was genuinely useful. It invited participation: unlike today’s red book, it was given away free of charge at petrol stations, and readers were invited to provide corrections and suggestions. They were even encouraged to leave the guide in plain view when visiting restaurants in order to guarantee good service. Try doing that by befriending a brand on Facebook.

The idea was capable of magnification via other channels, to the extent that Bibendum had his own column in a national newspaper. And unlike so many modern social media ideas, it also had a robust activation element. The Guide, after all, listed Michelin dealers amongst its more mouth-watering entries.

I’d like to think that the brilliance of this idea had something to do with the unusual division of labour between the brothers Michelin. Quixotically, it was the art school graduate, Edouard, who looked after the engineering and NPD. Marketing was the province of André, who was the qualified engineer.

Perhaps this perverse approach to HR was inspired. Or it may just have been inefficient. Because, in an omission that will no doubt disgust social media textbook-writers everywhere, the brothers Michelin never got round to starting a company blog. 

This column originally appeared in Marketing Week.