How Social Media Marketing Will Make You Fall in Love with Brands

Here's a Valentine's Day poser: Is it really possible to "love" a brand, to build the kind of trusting, intimate relationship generally reserved for close friends and family?

While many of us would claim to "love" our iPhones or "love" flying Virgin America, for the most part, we don't really have a deep connection with these brands. We appreciate their services and buy their products – maybe even bringing them into our bed at night – but we don't look to brands for comfort or emotional support. And while brands might remember our birthday with an email, or answer the phone when we call, they don't look out for us like we expect our friends to do.

But get ready to change your relationship status, because brands are about to become your new BFFs.
Social innovators such as Whole Foods Market, Comcast and Jet Blue are imagining a future in which they not only thoughtfully respond to your tweets and posts in real-time, but their responses are also increasingly targeted and proactive. They want to know you, they want you to know that they know you, and they want you to know that they care.

For example, my casual tweet about poor cable service – addressed to no one in particular – might someday generate an immediate response from Comcast, because Comcast knows I've had previous issues with my cable box, they're concerned and they're keeping an eye on me. Isn't that what friends do?

Friends also anticipate your needs. Using basic social graph and ecommerce data, Jet Blue could see that my mother's 70th birthday is coming up, that she lives in Florida, and that I've flown the airline to Florida several times over the past few years. How loved would I feel with a tweet from Jet Blue saying, "Hi @mktgalchemist, visiting your mom in Florida on her birthday? DM us for a discount code!"

But let's look even farther into the future, in which brands reach out just to let you know they're thinking about you. Wouldn't it be great to get a personal tweet from my local Whole Foods store manager about fresh produce they just received, or a spot-on book recommendation tweet from Amazon.com? What if the brand assigned someone within their company as a social media "owner" to me so that each time I interacted via social, I connected with the same person?

Sure, this feels a bit creepy now… we don't perceive brands to be our friends, so it's off-putting for them to know and communicate with us so intimately. But companies who share this vision of the future are already investing in the technology and infrastructure to achieve this kind of interaction. And as they continue to raise the bar for social communications, they'll push the entire market in this direction, making this level of social intimacy commonplace. Eventually, we'll even start to expect it. After all, everyone wants to be loved.

So if your social inbox is empty this Valentine's Day, don't despair. There are thousands of brands out there who are just dying to meet you.

Leyl Master Black runs the Social Technology practice at Sparkpr, one of the world's top independent PR agencies. She writes about social marketing and technology for Mashable.


Courtesy of USA Today: http://ow.ly/hKsCK