Can Aggregation Improve Your Brand?

Something I often discuss with my collegues is a goal for social media to amplify the voice of the individual over the institution. This is because the institutional voice has lost relevance. It is less trusted.

Research has shown that 90% of the audience to a social site is not interested in participating, but keenly interested in the content. They are interested in this content because 1-10% that is responsible for authoring the content is preferred over the singular voice of an institution.

The voice of the 1% contributors come off as more authentic, especially if that voice doesn’t sound like a marketing drone. Instead the 1% is opinionated, often with bias and often inaccurate. However it is real, and with its flaws it is valued over the voice of the institution.

But how can that 1% voice be a voice you can trust to discuss your brand. How can it be a voice that will help carry influence to make your brand relevant? After all you cannot control it… or can you.

I believe the answer is aggregation. Although you cannot control the conversation you can control what topics you make available to the 90% who are keenly interested in the dialogue. Consider your brand’s attributes, features, and capabilities. Then find, foster, enable and amplify discussions on those brand attributes. By playing host and rounding up that dialogue you are encouraging the 90% to go deeper and identify more strongly with the value proposition of your brand.

Look at sites like Digg, Techmeme and others that do a good job rounding up the dialogue and showing relevant discussions. By rounding up and categorizing the conversations, they are building channels of affinity on key topics. Why not do the same thing for your brand?

Let’s imagine how this could be done with a strong brand, like Dove. Dove aligns its brand with the choice of mothers and their daughters to focus on healthy body images in contrast to the stereotypes historically established in the beauty industry. (My apologies to Dove, if I have their brand positioning wrong, and to clarify I’m just using this brand purely as an example to illustrate my point, any brand could be used) Dove could use aggregation to build on its brand message by finding and publishing relevant dialogues from fast moving opinion leaders who are driving online conversations that foster healthy body images for young girls. This Dove branded destination would ideally be aggregating and republishing the most active discussions on this topic. If done well it should be a magnet for Search, and be a destination for the online audience seeking those discussions.

In addition Dove could add value to the site by fostering community within the aggregation. They could allow members to vote up or down the aggregated content. Dove could host a series of editorial blogs from recognized community members on this site. They could also categorize and group the content along key brand vectors such as; health, self esteem parenting and community. Finally Dove could syndicate this value added community information as a channel of information for other sites.

As Dove aggregates the dialogue and fosters community, the site then becomes a community reflection of the Dove brand. It is the brand, not voiced by the institution, but is instead voiced by the greater online community. It reinforces and markets the Dove brand without Dove having to write a single line of copy.

I believe aggregation by brand marketers is an untapped segment of conversational marketing. So far I’ve only seen media companies come close to doing this. Disney and Nickelodeon/MTV have done a good job building online destination around their brands and often these sites have been turned over to the community. However I’ve yet see a marketing organization really adopt aggregation to help build the content, and I have yet to see a retail product take on this approach.

So what do you think? Can aggregation help your brand? And if you know of a brand that has begun this, I’d love to know more.

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