How to Use Design to Create Social Media
As we’ve already established in our social media manifesto, social media is far more than Twitter and Facebook. It’s a science of how to facilitate better interactions between a product or service and people (your customers), to ignite conversations with those customers between each other, and then open those interactions to bring them back to your brand.
When looking at social media, it’s quite important to realize that it isn’t an afterthought. Social media doesn’t work best when it’s thrown in as an ad campaign or a presence. It works phenomenally well when it’s used as a starting point in place of a means to an end.
As a designer myself, I can attest to the fact that this is something that designers (over time) have learned to do very well. Designers create based on an understanding of the people that they’re creating for.
This simple fact is largely responsible for why Apple’s iPods sell the way they do and why Procter & Gamble’s products time and time again manage to make your life easier by solving problems for you that you never really knew existed. Both of these companies apply an understanding of their customer to everything that they do and design products, services, and interactions that fit those needs. The flip side, which used to work, is to design things and hope that people will want to use them. This still works with marginal success in some instances (Louis Vuitton), but it is by and large well on its way to extinction.
So how do you apply a design approach to social media?
Start With Your Product
Social media starts with whatever it is that you’re trying to spread. If you’re trying to get people talking about a bottle of water and it isn’t very exciting, you’ll find it quite challenging to start conversations about a product that’s only just as good as its alternatives.
To solve this problem, use design to do these three things:
1. Effectively tell a story about why it’s interesting and provide a basis for conversations about your product.
Example: Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld? Well, it turns out that he was indeed a real person and that his unusual soup experience created an interesting and strange reason to talk about soup. You don’t have to be a soup nazi, but you should ask yourself if you’re at least as intriguing (if not more) as a man who is very particular about his soup.
2. Create function with a purpose.
Example: Yves Behar’s Y-Water isn’t designed to compete directly with Dasani. It’s designed to add a new layer of function to water for kids that creates an experience that is worth talking about. By using the bottle as a springboard for a building toy, Behar was able to establish a function with a purpose that exceeded the basic premise of drinking the water itself. Kids love it and tell their friends. Parents love it and tell other parents. The bottle ignites conversations, not the water.
3. Use packaging to develop a personality. Packaging isn’t just the box a product comes in; rather, packaging is the entire set of communication media that surround your product, service, and brand. From business cards to your letterhead to your cup or bag or box or napkin, packaging is a way to share your message with your customer in an intimate way.
Example: There is a popular coffee shop down the street from me called Fido that’s found an interesting way to use an otherwise boring coffee sleeve to communicate its personality. Instead of saying the expected “Caution: Hot,” Fido’s sleeve says “Practice safe coffee. Always use a bongo coffee condom.” Likewise in Crispin + Porter Bogusky’s campaign for MINI, the agency created an unauthorized owner’s manual to help build a culture around what it meant to be a MINI driver. Both examples effectively utilize packaging to do something different and build a strong brand in the process.
Design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about creating an experience through any and all available means that somehow makes the user or customer better off for having participated in that experience. It is for this reason that people will gladly pay $4 for lattes at Starbucks and $2.99 for lunch at McDonald’s.
With social media, experiences are at the heart of a conversation about your brand. Understanding your customers, designing around their needs, and creating an experience that makes them smile are the first keys to using design to build your social media strategy.
I’ll explore more tips at a later date, but if you’d like to discuss designing to create social media with me, you’ll find my contact information below.
Patrick Widen
615.310.4096
@patrickwiden (Twitter)
[email protected]
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