Context matters in social media, especially for beer brands.
As craft breweries extend their brand through social media, it’s important to consider how followers differentiate from fans and advocates. Context of the media is especially important: while labels and logos can make a big impression for beer purchasing descisions in the store, Twitter followers might expect more playful, less formal interaction with a smaller brewer.
An except from FastCompany’s 5 Steps for Consumer Brands to earn Social Currency:
What do beer drinkers talk about? Not what brewers think they will, the study concludes. Who cares if a beer is triple-hopped in an ultra-cold bottle? “Product and packaging innovations do not help create relevance in this consumer’s daily life,” Joachimsthaler says. What’s important is the bonding or “social context” during consumption. Anheuser-Busch’s ballyhooed bud.tv, an original Web-video site, tacitly encouraged being a solitary Web potato — and quietly folded last year. Similarly, those Bud Light Lime ads on the Weather Channel’s iPhone app won’t help partiers reach the beach. Bud’s attempt to brand “fan cans” in collegiate colors for tailgating was the right kind of bonding idea, though, sadly for Bud, it failed when colleges feared the cans would encourage underage drinking. Even so, who wouldn’t share the tale of that time their beer was confiscated?
At the end of the day, it’s important for a beer brand to meet their market wherever they spend their time; whether it’s sharing a beer with good friends in the local public house, or in a beer review community where opinion leaders and advocates debate debate the merits of floral hops.
