The building blocks that we all grew
up with have themselves grown up. LEGO has become noted as a smart
user of social media. Crowd-sourcing ideas, allowing enthusiasts to
design their own kits with Design by Me are all in a day's work for
this iconic Danish brand.
Despite this success, the 9,000-strong
company clearly feels it can do more. Earlier this year LEGO raided
the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR - the country's public
service broadcaster - to recruit Lars Silberbauer as its first
Global Social Media Strategist. In his new role, he sees himself
driving the LEGO brand's corporate social media strategy and
ensuring that it is connected with the overall strategy of the
world's fourth largest manufacturer of toy materials.
Silberbauer believes that brands need
to consider themselves as social media enablers. "On social media,
you should think of brands as the creators of a stage from where
the consumer can shine and look good to their network and friends.
It is far more important to create an environment than to simply
state the brand is fantastic," he says.
In a conversation with Ivan Fernandes,
MediaCom's Global Director for Social Media Technology, Silberbauer
gives his perspective on the challenges and benefits of social
media.
Ivan Fernandes (IF):
LEGO is a global company working across different markets. What do
you think are the main challenges for a global brand in social
media?
Lars Silberbauer (LS
): I think that all global brands find it challenging to
align their global presence while creating local social media
engagement. You need to be as close to the consumers as possible to
create engagement and build relations with the users, but at the
same time your engagement and your brand must be consistent on a
global level.
IF: So where do you
start in solving this dilemma? Do you focus on global strategy
first with local implementations or do you do it the other way
around?
LS : I actually think
we do it in a third way. To get social media right you need to be
dynamic and flexible and this is our strategy. We are dynamic and
flexible with a global goal and we are continuously listening and
adapting to the local markets. The old way of doing strategy simply
does not work anymore. You cannot sit in an office for six months
and come up with a good social media strategy. In my opinion, you
should simply redefine your way of thinking about strategizing.
Your strategizing should happen while you are engaging with the
consumers. Each country should be individually thought through.
Technologies, platforms and consumers are very different from
market to market. As an example, in Italy we have 200,000 fans on
Facebook and 80,000 of them are located in Rome. This gives us
tremendous opportunities to do highly targeted messages and events.
On the other hand, we are not very strong on social media in Spain
for some reason. This creates a challenge in creating the optimal
strategy. Should we use the Italian country-based model? Or should
we instead target Spanish-speaking people in general? It is
important not to use the same strategy across all markets. Even
very mature markets like Germany, the UK and the US vary. It is the
local culture that will determine the best way to use your
resources. What platform you use depends on your target audience
and the product you are marketing. On top of that, the global
nature of social media makes it challenging to localize individual
markets and consumers.
IF: An important
feature of social media is listening to conversations and
sentiment. What are the key topics, the volume of mentions and so
on? How do you address listening?
LS : We certainly
listen and we are very fortunate that thousands of engaged fans
post pictures, comment and interact with us every single day. In my
opinion, social media is very suitable for listening to the
dialogue that is going on naturally among consumers. LEGO's
overwhelming amount of consumer engagement, however, also means
that we of course cannot listen to the entire dialogue going on
about the LEGO brand. But we do listen carefully of any signs of
crisis and we have a comprehensive crisis management system set
up.
IF: Why is social
media important to LEGO? What is social media adding to the brand
in terms of understanding behavior and attitudes?
LS : There is no
single answer to that. Social media is a way to get to know what
consumers are doing with our products and our brand. LEGO is a very
creative brand. You have a simple LEGO brick that you can build to
fit your imagination and consumers have a massive need to show the
world what they have created. Social media is the perfect platform
to display and interact with your peers. Social media is
continuously broadening the LEGO brand and we learn a lot from
listening to the conversations. We also have a direct dialogue
through social media. We answer questions and we let the fans know
about new products, but we make sure to do it as a service and not
as an invasive message.
IF: How does LEGO
view social commerce? And how is LEGO using social commerce to
interact with your consumers?
LS : Like many
companies we are trying to figure that one out. We are testing
various ways of using social commerce and finding the best way for
us and our users. We don't have a complete answer yet. Social
commerce is an important development right now if you create the
models and get the right products out in places such as Facebook. I
believe the companies that get social commerce right first will be
hugely successful.
IF: What other
developments are you keeping an eye on?
LS : I see two
important trends that are impacting social media: The massive
development of mobile and social gaming. Social gaming is an
interesting challenge because we have a clear and ethical policy at
LEGO that states that we do not want to interact with kids less
than 13 years of age old on social media. However, social gaming is
only going one way and that way is growth. IF: Yes, social gaming
is one of the biggest activities on Facebook and I think more and
more brands will leverage this opportunity to engage consumers.
What is most important when you as a brand want to enter the world
of social media? LS : For us, it is extremely important that we do
not let our consumers down once we have engaged with them on social
media. If you decide to engage with consumers on social media you
cannot stop the conversation just because some marketing campaign
has ended. You need to show commitment. So for us, what is most
important is that we are committed every time we create something
on social media. You should never commit to more on social media
than you can actually live up to. Make sure you don't promise
something you can't deliver. If a company wants to enter social
media, I think crisis management is another important subject to be
aware of - at least it has been a focus for us.
IF: Has the need to
be always-on changed the way LEGO deals with social media?
LS: LEGO is a global
brand, so there are always consumers in a daytime zone and we are
used to accommodating to a 24/7 setup. But, of course, this is more
extreme on social media and it requires the right organizational
setup. We are still in the process of enabling the company to do
social media in the right way and develop the social media
organization. Again for us, this is about trying a lot of different
stuff out and feeding it back to the strategy. It is an on-going
process and the challenge is to do it fast enough to keep of with
the users. IF: In every aspect of marketing, measure is growing in
importance. How do you measure success on social media? LS : It
depends on what social media is part of. If it is part of a crisis
management strategy then you need to measure sentiment and the
development of dialogue. It is different if it is a product launch
on social media. The measurement also depends on your goals and how
you want to proceed. We do not work with just one single KPI for
social media We have many different KPIs. It is about reaching out
to the consumers and getting a closer relationship and then driving
sales. I think engagement will always somehow reflect on sale and
ROI.
IF: From a practical
perspective, how do you manage social media content? Do you handle
it yourself or is it outsourced?
LS: Our goal is to
create a genuine and authentic relationship between the user and
the LEGO brand and that is why we do not outsource our
conversations with our consumers to agencies. You don't want to
have a stranger to call of one of your friends and that is why it
is always a LEGO employee that is doing the conversation on social
media. You cannot outsource it to others to build a emotional
relationship, that must be done by employees inside the
company.
IF: How do you keep
the strategy fresh and relevant to your target audience?
LS: We always try to
develop our strategy as we engage the consumers and as we enable
the company. We have a three tier model of developing the social
media strategy. The social media architecture is the basic layer in
our social media strategy. The next layer is our social media
enabling within the company. And the third tier is the engagement
strategy. These three tiers make for a continuous process that
enables our social media handling. What I think most brands need to
understand is that on social media you shouldn't focus so much on
your brand and think that the brand should be the centre of
attention. Instead you should focus on helping the user to build
his or her own personal brand and let your brand be a part of that
process. It's all about the user and social media, I think, has
answered a basic human need: A need to be in the centre of your own
life and a need to create a world of information and communication
around yourself. On social media, you should think of brands as
creators of a stage from where the consumer can shine and show off
to their network and friends. That is far more important than
saying that telling the consumer that the brand is fantastic. It is
necessary for a brand to be humble and acknowledge that we are in a
social media space where we have to earn our rights to be. In my
opinion, brands have to redefine their way of thinking about brand
marketing when engaging on social media, as social media should
never be seen as yet another one-way channel for pushing out
marketing messages and traditional campaigns. It's not just a new
platform; it's a mind shift.