(^263) ■
BUILD ON E
XISTING S
OCIAL O
BJECTS
The Workplace as a Social Object
The first step in anchoring your brand, product, or service is sorting out where to actu-
ally connect to a preexisting community. The main questions to ask yourself (or your
agency or work team, if the overall social strategy is in the hands of a distributed team)
are the following:
• What is it that the people you want to participate with have in common with
each other?
• Why are they participating in this activity?
• What do they like to do, and what is it about these activities that they find natu-
rally talkworthy?
• How does your firm or organization fit into the previous points?
• Specifically, how can you improve the experience of the current participants as a
result of your being there?
With the answers to the previous questions, you are ready to plan your own
presence in that community, and you’ve got the beginnings of how this involvement
can be tied to your own business objectives as you simultaneously become a genuine
participant in this community.
What are some of the social objects that successful community participation has
been built around? Table 10.1 provides a handful to get you started. More will be said
about these in the sections that follow.
P Table 10.1 Social Objects that Support Communities
Brand Social Object Participant/Brand Connection
Dell Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurs and small businesses use Dell hardware.
Pepsi Women’s Lives Trop50 is a naturally healthy drink for you and your family.
Found Animals Pets Found Animals provides adoption services for that appeal to
people.
Pampers Babies Babies and diapers...go together.
Red Bull Action Sports If two people are competing anywhere on the planet, one is
wearing a Red Bull logo.Looking at the brands and social objects in Table 10.1, the main take-away at
this point is that each brand has identified for itself an existing social object around
which to place itself in an existing social context. This is directly analogous to the pro-
cess through which a brand is mapped to a core consumer value or articulated business
purpose in traditional advertising: Where the advertising anchor points provide a con-
text for communicating what a brand is or what it stands for, the social object provides