Which Mr Men character is your brand's social voice?

Social media is fast becoming a central space for consumer-brand interaction, however this intimate setting is challenging brands to remain true to their tone, yet satisfy a users demand for a personal touch.

Different brands adopt different voices akin to their company’s culture or to suit their sector, so we have assigned four brands with notable and distinct social voices a Mr Men character  to convey their personality (and to remind ourselves of how cute the world of Mr Men is).

The four different examples of branded tones demonstrate how companies in different environments walk the fine line of staying true to their brand at the same time as being social.

Little Miss Giggles: O2 

O2 adopts a very personalised and humour-driven response to consumer engagement, something that defines it against other brands in the social space. The company encourages its media teams to air of the side of humour (where possible) in a bid to shake the baron-like image often associated with telecommunication organisations. This is a bold strategy, and one that Paul Fabretti, Head of Social Media for O2, believes gives them “an ability to be cool under pressure”.

“The business has so many diverse customers and customer needs, if we had a certain tone and we stuck to that for everybody, then clearly we’d be doing the customers a disservice, but also we’d be limiting the personality of the brand,” Fabretti added. 

What better way to test the brands informal ethos than 2012 – when the company’s social integrity was given the biggest test of all. The network experienced around seven million connection problems – making users sharpen their pitchforks ready for a Twitter hunt.

However, the event saw O2’s average followers rise from 155 to 13,500 per day and O2 received a 4,836% uplift in people talking, @replying and re-tweeting the channel – a fortunate result from what could have been a disaster, showing that the personal touch works (for them).

Mr Perfect: YouthNet

Unlike O2’s comparatively blasé approach to engagement, YouthNet, the youth support and advice charity, has a set of social guideline’s for both staff and agency use.

Guidelines sometimes conjure images of an unforgiving dictator, ruling over their kingdom with a single voice – unabashed by time or trends – however YouthNet’s guidelines came to fruition through staff at all levels. This collaborative approach managed to capture the tone of the company through those that make it.

What is unique about YouthNet’s guidelines is that they were not created by marketers, but by staff at all levels. By creating guidelines democratically, YouthNet encourages compliance, and empowers staff by giving them a sense of ownership over the tone of voice.

The charity also encourages its staff to use their own social media accounts to act as reliable voices for the company and emulate a more personal tone.

True to its environment, the charity must have appropriate moments of formality as it deals with sensitive issues – so at times, it adopts a formal tone suitable for the moment.

Little Miss Sunshine: First Direct

First direct endeavour’s to bring a personal touch to their social media strategy in a bid to make customers feel all warm and sunny inside.

The bank has staff monitoring Twitter 24/7 and ask that each of them tag their comments with their own initials, to provide a personal touch – making recipients feel they’re dealing with humans as opposed to outsourced robots.

The company also employs a different tone of voice for different channels. They use Twitter as a social news channel (not just for first direct communications) to keep their customers informed about news they feel would be relevant to them.

In contrast, they try to make Facebook a lot more fun and friendly because they feel the platform is more about social interaction between friends.

The bank believes that tailoring the correct tone of voice to the right social network is more important than having a single branded tone. Understanding the difference in these networks is similar to understanding regional differences.

A company spokesperson said that failing to adapt tones to different social channels means “you might as well write content directly for the ‘Condescending Corporate Brand Page.'”

Mr Reliable: The Met Office

The Met Office is relied upon for up-to-date and current weather updates and has been building a strong relationship with its followers for years to become a source of wisdom and trust for loyal fans.

Its strategy is to provide an unmediated response to any engagement and to become a valuable source of information. It has achieved this by maintaining a continuous social presence, answering weather-related questions in remote regions to provide weather warnings.

This has led to a calm and collected style of consumer engagement which carries forward through social engagement. This philosophy shone when responding to criticism from a Daily Mail columnist. The Met Office released a blog post addressing key points, calmly laying down the simple facts. Social media responded well to this after loyal fans recoiled in disgust at the injustice, clicking their share buttons they made the post to go viral. In this case reliability and a well cared for consumer base won.

By developing relationships like this, the Met office can respond to a crisis without altering its tone of voice or engaging in heated debate; it enables its ‘fans’ to pick up the mantle whilst it maintains a calm and collected tone of voice.

Every brand approaches social media in a unique style, to suit their organisations tone. Brands should be adopting distinctive styles to make an impact on social media and engage users. Social interactions don’t just matter to the individuals involved, the public nature of social media means the whole world can see how you conduct yourself, any interaction with a user is another opportunity to push and strengthen a brands image.

So think hard marketers, which Mr Men character would your brand be?