6Oct2016
“I’m sure that Finnish companies like Finnair take Facebook and Twitter much more seriously than they did five years ago,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO & Co-Founder, VaynerMedia. “The game of thinking of it as low brow or not serious – that game is over.”
Vaynerchuk was in conversation with Johanna Jäkälä, Vice President, Brand, Marketing and Loyalty, Finnair Plc., at the Nordic Business Forum’s MTV3 Live stage – and Jäkälä confirmed Vaynerchuk’s suspicions.
“Yes, we take social media more seriously, very seriously. Five years ago the game was different. But the scene is more complicated too. There are more channels coming in and we need to evaluate where the different markets are. Social media in Europe is quite different from what it is in China. We use different channels for different topics and to make different emphases.
“Twitter helps us to find customers and acts as a communications channel when you want to reach big audiences. It’s sales and engagement. And I would say that everyone is onboard. We don’t have much ‘old school’ at Finnair. But we know we can improve and that we have to make it less about simply selling the product.”
“Even so, it’s not that anyone is against it, it’s how they use it,” countered Vaynerchuk. “I am sure that even the most important executives at Finnair, Coca Cola, many big corporations, don’t realise how much money they can generate from social media, they don’t understand. It’s a mistake to use Facebook just for distribution.
“You need to understand the psychology of the user of social media, and to realize that people behave differently in different situations. You behave differently in different situations in real life – you need to be able to do that in the context of social media too.”
A brand manager tends to make the brand the same at all times. But if you use the same content on Snapchat as on Twitter, you are in big trouble, Vaynerchuk contended. Bad advertising has always been dead, he said, but it hasn’t been possible to measure its effectiveness as accurately as is now the case using new social media platforms.
