Basking in Reflected Glory
by asi
Until recently I was somewhat a purist when it comes to everything social (“it’s not about you, it’s about them”, “Don’t think of it as another advertising / promotion channel”, “You only get to be prominent in SNS by earning trust and respect”) but I’ve grown up to learn these are rather hollow cliches.
Here is a nice rule. The less interesting, exciting, relevant, fun or useful you are (see the whole range and the inspiration for this post here), the more money you will have to spend on pushing yourself into people’s lives and front of mind. That’s the reality of high-low involvement and the essence of the natural selection of interesting.
And it hasn’t changed a bit with the emergence of social technologies, it’s just been amplified. People are talking first and foremost about themselves, then about the things that touch them – the things that make them happy or the things that make them angry, excited, surprised, delighted, laugh etc.
Now, human social dynamics are interesting and sometimes a bit unfair. Some people have social permission to do stuff that other people can’t. Think about different personality types and social situations. Cool, sexy, charismatic people always have an advantage. They can crash on party they weren’t invited to and quickly become the center of attention. In social psychology we call it Basking in Reflected Glory. It’s this basic nature of wanting to be seen around cool, successful people so something of that glory will become our own (think about why people name-dropping).
That sometimes sucks but it’s true.
If you’re boring, stupid, asshole, lame or ugly, people would not want anything to do with you. And if you’re just average Joe shmo like most of us then you’ve got a pretty average life – you’ve got your friends, and some people who love you with whom you maintain strong relations plus your outer social circle of weak ties…you see where i’m going here?
Same thing with brands and social media. If you are a sexy, cool charismatic brand, you will have a fairly easy life on social media – people would want to hear from you and be associated with you. They will create fan page for you on facebook, they will talk with their friends about you and share stuff about you on Twitter. They will probably take part if you ask them to submit something etc. If you are not one of these brands, you will have to work much harder to earn your social capital. I’m not saying it’s not possible but you will probably have to invest more. More time and money to help you be more fun, interesting, funny or useful. And you should also find those who love you and nurture the relationship you have with them.
If you’re an asshole kind of brand, you’re pretty much fucked.
Don’t be an asshole brand. Try to make people happy.
Hi mate – thanks for the linkage.
On your personification of brands, a few teen hollywood movies spring to mind. Assholes and losers alike finally connect with others when they realise what they are and what they aren’t.
I.e. You have to be comfortable with yourself before others can love you.
Skoda became lovable by acknowledging what people thought of it. And although it was a fleeting effort, I still remember Reebok’s “lose the belly” ad – which basically admitted: We can’t take on Nike and Adidas, so we’ll stop pretending. We’ll be something else.
It can be liberating.
Oh and to all the quarterback jocks out there screwing cheerleaders… she’s going to dump you for the quiet new guy
[...] It reminds me of ‘basking in reflected glory’ theory applied to brands and social marketing. The point I made there is that if you are cool, sexy, sociable person/brand people would invite [...]