Director of Tiger Pistol, Steve Hibberd sees (some) Australian brands and consumers as two teenagers on a first date. They want to engage, but how?

Through building and selling businesses across India, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, Steve Hibberd has gained a unique and nuanced understanding of the social media and digital possibilities across a range of markets. It’s this knowledge, paired with an understanding of agency and technical requirements to facilitate campaigns, that informs his current venture, Tiger Pistol, specialising in social media activation.

Let’s get together

As brands rush to Facebook, Twitter and other vendors, brand and consumer are thrown together in a new environment. Brands who previously communicated via brochures in letterboxes are sending Facebook updates and tweets, and the expectations are unclear. A brand wouldn’t usually send a consumer a postcard, but thanks to blogs and social media, you just might be hearing from them on something other than sales. Hibberd says it’s not only brands who are confused about the exchange. “The key thing is, the consumer, or the customer, where are they? I think generally the population is equally as far behind, not in terms of using Facebook, but in terms of engaging with brands on social media.”

First date

It’s not for want of desire. Many brands and consumers want to enter a dialogue in the digital and social media environment. As Hibberd sees it, “I’m not sure they know how. I’m not sure either know how. It’s a bit like teenagers on a date. You both sort of want it, but you don’t really know how to engage. I’m not a fan of generalisations, but if you’re generalising, what’s driving the growth of subsets of Australian consumers [online], is the growth of online retail and online purchasing which is happening internationally. A lot of international brands are further on than brands in Australia in their social networking presence and so there are a lot of Australians who are probably interacting with international brands and their Facebook presence more so than local brands. There are subsets of Australians that are quite savvy and know how to interact with a brand; a lot of brands even globally aren’t that savvy about how to interact with the consumer.”

Find us on Facebook

As more and more brands invite consumers on signs in-store, billboards and marketing collateral to ‘find’ them on Facebook and Twitter, consumers head to Facebook pages and Twitter walls. What consumers find at those destinations varies wildly.

Hibberd considers whether a mass invitation for consumers to ‘find you’ is of value. “At the end of the day, any business needs to connect with the right customers and then they need to understand how to meet that customer’s need. They need to understand how to engage with that customer and then present the right things to them. Mass media is really opening yourself up to attracting a whole lot of people. So there’s one thing, that’s: well who am I appealing to when I’m doing that? And does a mass audience, even if I drill down to where my location is, does that audience fit with the brand?

“So assuming that’s the case and it does, I think it comes down to the ‘find us on Facebook’, [approach] can be a real negative if you haven’t got your plan in place for what people are going to experience when they get there. It’s very, very basic, but lots of brands aren’t really thinking through that, so they’ve set up the page, they’re starting to post content there, but they don’t realise that people are using Facebook and using it frequently. They’ll actually rock up and see the latest offer just sitting there on the wall, so what needs to happen is you need to have things that people can interact with when they come to your page and reasons for them to contribute.”

Activation

Tiger Pistol assists brands in engaging with their social media audience through applications on Facebook, Twitter and within the location space. “The reason that a business like us needs to exist is because you can’t, due to the rules that Facebook have in place, as well as the functionality limitations of say Twitter and Foursquare, you can’t actually run a promotion using the actual social networking platform’s functionality. Within Facebook that’s against the rules and they’ll shut your page down. They have to use a third party application which is why we exist.”

Whilst Hibberd and business partner Troy Townsend have extensive knowledge of the industry and engagement approaches, their business is primarily focused on providing the tools required for activation. “That’s what we’re about,” says Hibberd. “And the core to our proposition is the technology.”

Looking forward, in addition to Tiger Pistol’s existing apps, they are developing a sophisticated platform due for release later this year. “We’re bringing to market a technology platform that everyone from the local pizza shop through the largest multinational can use to implement a campaign or a promotion on their social networking presence, across multiple platforms, not just Facebook but Twitter and some platforms used in Asia as well.”

So far, Hibberd is keeping the name of the new self-service, multi-lingual platform, which is due to launch this year, a secret. We look forward to sharing more information as it comes to hand.

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Twitter role:

Featured: Steve Hibberd: @sjh0811, Tiger Pistol: @tigerpistol1, Troy Townsend: @troytownsend1

Article by: Lou Pardi: @loupardi, @smkapac