Brands are accepted in online cultures when they stop thinking in terms of campaigns and start thinking in terms of becoming part of a community.

When looking at the success and failure of brands in integrating themselves into the social web, one thing becomes clear: it’s more about anthropology, and sociology than anything else. I’ve blogged about this topic before from a slightly different angle. People often refer to their “digital lives” and this term is not to be taken lightly. The social web is where people hang out online. There are tribes, cultures, languages, mores and milieus. These digital cultures are as unique and varied as the cultures that exist in the “real world.” Facebook for example has a different set of mores than MySpace. And within MySpace exist many cultures and tribes, all with their own unique set of accepted behavior. Many failed attempts by brands to “crack the social nut” have failed or backfired because they are engineered by people who are foreign to these cultures and who haven’t taken the time to study them properly.

A few years ago McDonald’s decided to open up shop in India, a country in which the cow is sacred. McDonald’s took the time to get to know the culture they were serving so that they could successfully enter the market. This article from BusinessWeek has more details, here’s an excerpt:

McDonald’s dispensed with its most prominent ingredient in order to respect, and to please, its Indian customers. Many Indians eat no beef or pork, or any meat at all. According to Vikram Bakshi, managing director of McDonald’s India North, it was necessary to adapt the company’s offerings while keeping the core brand values consistent across cultures.

“The menu has evolved over the years as a result of constant innovation and our customers’ needs,” says Bakshi. “Local creations like McAloo Tikki Burger, Curry Pans, Wraps Pizza McPuff, and McVeggie are established departures from what we had in our introductory restaurant offerings.

“Today 70 percent of our menu is ‘Indianized’, and the McAloo Tikki burger is our highest selling product. While the menu may be different in some ways, the McDonald’s experience around the world is consistent, offering quality, great service, cleanliness, and value.”

In addition to adjusting their product offering, McDonald’s also had to consider the manner in which it marketed itself to a new culture. Many things that are acceptable in the US are considered offensive in other areas of the world. The same can be said for different cultures on the social web. For example: on MySpace it’s perfectly acceptable to “friend” someone you don’t know, it’s not considered SPAM by most, it’s just that kind of environment. Facebook, on the other hand is another story, people are much more concerned with truly knowing someone before they add them as a friend. On MySpace it’s also perfectly acceptable to have a profile for an entity, not so on Facebook, entities on Facebook need to be represented by groups, pages or applications. Culture on Twitter is different from culture on Last.fm, which is different from the culture on Digg and so on. Each one of these communities has it’s own culture, it’s own style of communication and it’s own etiquette.

The only way to know it is to live it, or to study it as an anthropologist would study a foreign culture, or preferably both. Just as an anthropologist, no matter how long they study a particular culture, will never be truly a part of that culture, the same can be said for those of us who view the social web from a purely scientific point of view. The science, and the study of the social web can provide useful quantitative data, but the magic lies in the alignment of qualitative and quantitative analysis to provide a complete picture of the culture.

Breaking it Down

• Remember that the social web is not a broadcast medium:
• Listen
• Observe
• Live in the space you wish to enter before you go barging in
• Respect the culture you are attempting to integrate into
• Learn the language
• Learn what’s socially acceptable
• Don’t try to run a campaign
• Participate in a community