Luxury brands, social networking and knowing who your friends are.

The best thing I’ve received all week is Google’s deck on ‘Real Life Social Networks’. Here if you want to see it in all its 224-slide glory (http://bit.ly/b6A03x - thanks @dorando) but I’ll do a synopsis.

The basic premise of the presentation is that the way we structure our social life on the web is totally different to (and nowhere near as complex as) how we do so offline. Online we have an amorphous group of ‘Friends’ or ‘Followers’ who we have picked up along our offline and online travels. Offline we have a series of different groups of friends (research says 6 is the average) who we have met throughout life (and through lifestages) and who we most often keep separate.

Our dialogue with each of these groups is totally different in tone and nature. It varies from the formal to the friendly to the downright childish (well, at least that’s what I’m like with my schoolfriends…). Bringing them together as one (at a wedding for example) can be stressful and slightly scary. And yet online (through facebook, twitter, linkedin and others) we usually talk to them as one.

This is a big dilemma for brands and nowhere more so than in luxury (my focus for this week). Luxury brands face many online dilemmas (transparency vs control, how luxury lives online, etc), but one of the most critical is how best to engage online customers in meaningful dialogue.

Some brands (remaining nameless) are hopeless at this but many are successful. Some go corporate (http://www.facebook.com/Tiffany?ref=ts), some take the formality of the POS experience online (www.faberge.com) and some create a much more informal environment (http://twitter.com/JimmyChooLtd).

Wherever they choose to sit on the ‘cordial-chumminess’ continuum, the brands who will succeed will be the ones who understand that the customers they are targeting online are as segmented and as complex as the ones they see day-in, day-out in-store. Ultimately they will need to create an environment and develop a dialogue which appeals to all but retains the ‘charisma', 'premiumness' and 'personal touch' of the in-store experience.