H&R Blog

Interesting recap in Brandweek yesterday about H&R Block and their social networking initiatives. Run by Amy Worley (who incidentally is worth a follow on Twitter @worleygirl), the tax prep giant has thrown pretty much everything including the kitchen sink at social networking this year. Facebook, YouTube, mobile messaging, Second Life. While I suspect the efficacy of specific tactics varies widely, the strategic intent is rock solid. For people, social networking represents new ways to connect, interact and keep tabs in a world where getting together for lunch can seem like a traitorous waste of time. Checked the membership count on three dimensional groups like Ad Club, PRSA, Rotary, etc lately? Yikes. It's sad that it's come to this, but who has time to hang out with real people during the day unless you're getting paid for it? So, for individuals, social networking solves this problem. I know things about people I follow on Twitter and Facebook that I absolutely wouldn't have known otherwise. Not all of these info nuggets are relevant to my business, and some of them would positively disqualify folks from public office, but there's plenty of legitimate intellectual meat on the social networking bone if you know where to look. Which brings us back to H&R Block, which clearly is not an individual, but a giant corporate monolith that lies somewhere between Wal-Mart and Nike on the coolness scale. Setting aside the question of whether you want your tax preparation firm engaging in humorous viral video propagation instead of something more studious, promoting in multiple formats is smart marketing for two reasons. First, at present social networking is especially popular among two groups: younger people and digitally active people. Getting Americans to use H&R Block when they are young and worrying about taxes for the first time is a long-term strategic play akin to McDonald's hooking you for life with Happy Meals and awesome playgrounds. H&R Block also preaches convenience and lack of hassle. Who does that cater to? The digital folks that are constantly online (which produces an information overload creating a sense of not having enough time). While marketing pundits rightly congratulate H&R Block and other companies (Jet Blue on Twitter for example) for their social networking agility, how different is covering your social networking bases now than running cable TV was 30 years ago? As I covered in my speech to NAU recently (slide deck below on a previous post), the media landscape is fragmenting tremendously. Marketers have to go where the people are. If people are on Second Life, you market in Second Life. If people are reading hyper-specific magazines, you advertise there. If they are listening to Web radio (we've had great success with ads on Pandora) than that's the key. Right now, social networking is having its moment of glory. It may last a bit longer than most because it's ability to connect people in ways not seen since the advent of email. But at the end of the day, social networking tactics are rooted in the same exact thing good marketing has always been rooted in: segmenting your customers, understanding their media habits, and inserting your message in that locale.

About the Author: Jason Baer

Jason Baer is the Director of Strategy and Ideas for Off Madison Ave. With 20 years of marketing experience on behalf of more than 500 companies, he's a pioneer in digital marketing and using advanced testing and analytics to enhance marketing success.

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