Occasionally I take time out from talking to startups to meet with folks from big brands.  What keeps surprising me is that many of these brands don’t seem to understand the power of direct.   By direct I mean any communication that is direct between the brand and existing or potential customers without requiring the use of a “medium” to carry the message.  Instead, many brands treat the Internet as if it were just another medium that is similar to previous ones.  The logic seems to be mostly around “I am going to shift my advertising from offline to online” with some “social” thrown in for good measure.

This type of thinking completely ignores the fact that the Internet is not at all like what came before it offline.   With the exception of direct marketers (catalogs, postcards), pre-Internet everyone needed a carrier for their message.  There was no way to deliver a brand’s message without embedding it in a magazine or radio segment or TV show.  But today that is possible and yet brands for the most part behave as if nothing has changed.  Imagine sitting at a table with three people.  One is the brand, one is a potential customer and the other is an actor.  Brands are behaving as if in order to talk to the customer they each time have to turn to the actor and tell the actor what to say to the customer.  In real life with three people at a table that would be incredibly awkward.  Well, with the Internet we are all sitting at the same table.

So what should brands be doing?  For starters they should completely own their names online.  For any of their products, their own site should come up top in google.  Once I go to the site it should be a landing page optimized for establishing a direct permission relationship.  In the extreme that could be a reason for me to provide my email address or to sign in with Twitter or Facebook.  At a minimum it should be a call to follow on Twitter or Foursquare.  The products themselves should carry clear calls to action to come and establish a direct contact.  After all, if I am already a customer I am likely to look at the product frequently.

Why would people allow brands to speak to them directly?  Well that’s where the real challenge lies.  Rather than paying agencies to figure out how to shift ad dollars more or less “mechanically” online, brands need to really spend time understanding what their authentic message can be that people will voluntarily want to hear directly from the brand.  These can be overarching messages and they can be messages for each product or service.  But in every case they must deliver some kind of value for people to want to receive them directly.  That value could be in the form of utility (alerts), pleasure (entertainment), inspiration (doing good) or most crudely and least effective in the long run dollars and cents (coupons/offers).

The beauty of this approach is that it takes care of “social” all by itself.  If people voluntarily receive messages that they like, they will share those message with their friends.  There is no such thing as a separate “social strategy” online.  There is either a core strategy of value combined with direct communication (and social will take care of itself) or there is nothing.  That is the power of direct.