After Apple AAPL -0.35% unveils the iPhone 6 today, you’ll hear about it just about everywhere — on TV, on news websites, and relentlessly on Twitter TWTR -2.67% and Facebook. Just about the only places you won’t hear about it are on Apple’s official corporate social media channels, because they basically don’t exist.
More than a decade after the creation of Facebook and more than eight
years after the founding of Twitter, the world’s most valuable company
and second-most valuable brand
is an increasingly lonely social media holdout. Though it maintains
accounts for iTunes and the App Store, Apple doesn’t have an official
corporate Facebook page or Twitter profile. Nor does it have one on
Instagram, Google GOOGL -1.59%+ or Pinterest. The CIA may feel like it can’t afford not to tweet, but Apple is a little more careful with its communications, thank you very much.
But that may be changing. Following the hiring of Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts last October,
the consumer electronics giant has been tentatively — very tentatively —
moving toward having a more active social presence, according to a
person familiarized with the company’s thinking. In recent months,
Ahrendts has brought on several key people, including global digital
strategy head John Agnew and digital marketing director Musa Tariq. Both
came from Nike, where Tariq was head of social media and community.
According to this person, Apple sees itself as being in transition
from its old communications model, where a “single narrator” — aka the
late Steve Jobs — articulated a “singular narrative” at a time and place
of his choosing, to a new model where the company speaks in multiple
voices and participates in two-way discussions with its consumers and
fans.
It’s a shift pretty much every other other big consumer-facing
corporation on earth has already made, but it’s causing more than the
usual amount of anxiety at Apple, not just because of the legacy of
extreme message control, but because of its ethos of perfection in all
things. If a year or two ago Apple was still ambivalent about whether it
needed to be on social media at all, now it’s moved onto the question
of how it can be as deft at Facebook and Twitter as it has long been at
traditional advertising. And Apple doesn’t want to dive into those
platforms headlong until it has figured out how to do that, even if that
goes against the trial-and-error ethos of the medium.
But there have been experiments. In May, Apple debuted a new ad campaign for the iPhone 5c on Tumblr, although the campaign has since been taken down. And then there’s the “Your Verse”
campaign for the iPad, the individual components of which were “
co-created” with users. Aside from LinkedIn, which the company uses
primarily for recruiting, YouTube, where the “Your Verse” videos live,
is the one big social platform Apple has embraced wholeheartedly at a
corporate level. It has more than 2 million subscribers
there. While a wholesale migration onto Facebook and Twitter may be
months or years away, expect to see more experiments like “Your Verse”
in the near future.
Content Source - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/09/09/is-apple-getting-over-its-allergy-to-social-media/
