How AI plus social can build greater trust and deeper customer connections

The holiday season is a reminder of how, despite our always-on, socially connected society, it’s still hard to keep up with all the relationships woven into our social feeds. And it’s not a “me” problem; this phenomenon is explained by Dunbar’s number, a theory that humans can only maintain about 150 connections at any given time. Brands similarly hit a limit—in budget, resources, etc.—to enable impactful social moments that build connections at scale. And if a consumer can maintain only so many relationships, how can brands ensure that they’re prioritized by their audience rather than the competition? Artificial intelligence offers a leap in technology that will further challenge or enhance our ability to forge close relationships—one that I believe will ultimately prove helpful. While there’s no silver bullet to help us overcome Dunbar’s number in our personal lives, we can at least tap into AI as a superpower to build deeper brand-consumer relationships at a grander scale. But this requires brands to build a social intimacy strategy from the top down, providing them a framework of how to better react in real time and to engage with ever more diverse audiences at scale. Social’s growing relevance for brands Social is more than just content or an influencer partnership—it has the power to move markets. A single social post can make or break a business, as we’ve seen with a handful of high-profile brand cancellations this year. Essentially, a flippant approach to social can destroy brand equity overnight. Social followers may be more fickle than you think. Social-first brands harness the power of social data and content to support, grow and more authentically represent the overall business, building stronger relationships in the process. Their chief executives have leaned into social as a key pillar of the brand identity. Everything today is social, touching experiential marketing, customer service, e-commerce and beyond. By elevating social to an upper-level planning function, brands have transitioned away from just seeking attention, and instead to enacting relationship-driven intimacy that directly impacts their branding. This is the sweet spot where AI and the social strategy can align to build trust and deeper connections with audiences. AI helps us build more, and stronger, relationships Laying the groundwork of a social-first brand has the additional benefit of identifying smart, efficient ways to implement AI into the work you do as a brand. Generative AI in particular offers us the opportunity to build workflows that are better designed to show up faster for audiences, and with greater relevance. The key short-term opportunity for marketers is using AI to pull insights faster and more efficiently than a human could alone. For example, insights collected, analyzed and processed by AI in real time can augment the work of community managers, helping them better understand where and how to dedicate their time and efforts. Generative AI can also automate some of their simpler functions, like customer support, to open more time to drive meaningful engagement with brand communities. On the creative side, marketers can implement AI in smaller yet impactful ways. For example, while testing different mockups for content that features an athlete, my team made use of an AI-generated clone of their voice. It’s important to note that the final asset did not include this AI-generated voice; customers heard the real thing. But using it internally allowed the brand’s marketing team to rapidly envision how different possibilities could play out or sound earlier in the process, ultimately helping us select the best content for their audience. Transparency is key to building trust There are very real fears that AI will help propagate misinformation the likes of which we’ve never seen, especially with an oncoming election season. This again elevates the role of social in the brand’s overall strategy, because brands can be stewards of truth amid confusion and culture wars—as long as they are open and honest with their own use of AI. The worst thing brands can do is break their audience’s trust. So while AI can help us overcome constraints in delivering content to audiences, we must use it carefully. Take a step back to ask yourself if the use of a virtual human rather than a real one is appropriate or necessary. If so, make it clear to your audience what you’re depicting. Begin your journey to becoming a social-first brand These concerns shouldn’t be too tough to handle for social-first brands. With executive leadership’s involvement in laying the groundwork for a cohesive social strategy, teams can feel empowered to look beyond traditional applications of social. That could include product announcements or customer service, building environments and communities that truly resonate with their audiences, while reducing risk in the process. It’s simply a matter of prioritizing social’s role in how you present yourself as a brand, then using that framework to strategically plug in emerging technologies. That’s a fine resolution for brands as they look toward the new year. About Media.Monks Media.Monks is the global, purely digital operating brand of S4Capital plc. Since 2021, Media.Monks has combined diverse solutions—media, data, social, platforms, studio, experience, brand and technology services—to serve as a consultative partner integrating systems and workflows that deliver unfettered content production, scaled experiences and data science fueled by AI and the industry’s very best talent and teams.

How AI plus social can build greater trust and deeper customer connections

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