Buying a set of Nike blades doesn’t make you play like Tiger. (er...I mean the golf side of Tiger). Similarly, opening a Twitter account or slapping a Facebook and Twitter share icon on your blog/website does not make you a social marketer. It’s a start though. But if it’s all you do, it’s a lot like spending good money on 30 seconds of television airtime and then using the slot to flight static visuals of your business card. You are selling yourself way short. As said in an earlier post, social marketing is about infiltrating conversations, adding meaning to existing conversations, helping people do what they do best: interacting with other people. And making sure your brand is quietly at the centre of all that.
But that doesn’t just happen. (Well I suppose in rare cases it does). But in spite of what you might think, online tribes have brains. Brains that work pretty well and which have efficient filters. Consider the following:
“there is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another...when aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone” – Fairfax Cone
All great communication happens as a result of two things. The first is crystal clarity of who you are talking to. This is a terribly neglected skill even by old world marketers. And, as both Seth Godin and Mark Ritson remind us, who you won’t talk to is as important as who you will talk to. And when it comes to knowing the people in your audience, I don’t just mean their sex, age, marital status and who they vote for – you need the inside track on their likes, dislikes, dreams and fears, hopes and hates. You need to know their hobbies and a whole lot more besides. The second thing you need is absolute clarity of what you want them to do - and how having online conversations with them is going to move them towards your business goal in ways that traditional media won’t. That’s the tricky part I know because you might want to achieve a myriad of outcomes with social media.
The point here is that targeting and insights are absolutely crucial to success. So, if you are the manager of a shopping mall, it’s not enough to know the sales numbers of your respective tenants and footfall trended over time. You need to break that mass of shoppers who visit your mall into segments of interest. One segment might mostly come to shop for groceries or white goods. Another for high fashion items and little else. Some will be culture vultures, passionate about good literature, great coffee and art movies. A sizeable segment will be teenage mall-crawlers or large families who just come to window shop or perhaps grab an ice-cream cone. And the list goes on. But unless you have an insight (or in some cases sets of insights) on how each segment views the mall and its experiences there, you have no real pretext for a conversation with them – much less one in their native tongue.
Similarly, if you are selling high value homes in gated estates, you are going to need to segment that audience too. Some buyers will be in their forties looking to sink cash into a nest egg. Some might be looking to dodge the tax man by investing in a home that never really gets lived in. Some might just want to play golf. Some will be investing for their retirement, others for the now. Do you know enough about the broader region which might attract those segments to your project? Schools? business prospects? hospitals? Weekend getaways? Crime and social stability? Annual festivals? Churches? How is the fishing? What’s the surf doing? What specials are the birdwatchers seeing?
Without insight, you have no content. Without content you haven’t a hope.
Finally, what is your brand’s tone of voice? We marketers can speak at length on our brand’s values and personality. We are masters of distilling its essence into three words. But what does all this sound like over a beer or a mug of hot joe? In part 5, I made the point that social marketing is all about “relinquishing control”. Well that is only partly true. The art of communication is in setting clear boundaries within which conversation can take place – you want freedom within the boundaries, and to know them well enough to see the potential for disaster should you overstep them.
Understanding your brand’s tone of voice and having a strong content strategy is the very essence of (as much as possible anyway) dictating the terms of conversation within these boundaries.
Here’s another quote from Morris Hite that sums it up: “if an ad campaign is built around a weak story – or as is so often the case, no story at all – I don’t give a damn how good the execution is, it’s going to fail...”
So before you even consider social media as a channel, ask yourself if you have a story.
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