We’ve been discussing the importance of experience. More importantly, how to use experience as a means of bringing consumers into your TAC loop (Transparency, Authenticity, & Community) to create truly valuable brands, maintain solid reputation, and fulfilling customer relationships. Social media is a critical set of tools for savvy marketeers to build a foundation for creating experience, delivering new information & content, and then providing a multi-directional forum for interaction between you and your consumers, consumers and their peers. Sounds simple and easy – at least it should be. But why does it seem so difficult and why do so many people make such a mess of it?
First of all, let’s clarify terms. When you get past the vocabulary – blogs, vlogs, Facebook, wikis, podcasts, video, web 2.0, let alone twitter; they all fundamentally do the same thing. Although each technology does excel in its own special mode of communication that works best in specific contexts (which we’ll review in greater detail in another post.), social media is any kind of technology that can enable people to create, augment, and/or share content among multiple interest communities and peer groups. That’s it. But there are key benefits unique to these media which is partially why they’ve captured so much attention and marketing budget. What separates social media from legacy marketing, CRM, as well as PR, is based on 2 simple attributes:
- Social Media by it’s nature is permission based.
- Social Media let’s you gauge and adjust your message & media in real-time.
Let’s discuss what these mean and how you can best optimize them.
As much as we like to highlight the creative, all marketing is based on rules & etiquette. There are rules of taste, of language, of etiquette, when addressing a consumer that you must follow or you will immediately lose credibility and obscure your message. To be effective when approaching a consumer, you must ask their permission to address them. Once given, you can then deliver your full palate of media & messages at full speed. In traditional marketing, permission was granted tacitly. Because media choices were limited and entertainment content required subsidizing in order to keep television and radio service free; marketeers had tacit permission to present their messages – it was an understood cost of consuming the service. It was just that simple. Today, where media is pervasive and marketing-free quality content can be broadcast for free – or as a paid-for premium, requesting permission is critical to create a level of trust between you and your consumer. This simple act of courtesy delivers such a strong impact on the minds of consumers that they in turn will be far more open to accepting the experiences you can offer and more likely to enter your TAC loop. Permissions can be as simple as offering a “Do Not Contact” button prominently on your page, offering a reward for registering, even as complex as assigning automated RSS feeds to specific subject areas. By doing things like this you offer the consumer an active method of rejecting or accepting your attempt to communicate with them. Anyone can turn the channel, move to a new webpage, or shut it all down if they’re not happy with what they’re seeing. But every time someone moves off your content without active participation with your content you’ve lost a critical opportunity to interact with that consumer. “No” is just as valuable as a “Yes”. It alerts you that your messages, offer, or content is inappropriate and needs to be retooled. Because you’re working in near real-time message delivery and response, you can more easily identify a virtual test community from your “No’s” and re-try your refined messages again – one more time. Hopefully with a better result. Word of warning: you cannot spam them, be overly aggressive, etc., You’ve got one more shot. If they took the time to give you a negative response once, it’s not unreasonable to try them one more time with a refined message. So the rule is – always ask permission and an active response – even a negative response – is vastly better than being ignored.
The real-time nature of social media is also critical. While we touched on it in the previous paragraph, the benefits go far beyond what we discussed. With social media you have not only real-time delivery of content but you have real-time response and then response to that response, etc., In short, you have community. It may form itself around a single issue, comment, or piece of content and can disappear just as quickly, but for a moment, you have a flash community that’s all yours. Digital lightening in the bottle! Think how important that is – how by watching consumers in your core demographic react to your content and with each other you discover significant amounts of rich psychographic information that you can then use to re-enforce your campaigns and your messages! This is the true value that underlies all social media – you can create immediate entry into your TAC loop – create a community that will interact with your brand, their peers, and help guide you with their unguarded input as to what will make them buy – as long as you keep faith with them with corporate Transparency and stay Authentic in how and what you communicate in relation to your corporate actions. Without Transparency & Authenticity you may attract a short term community, but you won’t keep them and you certainly won’t create a valuable brand or build consumer loyalty.
As marketeers, we’ve never had such immediate and truly powerful technologies like this at our disposal. We’ve never been able to broadcast a message into the air, see who’s receiving and responding to it, and then who’s responding to the responses all in real-time. When used properly, these tools can truly turbo-charge your marketing campaigns and enable you to build strong customer relationships and a valuable brand. Used indiscriminately they can tank your brand faster than arsenic in the Tylenol bottle. Social Media is truly social – so all the etiquette you’d observe when going to a party holds true for this – dress to impress, don’t be a boring, don’t be a know-it-all, and most importantly, don’t get too drunk and insult your guests!
David Appelbaum is an award-winning marketing professional and accomplished musician specializing in pre-IPO companies who is fascinated by the nexus between commerce, art, and psychology and how technology impacts them all.
