Marketing Matters

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Thanks to Chris Anderson, there’s a lot of talk lately about the true value of “free”.  Most people like the idea of “free” of course, but “free” is like most poisons – it’s ok in small doses. You can’t get carried away with free, though, because not only does it have a negative impact on the bottom line, but it’s messy, too.

As much as people like free, they don’t like messy. Messy things make it hard for us to feel at ease. There’s no peace in a mess. MySpace is pretty messy compared with Facebook, which is why MySpace is on the wane and Facebook is growing. Sure, you don’t have the ability to personalize your page, but the conversations are nice and tidy and can be followed more easily. Twitter is entirely messy – it’s hard to cut through the chatter sometimes to find the things you really want to know, so I fully expect to find it’s been replaced by something else in another year or so.

Free things are messy in the same way that Twitter is messy – there’s a certain amount of chaos in them and you need to feel at home with chaos to be able to make the most of it. The other day, some friends and I went to a restaurant’s anniversary celebration which featured free food. We got there about 5 minutes after the doors opened and found the line reached down the block. The line moved painfully slowly and once you got your food, there was no place to sit because everyone in town, it seemed, showed up for the free food. The restaurant hadn’t been prepared for the consequences of “free”. The food was delicious, but if you weren’t able to embrace the chaos, it was not a good place to be.

So before you leap on the free bandwagon, make sure you’re prepared to ride the wave of chaos it creates. It’s not for everyone. It’s messy.

The other day I was at a breakfast meeting at the Cornell Club where the topic had turned to how to use social media for business. The guy sitting next to me, who is rather successful in his field, rather abruptly announced that if he knew his insurance agent or financial advisor were “playing around at those sites” he’d get rid of them.

You can imagine the stunned silence that fell over the room for a few seconds before it got very loud. Everyone around the table had something to say about that. My response to him was very blunt: Customers are on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites – current ones, potential ones, you name it. If you have something to sell, you’d be remiss to not be where your customers are and to interact with them there. Let them talk to you, listen to what they have to say, and they’ll be more open to talking to you. Ignore them and they’ll go away and take their money with them.

Businesses exist to make money and they do that by communicating with their customers. Social media makes it easier to communicate, so it’s smart business to use it.

Personally, I’d like to think my financial advisor is smart. Wouldn’t you?

There are a lot of reasons to follow me on Twitter if you care about marketing, compelling ways to tell a corporate story, or if you want to read about me writing my book. But from the look of the landscape, there are some good reasons not to follow me on Twitter, too, that warrant mentioning. Here are the top 5.

1) I care more about the brand than the brand’s products.
When I mention a company’s great branding initiative or a way they’re using social media or some new technology to communicate with their audience, it’s not a given that I’ll be talking about the same company tomorrow. If I write about Ducati, I’m going to follow the development of their new social media ad campaign as results become available, but I won’t write about how wicked cool their new model is or what it’s like to restore a ’62 bike. Apply that example to any brand you can think of and it will hold true for me and my tweets. If you’re really into a brand’s products but don’t care about how they voice their brand, I’m not your guy.

2) I only tweet when I have something interesting to say.
I follow PR and social media guru @sandrafathi and she recently noted that she loses followers when she doesn’t tweet for 24 hours. That’s crazy. She constantly has great content, so if a day goes by with nothing, there are still the other 6 days each week that have compelling content. I don’t tweet as often as her and have let more than that period of time go by without tweeting. So if you’re constantly weeding your list of people who haven’t posted in 24 hours, you’re probably better off not adding me in the first place.

3) When I do other things, I usually don’t tweet.
I follow a serious business leader who shall remain nameless who recently tweeted that “peeing is great twitter time”. He wasn’t kidding. I enjoy multi-tasking as much as the next guy, but there are times to put the PDA away or to not have your laptop on your lap. If you want me to tweet while I’m “busy”, I’m not your guy.

4) I’m not in it for the numbers.
I’m not on Twitter to be Ashton Kutcher. I’m there to talk about great brands and interesting marketing ideas. Not everybody cares about that and that’s fine. Accordingly, I don’t care if I have only 2 followers, as long as they’re the 2 right followers for me. Would I rather have 2000? Sure, but only if they care about what I’m writing. It’s better to have the right audience than a big but disinterested audience.

5) I’m not going to buy your Twitter tool.
“Millions! You’ll make millions!” I hear it every day. Paid content, paid followers, spam followers, games, toys – the list keeps growing. No matter how many times you want to try to convince me to place myself at the vanguard of social media marketing by letting Dell buy my every tenth tweet, I’m not going to bite. I don’t buy crap. I buy into great ideas. If you’re shouting at me in bad grammar in bold print or all caps, I’m not going to listen.

Thankfully, that’s not most of you, but it is a large number. Twitter is a pretty interesting tool and for anyone who gets exactly what I mean with this post, I look forward to seeing you there.