Everytime you show up, you’re marketing yourself
-Scott Stratten
This is precisely what David Meerman Scott
explains in Chapter Four of his book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR; Social Media and Your Target Audience. When
you first hear such a title your mind immediately thinks that the chapter is
going to focus on HOW to reach your target audience or even how to FIND your
target audience. On the contrary, the chapter focuses more on how and where
companies should be engaging with its target audience online. First, Scott makes
it a point to specify the difference between social media and social
networking,
THE WEB = A CITY,
SOCIAL MEDIA = A COCKTAIL PARTY
For the few who find it difficult to understand “online
life”, it may be eye-opening to think of the web as a city and social media as a
cocktail party. For instance:
-
Corporate sites are the storefronts on
Main Street
-
Craigslist is the bulletin board at
the entrance of a corner store
-
eBay, a garage sale
-
Amazon, a superstore
-
Mainstream media sites like New York Times are the newspapers of the
city
-
Social media and the way people
interact on blogs, forums, and social network are the bars, private clubs, and
cocktail parties of the city
If you follow this analogy then you would agree
that, “The
popular people on the cocktail circuit make friends. People like to do business
with people they like. And they are eager to introduce their friends to each
other. The same trends hold true in social media” (Scott, pg. 55).
WHAT ARE THEY
SAYING ABOUT YOU? AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT?
The rest of this chapter on Social Media and Your Target Audience focuses heavily on the
importance of being aware of what people are saying about your business via
these social media sites and how your business should react or interact in response. Ignoring what
your customers are saying on these platforms is ‘hazardous to your brand’.
Sony BMG, for example found this out the hard way
when the company reacted not only slowly but via the wrong mediums in response
to backlash the company received in surrounding new software used on music CDs.
Mark Russinovich blogged about it and very quickly after several consumers
commented on his post with things like, “I SAY BOYCOTT THE BASTARDS” (Jack3617). Five days after Mark’s blog post Sony BMG’s
global digital business president Thomas Hesse went on NPR’s Morning Edition to defend the company.
According to Scott, “The choice of radio as a forum to react to a storm of
protest on the web was a poor one.” Sony later released a statement offering an
exchange program, but it was too late to stop the law suits. Texas Attorney
General Greg Abbott sued Sony BMG under the state’s 2005 spyware law; and more
law suits followed soon after.
As a marketer it is crucial to be an active
participant in the communities that your markets are a part of. It isn’t enough
to simply post only when you have a sale or promotion or to comment only about
your products or services. Marketers will find it beneficial to monitor what’s
being said (Hello Google Alerts!) and when and if a company becomes the center
of a heated discussion a representative needs to jump in with a response.
The internet is like a massive focus group…
- David Meerman Scott
Is Your Social Media Strategy Relevant to Your
Target Audience? Click Here
to find out.
