Attention is the New Marketing Currency October 30, 2009
Posted by admin in : Display Advertising, Social Marketing , add a commentPrivacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun- CNN Oct 28th 2009
I thought I would share this article, as it follows Coffee Marketing’s thinking, although is more focused on privacy than I am. Purely because privacy rules and laws will always exist, but people will be more and more motivated to trade off their personal information for free services and benefits. This has been going on a while now and, so I don’t think this point is that new.
What is new is that currency is now attention. As people are so sick of advertising display formats, impressions, eyeballs and all other similar measures are becoming less valuable, as people are paying less attention to them if not verbally reject them.
Brands today must create, engage in and add to a conversation relating to their industry. This is what we are doing in our social marketing campaigns. Ensuring that your brand is visible within the social networks, explaining what your business does accurately (moving away from the traditional marketing, jargon filled fluff e.g. “Creating synergy between our partners to help leverage financial assets” is an absolute no no!) and being useful enough for people to listen to captures attention.
We must start to create a personality that is representative of the brand and live it… that is if we are not the brand ourselves. Brand marketing agencies have been doing this kind of work behind the scenes to inform their marketing communication: tone of voice, positioning etc. Today brand management is much more consumer facing and important as a company must live and breathe this personality. It is down not just to the audience to understand and tap into the brand, but also for the marketers to communicate it effectively in far less structured environments. In short they ideally need to have that personality for it to work. People trust other people, not companies or products anymore. As a result any social marketing effort should focus on building relationships and trust within the network that is built. This will only work if the right people are included within the network and when we can show that there is value in people using our product/ service. This is done by talking to people about the issues that are faced e.g. the problem that your company solves and by talking through what the benefits might be, why other people do it, perhaps why they do not and a whole other host if issues that can be brought up by potential customers.
Let’s calling this making friends with people. Obvious perhaps, yes, but this is crucial to point out, as the value of social networks is not in massive numbers, but quality relationships and contacts. This is one reason why Facebook is not the first choice; companies must find a social network relevant to their industry if possible. It is easy to search around social networks and request a connection with as many people as possible, but this only works against the premise of social marketing. The good thing for us is that most people have not figured this out yet. In particular agencies it seems or inexperienced, freelance marketers claim to have done a good job by building a network of over 1000 people, but what value does this bring to businesses really? Little at best.
The old advertising model was all about ‘reaching’ millions of people. This was only the case as one-to-one communication systems like social networks did not exist. Now that they do it is time for companies to embed this ideology within their businesses if they are to generate quality leads, loyal customers and people who go out and shout about what a great business and group of people you really are.
