I wrote recently about “smart reach” (http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/to-sell-more-your-marketing-must-embrace-smart-reach.html) and the need to understand that how, when and where you reach your prospects (and your existing customers) is as important as the content of the messages you are hoping to deliver. People who are socializing aren’t likely to be in shopping mode; people who are chatting aren’t generally consuming; and people digitally scrapbooking aren’t really looking for new medications – whether they may need them or not.
These days the context (where they are and what they’re doing) often trumps the content (what you’re saying or selling) unless your messages get both active engagement from the consumer and are accurately aligned in terms of your target’s time, interest and attention. Blindly launching your campaigns into indiscriminate channels (regardless of their aggregate volumes) like Facebook where the active users’ likely behaviors aren’t coincident with the actions you seeking from them is just too sloppy and too costly an approach for virtually any business today. These channels are readily accessible; they may even relatively easy to use and to measure (at least in terms of tonnage but not real reach); and they may not actually appear to cost that much (ignoring the obvious opportunity costs). But there’s very little economic benefit in wasting your scarce bullets on bad marketing regardless of the CPMs or per-piece cost. And, frankly, these days the crowd in general is crap. You need to focus on the folks who matter – not the masses – and make your message real for them.
These mega-channels are simply the wrong places to be looking for new business or anything else unless you have thoughtfully crafted and precisely targeted your messages. It’s exactly like spending the night looking for your lost keys under the nearest street lamp. Not because that’s where you think you lost them, but because the light is so much better there. Lazy marketers use these big fat channels because everyone else is doing the same thing. It’s like a drunk uses that same street lamp – for support (and comfort) rather than illumination.
To succeed today, you need real visibility into relevant behaviors and a strategy/plan to move yourself away from the crowd and to do your own thing. If you want to beat the Babe (or the big guys in any business), change the game. That’s why, while understanding context is certainly an important consideration to keep in mind and one that you need to take into account when developing your marketing plans, it’s only one dimension of the new data and metrics-driven approaches to digital marketing that are changing the game and increasingly distancing the winners from the also-rans.
To really understand what’s going on (especially in terms of the ongoing social conversations which, for better or for worse, are impacting your business every day (whether you realize it or not), you need to focus on (a) the multiple dimensions of these social conversations; and (b) who’s having them; and (c) who’s listening to them in order to spend your time, energy and resources wisely and, more importantly, to be sure that you are targeting and successfully reaching the right audiences.
Today, the fact is that no one with a brain wants to reach millions of easily influenced nobodies – regardless of how many fractured flicks they watch every day or even how many “allegedly” fervent (and generally faithless) followers they may have. Even faithful followers only matter to a marketer if the reason they’re following an influencer is directly connected to the messages they’re trying to extend and expand. Asking a Justin Bieber fan about Bach is a lot like asking Mrs. Lincoln how she enjoyed the play.
The only goal that really matters today is to get your messages in front of highly influential people (think digital multipliers and megaphones) who are tightly connected to significant (and fairly sizeable) niches of active and desirable individuals whose actions and attitudes they can directly influence (amplification) and whose behaviors as consumers, voters, or other cohort members you are looking to change and direct into actual results – not wishful thinking.
To do this successfully, you need to look at the whole story and at all four of its sides. Even more to the point, the big guys in the social listening spaces (Radian 6, Buzz Metrics, etc.) are all myopically focused on just one part of the equation (WHAT is being said and the apparent sentiment associated with it) and – as a result – if you hurry, you can jump ahead of them and deliver some valuable and truly-differentiated products and services to a marketplace that is ready, willing and able to buy anything that makes economic sense and that makes common sense out of the tsunami of meaningless data that they’re swimming in right now.
As noted above, equally as critical to effective social listening and deliberate message delivery is a determination of WHERE the conversations are taking place (context) and information about WHEN the conversations are taking place (time). But it’s the 4th dimension – the WHO is speaking and what are his or her relationships and connections to the ultimate target audiences as well as his or her ability to amplify and extend the messaging thru expressions that sway and influence (power to direct or drive behavior) the targets that is the vast unmined terrain and opportunity zone.
Klout.com and Kred.com are the pioneers in the individual influence measuring space, but at best these are mechanical attempts to count frequency, volume and potentially the extent of one’s connectivity without a great deal of time or thought being devoted to the true weight, value and influence of the sum of these connections. These are brute force approximations and solutions that are barely workable and of little real value beyond generating some industry bragging rights and hype. This, of course, didn’t keep Lithium Technologies from buying Klout recently for $200 million. I wish them lots of luck in figuring out exactly what they got and what to do with it.
But bigger and better versions of these types of tools are desperately needed because the stakes are high and so – as a result – are the opportunities for new disruptive entrants into this space. It’s clear that today even the best language parsing engines and related algorithms are no match for the old family connectivity trees built out of bright colored Post-its tacked to the wall or the white boards that we see every night on the tube in the police procedural shows like Law and Order. You can’t tell the players without a program and a scorecard and the best computers can still only do our bidding (and massive data assembly), but not our thinking (yet). The companies which build the products and services that help us identify, reach and influence the people who matter (the highly influential and deeply connected prime movers) and who – in turn – can move the markets and the marketplace will be the next generation of big winners.
We don’t care about the wisdom of the crowd; we only care about the wisdom of the people we care about.
