Surely by now everyone is in the loop about the city riots that occurred during the last week, and fingers have been pointing the blame at social media and its role in “fuelling” such devastatingly destructive disturbances. As a result, those concerned have pleaded for social networking outlets, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry’s instant-messaging software “BBM”, to be limited or shut down.
Whenever we are presented with an opportunity to revolutionise our business, we are tempted to jump in headfirst before fully understanding what opportunities are available and how best to maximize them. A perfect example of this is how the Internet has impacted marketing. Companies have been so overcome by the potential to reach out to consumers on mass, that they frequently bombard them with untimely and irrelevant content.
When one of the greatest challenges in modern business can be getting users to register or subscribe, why are we then pushing them away with irrelevant marketing? Companies often make the mistake of assuming that mass marketing is justified by the generation of huge exposure which boosts their SEO. While this is true on one hand, in reality this is just a short-term gain. Search engines are constantly refining their algorithm so it’s only a matter of time before mass marketing content is recognized as irrelevant and unvalued by consumers and companies will loose their SEO rankings. In which case their mass marketing strategy will have completely flopped as they lost their SEO ranking and sacrificed the opportunity to establish relationships with the customers and prospects in the process.
There is only one sure way to gain long-term success, and that’s through relationships. Today’s consumers are looking for rich relationships with brands that deliver relevant and engaging content. So if you want long-term success it’s time to start defining your marketing strategy by these consumer terms of engagement.
Justin Bieber posts a picture of an LA traffic jam on photo sharing site Instagram and within a matter of minutes is inundated with followers. Whether it was Instagram’s ability to make even the mundane look beautiful or more likely the social influence over the pint-sized crooner’s 11.1 million followers on Twitter, Bieber put somewhat of a strain on the site’s servers gaining 50 new followers per minute, all clamouring to stalk his view of the world through vintage filters.
