“Hello, [first name] I Want to Sell Things to You.”
// January 15th, 2009 // Social Media
Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) wrote an interesting post today about his distaste for the practices of certain Email Marketing campaigns (Which you can read here). More importantly than his thoughts regarding best practices in Email Marketing etiquette is his profound and yet obvious statement about simply communicating to people as human beings.
To quote Bernoff: “All three annoyed me by treating me as a target, not a human. Influencers and journalists are human, too. We get mad at this stuff. You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?”
As of late, I’ve found myself getting into many debates with colleagues at the office about the usage of social media in marketing.
As a web shop with a ton of agency experience in house, many of us are marketers and have very rich experience in working with brand shops. This has made us a perfect partner for Ad agencies and clients with strong relationships with those agencies and it has also given us the ability to think about any digital strategy from a brand / marketing perspective; however, social media requires a more in-person touch than anything marketing has ever provided.
My personal stance is that the Public Relations team must to be involved in any communication strategy within social media tools as marketing and social media typically results in, dare I say it, a lack of trust from users in the brand. In the case that you don’t have a PR team, all you really need are people who believe in your brand and are willing to take the time out of their day to actually talk to people on Twitter, your blog, your forums and even venture out into the rest of the world where people are talking about you in places you probably don’t even know about yet.
Social Media tools / outlets / channels / sites / whatever you want to call them, are direct portals to specific human beings. They are key opportunities to speaking directly with a customer about their thoughts on your products and services and yet most companies are only interested in pushing brochures to them, rather than actually talking to them.
Now is the time to empathize with your customers. Their wallets are getting thinner lately, but your brand will probably be around longer than the recession (I hope). The opportunities you have today to truly connect with your audience and prove that there are real and genuine people running your company are enormous and plentiful; take advantage of them.
