Sometimes you just need to sit back and let the admire the staggering numbers. Social is such a pervasive part of our digital lives, it won’t be long before it becomes embedded into every aspect of our lives.
It’s the new year and everyone is making resolutions. One thing I’d like marketers to do is focus on moving past breaking the ice. Huh? What’s that?
Every now and again, clients ask what the value of a Facebook Like, Foursquare check-in, or Twitter follower is. Digital strategists (myself included) have tried to quantify these interactions into dollars and cents, with varying levels of degrees of success. In my mind, the thinking needs to evolve beyond the transactions and towards relationships. When a consumer likes your brand, think of it as an ice-breaker of a conversation — it’s the start of a dialog, the beginning of any relationship. Dialog requires back and forth, give and take, listening and speaking. Before you can expect any consumer to become an advocate, brands need to set themselves up to establish and more importantly maintain conversations on an ongoing basis.
For marketers, after an initial campaign launch, sustaining momentum and buzz is a challenge. There is usually a flurry of activity at the start but after a couple of weeks, scores of new followers and participants, the question becomes, “now what?”
The ice has been broken and now it’s time to maintain the relationship. It requires regular conversation about things that matter. It’s similar to exercising regularly; you can’t expect to remain fit if you only go once a year. To keep things interesting, you need to mix things up and have different conversations that are contextually relevant, otherwise you get stuck in a boring rut, like having the same gym routine day in day out. It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Conversations are no different, in that they need variety in purpose, tone and topic in order to keep interest up. If not, you run the risk of sounding like that relative at Thanksgiving dinner who talks about the same drivel year after year. No one said the art of conversation was easy, but isn’t that half the fun?
I had the pleasure of meeting Paul Adams at a marketing conference earlier this year, where he gave a stirring lecture on the social web. Within a few minutes, the crowd was mesmerized and his talk was the highlight of the day. He delivered a clear message that there was promise for marketers in social, and to be successful, there were some key principles to adhere to. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about how to create content and experience that really means something to the people we’re trying to reach.
As we wrap up the year, social media continues its upward trajectory. Facebook now has over 800 million users, Twitter over 200 million. But beyond the numbers, the amount of energy and activity in social is all but impossible to ignore. Compounding the growth is the rapid rise of smartphone adoption, a trend that doesn’t appear to be slowing down either. Collectively, social and mobile are strengthening connections and creating new ones in ways we never would have thought possible even a few years ago. As social media gets bigger and bigger, the world becomes smaller and smaller.
One of the smartest things about web services are the APIs, which let you take data or content from one service and wrap it up in experience from another service. Mashing services together often results in the whole being significantly greater than the sum of the parts. Take for instance, Instagr.am, which combines cool photo filtering along with an instant network to share your photos. Then, make all of these photos accessible by exporting them to them available through popular social networks that everyone uses like Facebook and Twitter and you have the ability to expose your photos to a much wider audience. You can embed your Instagr.am photos nearly anywhere making it effortless to amplify the reach of your photos.
I believe the next big API target is music. With services like Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio and Spotify, there are no shortages of companies who see the potential in social music. The beauty is that sharing music is something people have been doing for decades, through mix tapes, going to concerts and loaning CDs to each other. The behavior doesn’t need to change in order for it to work; rather, the technology needs to catch up with how consumers expect to discover new tracks.
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