Where should you spend your time trying to target and interact in the millions of conversations going on? There's no simple answer to that question and it varies on dozens of factors. Factors that I'm still trying to figure out. Keyword searches is an easy way to determine where you need to be communicating and sharing content. So you find hundreds of places where you can could comment, share, or optimize to get the right people to start listening and responding to you. Again, now what?
Storytelling is one of the best ways a marketer can communicate their message. If you want to capture the attention and interest of your audience you must tell stories. This past Friday we had a very violent rain and windstorm that hit all of New England. Usually at this time of year we would be talking about a blizzard with people digging out for days. Not this time. Instead we got two to as much as seven inches of rain and hurricane-force winds. Northern New England, especially New Hampshire (NH) my home state, got hit very hard. In 2008 we got hit with an ice storm that knocked out power to more than 400,000 people in NH. Some people didn’t have power for weeks and everyone learned a lot from the great ice storm.
Information overload is a very big problem. There are so many social conversations happening so fast that you can't keep track of them in your mind or on a piece of paper. You need to start organizing and creating silos of information you think have some value. This is one of the hardest parts of listening, deciding how to organize the information.
Over the past few posts I have discussed social conversations, listening, reading, and planning. I watched the Super Bowl last night and was excited to see the Colts and Saints play, but more excited to see the TV commercials. Not because I wanted to laugh or figure out which one was the most clever, but rather to see what companies really get how to integrate traditional, interruption-based marketing with our online social conversations.
Searches engines have changed the way we find information. It was very difficult to access information before the Internet was invented. We now live in a real-time world of continually updated information, which we have access to at almost at any point during our day. We come into contact with so many Internet marketing messages and there are hundreds of ways to find what we're trying to answer, that businesses have to be listening and contributing.
Conversations now take place in a virtual, always on, environment. Recommendations that used to be said word-of-mouth are now talked about on blogs or twitter. Complaints, that if heard, were filed through a returns or customer service department. Communication has changed and us, as a society tune out most of the other messages through some form of technology. You know what I mean, think about what's in your living room or in your car.