This article will appear in the Saturday Star 2 July

Social media offers new ways to reach target markets

Something dramatic is happening in the world of communication, and it is predicated on three trends: near-limitless numbers of powerful, untethered computing devices (especially cellphones) to communicate at increasingly lower costs; high-power, low-cost processors; and vast amounts of storage available at next to no cost.

The combination has spurred the revolution of social media, and while many corporates are nervous of it, it is a typical case of King Canute: social media is a tide which cannot be turned back.

Corporate executives and managers are quite correctly concerned about the impact of social media on their productivity. The average Facebook user – and there are now 750 million of them, making Facebook the third most populous “country” in the world – spends 34 hours a week online, relative to a 40-hour working week. If they are doing this, they are either stealing company time, or doing it after hours and nearly doubling their time online.

The same goes for Twitter, which takes less time to compose a post, but can also be a terrific time-waster. Users who post: “Sigh!”, or “Coffee!” consume the recipient’s bandwidth and time while adding no value.

But none of this is to diminish the overall value of social media. The sheer numbers, and the connectedness of the world, mean that social media is the new way of reaching your target market.

It has enabled guerrilla marketing, where you fly under the radar, and hit your target market without your competitors necessarily knowing about it.

In previous communications, whatever you said you tended to share more with your competitors than with your potential customers. Social media changes this.

Duncan McLeod’s TechCentral (www.techcentral.co.za) is a good case in point. Duncan created an iterative model whereby he could create great, compelling content based on domain expertise, and give it away for free.

And this is the single most important insight: on the Internet, few people will pay for content. Ask the New York Times.

There are simply too many other options.

Duncan is able to use social media to be nimble, publish on demand, break the news first every day, and have enough people subscribed to his site and following him that he has a critical mass of influence.

Not one of his competitors can publish on demand. The larger you grow, whether online (virtual) or print, the more you are limited by internal processes to break the news. This applies equally to 702, Independent Online, ITWeb, Timeslive or SABC.

The gap for communicators alive to the opportunity is this:

·          

D--- Define your target universe

·      ---   Understand what they want to hear, read or see

·      ---   Build a comprehensive, integrated marketing/communications strategy that embraces the new and existing channels

·      --   Create opt-in/opt-out databases and mechanisms to allow people to choose if they want to be part of your communication.

·      --   Build a push-pull mechanism that pushes content to the targeted universe, which may be 10 people or 1 million.

·      --   Use existing, acceptable push media to pull people back to a repository of world-class content. This repository must contain content that exceeds readers’ value expectations and should be educational and informative rather than self-promoting.

The classic iteration now looks like this: a corporate website (inflexible and hard to update), integrated with a blog (easily, immediately updatable).

But, where Kevin Costner built his Field of Dreams and was certain that if you built it, they will come, we have no such certainty in terms of social media. Build it and don’t tell people it’s there, and you will depend on non-existent pull.

There are, of course, ways to pull eyeballs, such as RSS (real simple subscription) and search engine optimisation, but they pale into insignifance against the critical mass-driven volume of people on Twitter.

You cannot reach everyone, all the time, but the new rule is that you can reach enough people over time to achieve your communications objectives at a relatively low cost.

What is very clear is that the rules of the game have changed, and will continue to evolve. One release used to achieve corporate objectives: now 500 things done to perfection might achieve the same objective.

Excellence in communication and content communicated is the only criterion. Mediocrity is always punished, either by poor results or people simply ignoring the content, which undermines the entire process.

There is a revolution afoot, and companies which say today’s trend is fleeting miss the point. All technology-driven trends are temporary, but business imperatives drive evolution to a higher state.

It’s not about Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn: it’s about the new channels. Some will work, some won’t but you disregard them entirely at your peril. -- Frank Heydenrych, Predictive Communications