Marketers who are used to the traditional ways of buying media and working outbound marketing are having a hard time understanding how social media works. They made a habit of thinking that marketing equals their messages pushed out to as many people as possible.
Best practices in direct mail and email marketing give them an easy -- and lazy -- way out. If you know you're going to get x% of leads on average, you can farm out content on the cheap, and sit in your office looking at your dashboard for the clicks to come in.
It turns out that attracting and converting people is not that simple anymore.
Maybe it never was.
People want value for their hard earned dollar
Even in businesses that buy from other businesses (B2Bs), people have learned to do their due diligence. The sheer volume of pitches, calls, and spam have gotten everyone's draw bridge up, so to speak. The only way to build a bridge to relationships is increasingly one of permission and attraction.
Smart companies have learned the new gymnastics of business.
Read all about that here:
The New Gymnastics of Business: Part 1, the Balance Beam - starts with believing in what you do. Compare these two cases: I published a book so I need you to read it vs. There’s something you need to read, so I wrote about it.
The New Gymnastics of Business: Part 2, the Vault - to achieve scale, you need less volume, more connections, and focusing on the right things.
The New Gymnastics of Business: Part 3, the Rings - for an organization to get ready, it needs to recruit and energize the people on the inside.
The New Gymnastics of Business: Part 4, Rhythmic Gymnastics - the tools are there to support you, enhance your communication, allow you to extend your reach. This is about performance and doing the right thing.
In social media, if you want an audience, you build it. And there are ways to use paid media and earned media together to do that.
I'm all in favor of value
That's why I developed a resource for the loyal readers of this blog. You can now access 16 of my best content strategy posts in one place. For a limited time only*, this content strategy page will give you a leg up on how to build an audience, get customers, create advocates.
Please leave some feedback here as to what would be helpful to you. It's Fall and we're kicking off year 5 of Conversation Agent in high gear.
*UPDATE: as promised, the page was going to be up for a limited time only. The content will be part of a new project, significantly enhanced. It has been fascinating to see how this post was bypassed by everyone in favor of the page as a direct link. As well, it looks like we missed an opportunity to talk about future content in the comments here.
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Valeria,
This was such a useful post (and most generous for you to continue to nurture your 'intelligence hive'). I'm working on an ecommerce project at the moment where content is very much absent, and needed, so am enjoying revisiting these posts and your related links. I often find that content strategies specific for Ecommerce is often not covered, so your post was so timely for me.
Happy to be a part of your year 5 (and hopefully many more).
Posted by: RaynaNyc | September 11, 2010 at 07:21 PM
Thank you for taking the time to let me know this is useful to you, Rayna. And thank you for being part of year 5 as we get going. Thoughtfulness and gratefulness are always remembered and special.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | September 11, 2010 at 10:11 PM