Anyone managing a social media account (or accounts) has heard that “A successful marketing campaign requires reaching your audience with the right message at the right time and that in order to do that, you need to focus on the channels with the largest audience base.”
But the more crowded a party becomes… the noisier it gets.
Sure, if you’re telling a better story, speaking louder than everyone else or talking more frequently than most — more people are bound to hear you. However, being “heard” by more people doesn’t necessarily equate with being heard by the RIGHT people.
Your odds of reaching the “right audience” are better in a venue with more people but just because there are a ton of people in a packed arena on a Saturday night, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interested in listening to you.
As any sniper would admit, more targets doesn’t equate with the right targets.
A message is better received when it’s targeted to a specific audience comprised of the people who want to hear that message in the first place.
As the marketing and advertising firm Stunt & Gimmick’s puts it “Long before content marketing was a buzzword, we had decided that the best way to reach people was by giving them what they wanted — great content that was useful…” and I couldn’t agree more.
Similar to television broadcasting networks, social media networks carefully calculate which messages their users receive based on a constellation of previous online behavior and algorithms used to govern their monetized message delivery systems…which is a very intelligent way of determining what people want and delivering it to them.
Personal media, however, allow users themselves to determine whose which media (or whose messages) they receive. Hawser Inboxes (our new personal media and messaging app launched last month) not only empowers users to “be the algorithm” it also guarantees that every single one of the messages they want delivered is not only delivered… it’s organized and then made available on-demand. All without users having to do anything other than connect with other users.
Advertisers have historically directed their messages to wherever the attention of consumers/potential customers is focused. It’s why billboard space on the most heavily traveled roads is more expensive than billboard space on a less traveled road and why the most popular social media networks are rife with promoted posts, sponsored content and native ads.
But what if advertisers, businesses and beloved brands were to be the pioneers of a new platform instead of track and chase it? Would their inner circle of loyal customers and die hard fans follow? Or would this necessitate a tectonic shift within the entire marketing paradigm?
Granted, adopting a more active approach to marketing like this would be quite a departure from the more conventional reactive strategies firms and businesses seem to adopt but…in an age where consumers are able to obtain an unprecedented amount of data in the blink of an eye — and are less apt to making more emotional purchases; perhaps advertisers, businesses and brands can see the value in diversifying the time and energy spent on ubiquitous posts that ensure relevancy and discoverability to now include taking the initiative to opening the door to directly connections with those loyal customers who have been already been converted. After all, loyalty is a plant that requires constant watering.
Hawser Inboxes is the most efficient and user-friendly personal media platform since email. A reset button for some and for others, an opportunity to turn down the noise and escape the bloat of social with the ability to decide precisely who enters their inner circle and whose messages they’ll receive — instead of a network’s algorithm deciding for them.
Social media rules and no one will debate that — but the reality is, most of us understand social media a lot more now than we did ten years ago and are gradually seeing more channels that cater to users’ diversified interests that range from networking to novelty.
Five years ago, most of us had never even heard of an “algorithm” (and the powers of an intelligently designed algorithm are still far beyond my comprehension) but regardless of how intelligent the code is behind the UI, social media is still media and not messaging.
We enjoy having public media platforms where anyone can say or sell just about anything…and we accept the inherent negative aspects that accompany such accessibility…namely: obligatory “Likes” and the decorum that directs us to accept “friend” requests from people we know but don’t particularly like…not to mention the subsequent necessity to scroll endlessly past unwanted posts and interruptions from advertisers in order to get to the good stuff we really want.
Of course that endless scrolling often results in the pleasure of discovering something interesting or amusing or so random that we otherwise wouldn’t have found… but some have grown to hate it. For many, the endless scrolling has become more than a Pavlovian behavior, it has become the defining reason social media is the medium we love to hate.
From The Hawser Inboxes Blog Post: “Maslow’s Hammer” | Josh Sapienza
