Turning advertising audiences into brand advocates
Mike Walsh Trailer from Mike Walsh on Vimeo.
Catching up on some reading, I loved a recent post from strategist, speaker and author, Mike Walsh, Be Sweet, Please Retweet. If you’re learning how to build brand relationships with social media it’s well worth the reading. If you don’t have time, a couple of Mike’s points really stand out for me:
Broadcast networks now compete with ‘audience networks’
“On the Internet, there is no concept of prime-time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on Wordpress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.”
Social media only works if your creative benefits the consumer’s personal brand:
“Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake.”
A passive broadcast audience must be persuaded to become an active brand evangelist:
“Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods… it takes true creative genius.”
I don’t know that it always takes true creative genius. If you don’t have true creative genius on hand, aim for great creative, some luck, good timing and most important of all: give your audience something that will be good for their personal brand if they share it with friends.
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