Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash
Social media has been twisted for profit and gain. Furthermore some unscrupulous Marketers are using some nasty tactics to pull the wool over your eyes. Here are just a few ways they are leveraging social media platforms for their fun and their profit.
Is your promotional information written in selfish ‘feature language’? Consumers are like selfish six-year-old kids and hate reading other people’s selfish language. It’s all about what’s in it for the consumer when parting with their dollars.
Write in benefit language, become an empathetic organization.
Our Marketing Manager, Jodie Gastel, got me thinking about a notion to consider: the onslaught of information on the web feeds into the ‘confirmation bias’ carried around within us all. This bias, combined with readily-available, easily joined ‘Confirmation Bias Tribes’ is deepening entrenched opinions and judgments like never before. Dealing with deeper, harsher opinions represents a serious adjustment when it comes to the Art of Persuasion.
Understand the biases that sit within your target market and understand what on the internet feeds or confirms those biases. Write your copy accordingly to address those biases in a proactive manner.
One of the outcomes of mobile phone adoption is we have the ‘entire’ world available to us sitting within this little rectangle box, which in turn is constantly attached to our person. ‘Content’ is being dumped into the internet slipstream landing in the little smartphone boxes. Professional branding and PR types compete intensely for your attention. The bi-product is an incredibly pervasive stream of unfiltered media content: cute kittens followed immediately by cops killing people. We as consumers chew on what is mostly crap, each and every day, whether we like it or not.
Back in the day, PR people would get hired by companies to wine and dine assignment editors, writers and personalities to speak favourably about their clients. Media controlled the message and they shaped the content. My Dad was a photo editor at a major Daily. One of his jobs was to sort through images, match them with stories, then write captions and headlines, gluing the story and photos together. His lament was 90% of his job involved being negative, but that’s what sold papers. His thinking behind this was readers would say, ‘at least my house didn’t burn down or my car didn’t crash’. Basically, consumers gained an appreciation of their lives by comparing themselves to the misery of others being displayed in the papers or on the news. Negative news garnered readership which garnered media buy.
The dawning of 2.0 actually came pre-internet, when TV started channeling horrendous footing of war atrocities from the Vietnam War. This jarring violent footage of freaked out miserable villagers, soldiers, mutilated bodies, etc. helped to kick start the Vietnam War protests in the 70’s, catalyzing social change. The Korean War was just as hideous, but its documented footage was not pushed into the living rooms of the masses while eating their TV dinners.
Now 2.0 is firmly entrenched; with thousands of Clickbait sites feeding content to massive information addiction portals such as Facebook. We as consumers have sort of become our own photo editors plus consumers of this massive surge of content engulfs us; most of it salacious, violent or negative in nature.
We have direct daily access to massive amounts of footage that often elicits negative feelings. It is pervasive. Facebook paying over 150 Clickbait companies hundreds of millions a year to generate footage is a ‘small’ example of how big this trend has become. We are being pounded and pounded with amateur and professionally produced news footage everywhere, every day. Much of the footage has an agenda. SUGGING – ‘selling under the guise of’ – is a staple of the PR industry.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is generating a palpable angst with many folks within society, more negative crap than any average person ever needs to know. Marketers need to deal with this collective angst like never before. Salespeople now often have to unspool partially or totally false information previously gleaned online. But mostly marketing and sales types must now fold into their marketing plans the new reality of dealing with the collective and individual fear pulsing within their target market.
If you are asking me how to deal with this societal angst within the context of marketing our stuff, heck, I don’t totally know. I am thinking that perhaps the day of marketers just ‘selling stuff’ is over. Marketing now shapes opinion and self-esteem, in turn shaping our society. Is it our duty now to market in such a way that we leave society in better shape along the way?
I will say, that having awareness and an intention around this question, will in turn, allow ideas and solutions to bubble to the surface…
I’m curious about your thoughts….
Namaste, Gregg Meiklejohn
A year or so ago I was contacted by Chris, the new CMO of a three-campus school system. He was baffled as to why his lead flow had dropped by 60 leads per month for the past three or four months. Being new to his school, he didn’t really have a handle on the problem yet and wanted help with some insights.
I asked him to Google the name of his school and see what happens. My worst fears were confirmed. He didn’t show up at all. Turns out their website had been “delisted” by Google. Nuked, obliterated, vanished from the search engine. Read more
Back in the day, the industrial age chugged along and real estate was the foundation in which market share and wealth was built. Factories, warehouses, roads and store fronts were mechanisms for commerce. Those who owned the real estate controlled the wealth. Does McDonalds make more money selling hamburgers or through their real estate empire? What was drilled into our heads in Business School is Real Estate is the foundation investment for all millionaires, blah, blah… You get the picture.
“Online Lead Generation Improvements that you can use”
An audio recording and notes as presented from our Conference Call
Presented on Sept 29th, 2011 by Gregg Meiklejohn and Shane Sparks of Enrollment Resources Inc.