Avoid Social Faux Pas: Communicating in the New World
In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, wrote an article for Electronics Magazine. He observed that the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit had been doubling every year.
It was a technical way of suggesting that computer power was doubling every year, and the idea became known as Moore’s Law. He later amended it to say the doubling occurred every two years, and it has since been refined until it is now generally accepted that computer performance doubles every 18 months.
Companies in the computer industry pride themselves on how well they answer to Moore’s Law. After all, this relentless performance improvement is a harsh discipline. Those companies that are not constantly creating new ways to exploit the exploding increase in power don’t last very long.
The rest of us watch this high-tech rumble of remorseless and ruthless innovation with the same kind of fascination we might watch two teams try to destroy each other in the Super Bowl — and with the same kind of dread. For as much as we might love watching football, few of us would wish to suit up and get out on the field to join the mayhem.
And yet, every industry and every profession has to get out on that field sometime. Now it’s marketing’s turn — ready or not. Moore’s Law has literally put enormous processing and communications power into the pockets of our customers and prospects. And customers are using that power to leave the places where we had their attention and go to places we’re not invited.
Texting, blogging, podcasting, YouTube, MySpace, Second Life… it seems like every day there’s a new way of communicating with audiences — and with it a new way for marketers to stub their toes:
Although viral marketing was considered very hot a few weeks ago, Jupiter Research just reported that marketers are doing it so badly that only 15% of them have successfully gotten any consumers to promote their messages in the past year. Over the next year, according to the research firm, more than half of the firms engaged in viral marketing are getting out of it.
Contextual advertising, which “intelligently” presents Web ads based on the surrounding content, doesn’t always work as planned. The always-irreverent Adrants described a contextual ad that appeared in September on CNN.com with the headline, “If you died today, who would fund your family’s future?” It was next to a story reporting the deaths of two American soldiers in Iraq.
A survey of 200 avatars in Second Life conducted by the Hamburg, Germany-based agency Komjuniti this Spring found that a mere seven percent thought the marketing of certain brands in Second Life had a positive influence on brand image or would influence their buying behavior. Seventy-two percent expressed dissatisfaction with the brands’ activities in the computer-based world.
Of course, it’s not entirely fair to cherry-pick problem stories about the new era. In fact, there are a lot of marketing successes occurring in social computing and Web 2.0. But what these stories indicate to me is that the problems faced by marketers in dealing with new technologies, media, and formats are not technical problems. They are behavioral — and it’s our behavior that’s at issue!
If we are going to follow our customers into these territories to which they’ve fled from us, we need to understand the implications of everything we do there. We need to master the customs, rules, and norms of places we probably haven’t grown up in. These days, as we watch the folks in the computer industry beat each other up, we may wish our lives were that easy.
Craig Blake is president of the New England Direct Marketing Association and vice president of sales for the W.A. Wilde Company.
