10,000 Friends vs. 1,000 Enthusiasts
Your business is considering a social media strategy and your consultant keeps buzzing about ten thousand (or some other ridiculously high number) of fans over night. You keep thinking to yourself "This is too good to be true; sure, he's done it for other people, but my brand?" You're right. It is too good to be true, for a few reasons:
- The marketplace is over-saturated. Too many stunts and bad behavior by too many companies have left your potential customers jaded and they are becoming increasingly disengaged.
- Social Media tools are increasingly letting users filter messages so that they can still follow "friends" without necessarily seeing each post they make. On Facebook, for instance, I have a "friends" list of people about whom I wish to know every little detail of their lives, and a "companies" list who I check for promos before I make purchases (they're lucky if I visit the list once a month).
- Approximately 30% (as of this 3/25/2009 report from InsideFacebook.com) of Facebook users (and I'd wager this number holds relatively true across most Social Media) are age 35 or older. Fully a third of your potential audience has entered the "lowered BS tolerance" portion of their life; meaning spending ridiculous sums of money on stupid tricks and stunts will fall on deaf ears - or get you dropped as a friend.
Of course your target demographic may be the 70% of users not mentioned above; in that case, go ahead and waste the mill getting the doofuses (doofi? doofe?, whatever!) from Jackass to run your next stunt. If your business, however, is focusing on household or business decision makers, you may want to take the time to craft an approach that targets a lower number of engaged enthusiast who want to hear your message, rather than the TV advertising model of broadcasting to the masses and hoping that the focus groups (Nielsen Media Research is dead, by the way) are right about viewership.
To put things into perspective, only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment. This is where the majority of media dollars reside today. I don’t believe the majority of media dollars will reside there tomorrow. -Erik Qualman, Socialnomics
To put it short & simple, focus on and highlight what your company does best, and your customers will follow you. Changing image will not help, and your current customers may actually dislike it.
