Saturday, August 15, 2009

A Text From Last Night.Com

I have received a lot of feedback on my post about monetizing my mother. People wrote asking if she was really on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Well, the answer is no. She is not. As I noted, it was just a dream. But the reality and the number of responses I received are not a dream.

Many people were struck by the idea of using social networking to build their business. Well, yes, of course, that is the point.

Social networking, all the online points of contact available, are ways of making mass marketing even more one-on-one communications. The best point is that these are true conversations.

Your customers can twitter you their ideas (and their complaints) and you can twitter them back your acknowledgment of their issue. You can even follow-up with them. Test new ideas and products with them and receive immediate feedback.

There used to a truism that for every complaint letter you got about your product, there were seven other unsatisfied people. With all the tools at our disposal now, you can talk to all eight.

If the humorous x-rated reality of textsfromlastnight.com is the zeitgeist of the 17-29 year old demographic, marketers still have a lot of catching up to do in terms of developing "real" dialogues. I won't tell you what Windex is really good at cleaning, but the product placement is priceless.

All this back and forth is so much more intimate and immediate than focus groups, snail mail and even web sites.

The challenge, as always, is in building the tools and the tonality. Here, tonality is critical because the conversation is so immediate. So it is the marriage of voice and insight. It was the same creative challenge as presented in the sixties (viz. Mad Men). But I don't think marketers have fully recognized the opportunity yet.

And oh, by the way, my Mom does have a cell phone. Need I say more?

No comments: