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You can't change new world marketing to suit your mindset"
I often hear people proclaim the following:-
“We need to apply new world marketing strategies to our company!”
“We have to use a corporate blog to position ourselves in the industry.”
“We must have a Facebook account, group or fan page to communicate with our customers.”
“We have to join Facebook because Facebook is a high traffic social networking site, otherwise, we will be losing out on a lot!”
Setting up a blog, signing up and setting up a Facebook individual, group or fan page is not a problem. In fact, it takes minutes to do this. Even with a blog, the task is simple if you knew how to do it or know of someone who can do it. The problem is this: how we implement and use it.
A lot of business people in this part of the world have the “we can't lose out on it” mentality because they are merely hopping onto the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. If their competitors had Facebook accounts or twitter pages, then they had to have one too.
The perception is that they should hop onto it because marketing people are advising them to join online social networking sites where traffic is high. Once they have one, they're lost about how to maximize its potential or utilize these sites to expand their businesses.
I am here to give you three examples about how the old mindset works when implementing new world marketing strategies. I will use blogs and Facebook as examples.
Blog
Working on the assumption that you have hired a web designer to come up with a proper blog content management system for your company and your blog is ready to roll – you are pretty excited to get started on it.
You get things rolling by emailing everyone you know, informing them about and sending them the link to your blog. You call a couple of friends and business associates, the blog URL is printed onto new business cards, flyers and brochures are distributed. You are sure that everyone you know and those you come into contact with now knows about your company's new blog.
To kick things off, you blog enthusiastically a few times a day on everything you can think of. Your staff is roped in to contribute to the blog too.
But as with everything in life, the novelty will slowly wane. As boredom sets in, the number visitors to your blog slowly decreases. Over time, you start thinking that the blog isn't generating you the kind of traffic that you anticipated. There are no comments on your blog and traffic is at a dismal level. Worse yet, it is not generating you cash.
At this point, you think of giving up but not before you seek advice from your friends who knew a thing or two about blogging.
The most common advice these people will give you is to hire a ghost writer for your blog, to take over the job of writing about your company's products or services. The idea is that professional ghost writers know how to strategize the writing.
The ghost writer is instructed to write only positive things about your products and then you inform your staff (or you might find yourself doing the same thing) to write some anonymous comments on each of the blog posts.
Unfortunately, some of your readers find out about the agenda behind the blog – it is all a big lie. What, in your personal opinion, will the readers think about your blog now? How will it affect the image of your company?
Blogging is all about honesty; it is not called an online journal for nothing. When the whole blogging sensation first burst into the online scene, it was meant to be a form of public journaling which involved a lot of sincerity. The reason why some bloggers become popular is because the readers found the bloggers genuine and honest, or even funnily honest. The truth is – nobody likes to read lies.
With the old mindset, lying is used as part of the strategy, which will not work when it comes to new world marketing.
As we all know, among all online social networking sites, Facebook is the king at this point in time. Everyone wants to earn money from Facebook or expand their business or network of contacts with it. The mindset that we have is that if everyone has one, then you should have one too.
Once they have a Facebook account, they fervently go online to post pictures of their products or inform everyone about their new services, how much it costs, etc. Soon, you notice that no one really looks at what you are posting on your Facebook wall so, you go a step further by posting pictures of your products and tagging your friends on those photos.
Now, photo tagging on Facebook is one of the most annoying practices and people are turned off with such a habit. There are people who will not hesitate to block your facebook account and then label you as a Spammer.
So instead of using the conventional Facebook account, a Facebook group or fan page is created so that you can work on your customer service. However, disgruntled customers actively voice their dissatisfaction on the group or fan page's wall. Afraid of others seeing the complaints, you delete them or block the customers from posting these comments.
When these customers find out about the block, their anger becomes volatile and they then spread their anger over the incident on THEIR Facebook account which results in more people knowing about the company's reputation.
The above is a clear example of how the old mindset works in implementing new world marketing strategies.
Another big failure again.
The truth is that Facebook is an ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING website which means there has to be NETWORKING and INTERACTION between groups of people who share common interests. The crucial element is to use these social contacts to network with each other.
However, when you fail to tap into communication and interaction between these consumers and businesses, you fail to fully utilize these sites completely while also running the risk of losing existing customers. You need to socialize with them, not force your products or services into their faces. Engage them, communicate with them – this is what social networking is about.
This describes a whole, huge misunderstanding about the relationship between mindset, your company and new world marketing strategy.
It is sad to see that many businesses try to bend new world marketing strategies to suit their mindset, their company's business structure, system, culture, and goals. The reality is that it should be the other way around. Change your mindset, your company structure, change management style, hire new staff to implement online marketing strategies, change your staff mindset, in charge of blogging, in charge of Facebook, etc.
Using old ways to implement new techniques will result in what I would call the old world marketing strategy.
What we need to do is to change our mindset first. To admit that the world has changed and that consumer and human behavior is no longer the same.
Only when our mindset is changed will new world marketing work. The strategy cannot be changed to suit our old ways of thinking.
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