Archive for 2010

Persuasion and context is inherently tied up in who you are.

If Woody Allen remarks that he’s going to make someone an offer, it has a quite different meaning than if the same thing is said by Don Corleone, even if the syntax is identical.

If Don Corleone says that he is going to make a funny movie, we would all laugh before the movie was made. If Woody Allen said the same thing, nobody would be laughing.

Trust builds in those brands, products, services and vendors that we interact with regularly.

The problem for most brands, products, services and vendors is that unless a large amount of real-world money is being spent on direct advertising and marketing, it can be difficult (but not impossible) to build repeated interactions with the target audience.

But there is another technique, that takes some time, and costs almost nothing at all, that helps to build trust through repeated interaction.

Psst… You’re reading it.

I don’t care how flashy your website is, if you’re a small business, you better have a rock solid foundation to your business otherwise you’re just throwing money at a solution that cannot possibly help you.

Congratulations, your marketing gizmo just went viral.

Likes, shares and follows are pouring in.

Why?

Did you ask “why do we need to go viral?” before you went viral?

Hopefully you did.

Because if you didn’t, you are probably capturing all that social media goodwill by accident rather than intentionally.

Identify the “why I want to go viral” and how you will translate that traffic in to real-world benefits for your product or service.

And then figure out how to go viral.

Without the “why” (which most people overlook) you’re just wasting all that attention people are giving you.

Authentic efforts to connect, either with an homogenous and disparate audience, or with individual influencers, are always going to be more powerful than an orchestrated public relations message or approved marketing channel.

Anything that is decided by a group or committee, that is then filtered through whatever corporate translation service that churns out dry and mundane messages is good for only one thing, generating “news” for news channels that only want to fill column inches of digital ink.

Measuring your success of a campaign to connect by digital ink column inches is a sure way to fail, but to fail whilst you feel good about yourself.