Audienz's Luke Newman is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to drive business and marketing innovation. He also has a weakness for baked goods.
Good friends should be able to call one another out when they have done or are in the act of doing something foolish. My wife insists that this is easier for men than women, but I’m still not sure why. An insightful friend of mine approaches these potentially tough conversations in a unique way that I love. Before he calls you out, he lets you know that he needs to cash in some of his friendship chips.
It’s refreshing to use the image of chips as a tacit recognition that social interactions are literal exchanges. What my friend is admitting is that most of us only tolerate seemingly negative interactions until the chips run out.
If you’ve read my previous posts on social media, then you know I don’t advocate employing heavy messaging and selling tactics for this channel. The reason for this is that marketing messages have an especially high cost in terms of your chips.
Below are a few ways to market to your audience without cashing in any of your chips:
- When you comment on the blogs of others, or when you send messages in Twitter, include a link to a targeted property with your signature. Examples of targeted properties could be your own blog, your company Facebook page, an informative landing page, or others.
- Provide an easily consumable and free service – a company blog is a great place for this. For instance, if you company sells marketing services, then blogging about *cough* social media might be a potential idea. Other ideas are loan calculators, free business tools, a YouTube channel with free video training, etc.
- Provide a space for your customers to interact – a Facebook page is ideal for this. This also gives you an important and often highly fruitful opportunity to participate in the conversations your customers are having about you. Customers love to comment where other people can see, and even negative comments can turn into positive interactions when you help the customer solve his or her problem.
Stay tuned for my next post which will cover ideas for how to track and measure your social media presence and progress.
