In today's social media world, marketing is changing dramatically in that everyone is increasingly able to communicate directly with actual people and not just target market segments or "audiences." As a result of this social media trend, marketers need to think more about how to establish direct, authentic relationships with people - and why they are doing so.
The irony of this movement is that "market relations" - the process of establishing direct relationships with an infrastructure of market segments that have some influence on a buying decision - is the very basic marketing principle taught by my first professional mentor, Regis McKenna. Back 25, even 15 years ago, real market power came from having sustained relationships with a wide variety of people of influence.
Once the PR industry caught on, this trend became an bandwagon that truly overplayed its welcome - everyone talked about communicating to influencers for a company (within the context of its market and technology segment). Unsurprisingly, those influencers (market analysts, all media, associations, noteworthy VCs, high-profile CIOs) all became numb to the constant barrage of communications. Everyone's effectiveness suffered.
But, with the proliferation of social media and its requirement of sustained personal integrity, it's possible once again (although via different mediums) to establish the type of one-to-one connections that are so intrinsically important and so highly leveragable. Authentic dialogue can be reestablished between those who are seeking to honestly communicate and respond. Tools and technologies will enable and accelerate these conversations (blogging, Facebook, Podcasts, etc.) and those most facile in them will have the competitive advantage of "speed to market" but even more importantly, "transparency of voice."
Understanding the sociology of networks that are then created is a concept that Ev Rogers so eloquently wrote about in his ground-breaking book "Communication of Innovations" (now in its 5th printing as "Diffusion of Innovations.") His statistical, communications-based research proved that the rate of a market adopting an "innovation" is specifically driven and effected by the activity of one adopter category of people choosing to influence another. Bottom line, there is always a set (or sets) of people in a social system that play(s) a catalytic role in how an idea, concept, product, etc. takes fire and gets adopted.
So, in today's social media reality, we're back to relationships then between groups of people, and understanding how the process of authentic and transparent communications impacts eventual market success.
Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO
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