Are You Famous?

When I was young, I thought that my Uncle Robert was a superstar. Everyone in our little town of 10,000 people knew him. As I became a teenager, I came to the realization that there was a great big world outside of my little town, and he most certainly was not a celebrity, even though everyone in our little Podunk area knew him. Now, as an adult, I have come to understand fame a little better.

Robert drove a fruit truck in town. Basically, this means that he woke up around 3:00 in the morning, and drove out to Quincy Market (the real farmer’s market, not today’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace) and bought the freshest fruits and vegetables available. He would hit several farm stands on the way back to town, where he knew of good deals on excellent produce. He would organize all of the product into bins, and drive around, selling. All of the restaurants in town bought from him. His route took him to every business in town, and he sold to every worker. People would flag him down as he drove down the street, and buy their produce to use that night.

You can understand how I thought this was akin to being Elvis, when I was a small child. Everywhere we went there were people were pulling him over, and waving him down. Every time the truck stopped anywhere, a crowd formed around him, and people came out of the buildings to see him. Although this happened back in the 80’s, not too long ago, there was still a lot of bartering going on, so I’d see him giving away pounds of potatoes and taking a chicken in trade. I thought he was receiving gifts! How much more famous could he be!

I can look back on this, almost thirty years later, and realize that although he was not a celebrity, he certainly was famous. He did not reach millionaire status, but was able to live rather comfortably. He raised a family that understood hard work, and everyone in town knew where to go if they wanted fresh food. I’m sure the local supermarkets sighed in relief when he retired.

You have this same ability. Brand yourself. Become the absolute best place to buy your specific product from. Offer a level of service that no one else can compare to. To be cliché, go that extra inch, mile, etc. Use you business’s good reputation to grow. Use the social media tools of today to expand where businesses couldn’t in the past. Make your business famous, even if it is just locally, and you will be successful.

-Submitted by Chris Gregoire

Live In and Learn Your Market

I’ve got another game. I’m going to name a product. Then I’ll give you three choices, and you can pick what information you’d like to figure out the target market for each product.

Item 1 – Highly Caffeinated Energy Drink

a. Males, Ages 15-30
b. Males, Yearly income of $25,000-$50,000
c. Males, that commonly: partake in extreme sports, listen to loud music, play aggressive video games.
Item 2 – Home-Made All-Natural Anti-Wrinkle Cream

a. Female, Ages 25-55
b. Females, Yearly income of $35,000-$60,000
c. Females, that commonly: buy/wear makeup, spend time getting hair/nails done at professional salons, have gym memberships.

If you picked either a or b in either example, you are using demographics (characteristics used to classify people for statistical purposes, such as age, race or gender) to try and figure out who the target audience is. If you chose c, you are using psychographics (variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests or lifestyles). Demographics are chartable; they are concrete classifications, unlike psychographics, which are open to interpretation. If you could fine tune your marketing for the appropriate psychographics, in addition to simply the demographics, you would have a higher success rate.

The challenge in the past had been, “How do I successfully market to a specific niche when they may fall into different demographic groups?”

Enter social media. You now have the ability to find your target audience, and specifically speak to them. In example one, if I was launching a new energy drink, I would actively post on extreme sports pages on facebook, sponsor cutting edge music groups on Myspace, and run ads on video game review sites. I would make sure that people that I felt would want my product could see it. Rather than relying on traditional print or television ads, I now have the ability to infiltrate the correct groups with my product, and give people that would want my product the avenues to find it.

That’s on a national level. What if my product was more like number two? A self-starting, small business that creates and distributes products that are locally made and sold would not want to go for a national market. That business would want to get into local homes, which means getting in with local businesses. The person starting that type of business would want to visit local gyms and salons, and offer sample giveaways. He or she would put the company’s energy into local fan pages in social media, to build up relevant excitement. The ability to cross market with other small local businesses through everyone’s social media channels can greatly increase visibility for every company involved.

Are you actively communicating with your target market, in their environment, or are you passively hoping they will randomly see your message? If your marketing is based on hope, you are risking failure.

Don't Waste My Time

I’ve read a couple of blog articles recently themed, “Rule #1, there are no rules in social media!” I could not disagree more. In any give and take, there are decency standards, or rules, that must be observed. I cannot go to a dinner party and simply yell out, at the top of my voice, whatever crosses my mind at any time or I would never be invited again. The same is true of social media. There are rules. Do not buy into this belief that social media is anarchy. It is democracy, not anarchy.

I recently read a blog on how to have more Twitter followers. It had a great title, which I will translate into “How to Have a Twitter Explosion!” Here is the summary of the 1000-word blog. Ready?

Give away free stuff.

I could say there was more to the article, but I would be lying. Basically, it states that as long as you give away something for free (with a prize value of under $500 so that the winner doesn’t have to pay taxes) you will have a booming Twitter account.

It was contained on four different pages that I was forced to keep clicking through to continue reading the piece. About 15 seconds after the new page loaded, a full page ad popped up that covered the screen, and blocked the article I was reading. I had to search for the Cancel option to return to my reading. In this article, there was no mention of how to have your audience find out about this contest. There was a vague mention of using a hashtag to track possible winners, but that was it. There was no discussion of how to promote your promotion. There wasn’t even a basic guideline as to how to initially post you were giving anything away. Basically, it was, “Offer it, and they will come.”

People may argue that this style of blog, where the information stream is broken by the author so he or she can push his or her own full page ads, is a correct way of using a blog. These people are wrong. By interrupting the information stream, you risk losing the reader’s attention. In reality, I will go out of my way to avoid using their services, since my initial reaction was, “Thanks for wasting my time.” There was no original thought in the blog, and it was written simply to push the ad several times.

Sometimes, I think we lose sight of what blogs, facebook, Twitter, etc. are meant to accomplish. These are not tools to force ads on people, or of providing meaningless drivel just to increase SEO. The point of any social media channel is to increase communication between a company and its customer, in order to provide a better purchasing experience. Ideally, social media is putting the power to influence the direction of a company into the hands of the people that the company is in business to serve. It is democracy at its finest, and there is no anarchy involved. The Number one rule of social media is:

Serve your customer.

Neat how nicely that lines up with the number one rule of business in general.