Confucius Say: Follow Me, Share This!

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With the buzz around social media marketing and the need to go into the life of the consumer, marketers are trying their hardest to get included. There is so much talk about inclusion and about following that marketers are forgetting to look at some fundamental issues.

If you want to get included on the Facebook page of the consumer, it is very much like asking the consumer to invite you & their friends into their living room. The consumer needs to feel comfortable about including you before they open you up to themselves and more so their friends. The same thing applies to Twitter; about getting the consumer to add you to their safe list via email; or even getting them to visit your blog.

You need to engage the consumer with something that the consumer has an interest in and not just expect that the consumer will blindly follow you.

It goes back to a quote by the Chinese philosopher Confucius – ‘Marketer who wants to share something should first be sure he have something to share.’

Okay so Confucius didn’t say that, but to really keep a consumer engaged you need to learn what it takes to keep them interested. It is all about engagement (2009 is the year of engagement for marketers), about making connections. Here are five simple ideas to help facilitate engagement –

You have to improve your segmentation
You have to use active copy
You have to achieve real personalization, name calling will not cut it
You have to look hard at your numbers, if something doesn’t work don’t do it
You have to carry on a conversation


More details on each one of these to follow tomorrow.