I was recently asked at a communications and marketing conference for senior executives when Social Media would start to appeal to all senses including, vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It was an interesting question and the first time that I had heard it in public.
My response was that it is already in full effect. To go one step further, much of the work I've studied and also the focus of much of my own work fuses aspects of sensory branding and marketing with elements of experiential and emotional marketing to appeal to the senses as well as to the emotions that inspire action.
In marketing today, it's less about what we say about us and more about what people hear, feel, and in turn, say about us.
The "Me" in Social Media
While the culture and corresponding dynamics and mechanics of social media remain elusive to many executives and marketers, its purpose and promise are far more profound than we may realize. To that end, I believe that in order to unlock the methodologies and philosophies tied to effective and long-lasting social media strategies, we must remove our marketing capes and instead remember who we are as individuals. There's a "me" in social media for a reason and that is because everything in social networks and online for that matter, begins with us. We define our own experiences. We decide who we follow and who follows us. We choose which stories we read and those we share. And it is only those experiences that we connect with emotionally that compel us to push across our social graphs.
Before we are marketers, sales or service professionals, executives, employees, or leaders, we are human beings. And social media equalizes the playing field for media consumption, production and distribution. We are the champions who introduced businesses to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. We disrupted marketing. We disrupted communications. We disrupted media. More notably, we are affecting the very foundation of...
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