Direct Marketing’s Nightmarish Dream
Social media has been especially perplexing for clients who have made their hay over the years in direct marketing channels. To help clear things up a bit, here are a few key points from my place consulting these clients:
It’s still database marketing: you just don’t own the database anymore
Direct marketing has thrived over the years on the notion of how big the enterprise database is. Social media forces database marketers to answer the tough question though: how many of these names really count as interested in hearing about your product offer? In social channels, your database is your follower/friend count. To grow that group, you need to have a regular presence contributing value to the community. Ultimately, those people are your database for marketing, communications, and customer support. The only issue is that database is owned by the social network, not by your brand.
The good news: second- and third-order followers
This is what makes social media the accelerated equivalent of direct marketing. If what you’re communicating has value, you’re not just providing that value to your “database” of followers; you’re giving them content they can quickly and easily pass on to their followers. So even though your group of followers may be much lower than your internal database group, the potential for return on investment through communicating in social media can be exponentially more.
Leveraging APIs
All of the major players in social platforms have an API built so that you can sign into sites with your ID from that network. See the comment section below — Disqus uses the Twitter and Facebook APIs so that you can log-in using the network IDs you already know. When you leave a comment here using those IDs, you automatically share this post and your perspective back to that community. At the same time, you’re also contributing to the Disqus database.
APIs are a win for all involved parties: the user wins because they can easily access, add to, and share back their perspective where it matters to them online. The social network reaps the benefit of participation and added content: the lifeblood of any social network. And Disqus wins by tying these sites together, building their own database by providing convience for the entire discourse.
This is the way for direct marketers to continue to build their database and provide convenient utility to their audience simultaneously. Of course, the functionality alone is useless without strategy to identify how to use these techniques to keep your brand in the discourse of the communities that matter. Luckily, you’re in the right place to start developing strategies that help brands make sense in a networked world.
Most importantly: what do you think? Continue the conversation by leaving a comment below, or on Twitter @mleis.
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