Social media are booming and that age-old human instinct to sell you something has picked up the scent.
Even a brand like Bigelow Tea of Fairfield in an industry as low tech as tea drinking has its own group on Facebook.
“The rules have changed as it relates to business development and sales,” said Darryl Ohrt, founder of Plaid Design and Branding. “Attraction is the new selling. Bringing clients to your door is so much easier than cold-calling, or targeting individually. Blogs, social groups, and some of the newer tools now available make this a cinch for brands looking to connect with their customers. This is even true for the B2B segment.”
According to Hitwise Ltd.”™s April 2008 report, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace all appear in the top 10 most-popular Web sites based on U.S. Internet usage. As well as ringing up huge numbers of visits, the sites are also popular in the young consumer demographic.
“Throw off your resistance to the term social media and look at this rich new set of tools as just that, tools,” said John Jantsch, author and creator of Duct Tape Marketing.
“Tools that offer the prospective customer the ability to find your business more easily, connect with your business in ways that are meaningful to them, and simply spread the word about the experience they have with your business. If any of those things sound appealing from a marketing standpoint, it’s time to jump into social media with both feet.”
Even the more independent version of social media, blogging, has numbers that advertisers still hunting bus bench space could only dream of. These trends show that social media is something that has the potential to be enjoyed everywhere, by everyone, and makes an impression.
“You can no longer just build a Web site and expect that to be your interactive marketing plan,” said Ohrt. “That’s just not enough anymore. The brand with the message that connects wins. And your potential clients and customers are all over the place. The more you can be where they are, to speak to them in their world, the more likely they are to connect.”
JetBlue, an evolving business model from the beginning, is working on Twitter, for example.
“I can tell you that our blog is now the number one driver for new business,” said Ohrt. “It’s given us a very loud voice in a very crowded industry, and made clients, and potential clients, fans of our brand.”
