Microtargeting Your So-Called Audience
If you believe, as I do, that “Public Relations” is being empowered to fulfill its original mission to RELATE to the PUBLIC, then you are probably enthralled with the potentials of Social Media.
But as Spiderman says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Just because you may now know how to reach out to individuals on behalf of clients, doesn’t mean you always should! As was always the case with Media Relations, it’s best to incrementally build up relationships with your so-called audience.
And Social Media makes it easy.
Easy to identify the appropriate users. Easy to determine whether these folks are likely to be receptive to your client (or to you). Easy to reach out to them, with info that truly ought to be of interest.
For example, let’s say your client is launching a new iPhone app. You suggest hosting a tweetup in a few digerati-heavy metros. You can use PeopleBrowsr to see “everyone in Austin, TX who’s tweeted about the iPhone” over the past few weeks.
It’s not too hard to determine — by the nature of the tweets and/or the target’s Twitter bio/link/favorites — whether you think it’s worth inviting them to the event. Over time, you can even use PeopleBrowser to keep track of the folks you’ve tagged as “VIPs,” which will facilitate longer-term relationship-building and better results the next time out.
Sure, some of the people you reach out to will tell you to buzz off — no matter how well-intentioned and helpful and relevant you’ve been in your outreach. So what should you do? You should buzz off. Fast. No matter how “perfectly targeted,” these are people who dabble in Social Media for fun; they’re not journalists who are at-some-level getting paid to (begrudgingly) review your pitches.
There are other tools and techniques to help with your microtargeting. I covered a pretty rockin’ example of how to use del.icio.us in a similar way in BRINK.
Are you engaged in edgework like this? Will you share a success (or horrible trainwreck-level screw-up) in the comments?
Posted on: March 13, 2009 at 12:07 pm By Todd Defren
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Great post! Thank you!
I’m glad to be in the PR/Marketing field during this time, it’s very exciting. I wonder whether marketing/business schools have started including “Social Media Marketing” in their curriculum. If not, they will be doing their students a great disservice.
Its really cool that with social media companies can really get down to having one to one conversations with customers, I think its still a while till most companies come to the realization of this but it is really cool times in Marketing/PR right now.
It is happening though, and methinks it will accelerate in the next 18 months.
Yes all that is possible but i think it’s not that simple to do the next step well, especially when it comes to what you do with this information. If i tweet “i’m considering buying an iphone” and i receive a straight email from nokia (and motorola and …) saying that i’m elligible to a one day offer on their new ‘better than iphone’ device, I connect the dots. It’s marketing in social media. Not social media marketing. It will just make things work: we’re already bombarded with unsollicited (even well targeted) stuff, It will just be more.
However if i tweet “what do you think of this antivirus” and say, mcaffee uses this input to assess who i am, discover i’m a computer security expert, engage with me, build a relationship with me for mutual benefits, I get value, they get value, it’s social media marketing and there’s implicit permission built in the process.
L
Laurent, that is a fairly brilliant way of slicing it. I am in total agreement.