Marketing’s new math.
For decades, we in marketing have had little choice but to subscribe to the paradigm of “media attrition.” It goes something like this: “If we hit 1,000,000 people with the same message, we’re bound to influence the behavior of 1%.”
That means we spend money to deliver the same message to 1,000,000 folks with the expectation that we may actually get 10,000 of them to take action.
The Internet turns this notion of scale on its head. What the Internet doesn’t deliver in numbers it delivers in impact and influence. The Internet is about whom, not about how many. You no longer have to intrude on 1,000,000 people to influence the behavior of 10,000. You only need to take really good care of 1,000.
Those 1,000 people you take care of just happen to be 1,000 of your best customers, the ones who relish hearing from you, who look forward to engagement with you, and who will (with a little coaxing on your part) be the medium of singing your praises within their spheres of influence and beyond. Before long, you’ll find their numbers swelling to a number of 10,000 or more.
So whereas 1,000,000 used to equal 10,000, now 1,000 does.
One of the arguments against social media and online campaigns is that they operate on too small a scale. It is unrealistic to expect the number of eyeballs from an online campaign that you would get from a traditional mass media campaign. But if you think of it in terms of “engagement,” it can be suddenly competitive in scale with mass media.
An excellent example is the “Rollerskating Babies” video produced by Evian. It garnered more than 3 million YouTube hits in the first week after launch. That’s 3 million opt-in views with no paid media (and that’s before the morning news shows got on board).
There are other variables, of course. But the point here is that social media and online campaigns shouldn’t be dismissed strictly on the basis of reach.
Do the math.
Posted by Mickey
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