Awareness is not relevance - & what this means for participation
When you read a lot of blogs, it’s funny how often the interesting content is not in the article, but in the comments. In an article over on MackColliers about Ford’s CMO talking about Social Media, a verbal fist-fight broke out with a poster saying that Ford was claiming social media wins that were illusory.
Now don’t get me wrong, the article itself is interesting. Ford has done a good job of trying more and more advanced tactics to engage users online over the last year or so - but I think the headline may unfortunately make people think that social media is cheap, cheap cheap - or free (and I hope you know how I feel about that).
But it is in the comment slapfest that the forum begins debating ‘awareness’ - “[it] isn’t an absolute good” - and ‘exposure’ - “[it] isn’t the same thing as awareness.” This is where I got really interested. In designing digital experiences for consumers, we realize that awareness sans relevance is no help to a Brand. Just because I think I know your product doesn’t mean I think that it has anything to do with my life. Good digital marketing gives you a reason to interact that you relate to, and something interesting for you to do.
But to push this idea further, we have to realize that participation (the ‘do’ part) does not always mean that a deep relationship is being formed. Simply put, not everyone who plays with your Facebook application is building an emotional affinity to your brand - it’s a tempting assumption, but reality says otherwise. And it’s important to note that this doesn’t just mean that all relationships are not created equal - but it means that we have to take real consideration about what we ask people to do in the first place in order to create participations/acts that mean something real to people.
Where the real relationships lie are in those things that Brands create/sponsor/offer that people want to subscribe to - things that your users want so much that they ask for them to be delivered over and over - or they carry them in their pocket/phone, or they set reminders to go back to. Human Behavior in terms of subscribing to content is all about choices - pulling things that you want closer to yourself.
Homework: I’m making a map of all the distributed experiences I currently subscribe to, and I’ll bet that it forms a pretty good picture of the relationships I have with Brands. I’ll do the same thing with as many other forms of participation as I can, and see what the overlap is. Try it yourself. You may be surprised.
Via SmartBrief on Social Media
Image: Public Art in Chicago by Pam_Broviak, on Flickr
(Oh - and The Social Network launched today in the US - Woo Hoooo!)
