Talking To Your Audience
Groundswell discusses five primary objectives a company can use to be successful with the use of Groundswell. These primary objectives are listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.68-69). In this blog post, we’re going to be discussing talking and importance difference between shouting and, well, talking.
When an organization purchases ads on a television network, they are shouting. Think of it like a little kid who falls while running in the living room. They’ll yell if they think or see someone around to get attention, otherwise, chances are very likely there’s nothing wrong. They yell in hopes someone will listen which shows that the difference between talking and shouting truly comes down accuracy and broadness.
When you talk to someone, you ask “how’s it goin?” and have a conversation. It’s a lot more personal and the accuracy of your messages increase because you’re not going for a “throw something and see if it sticks” approach that would come from shouting at anything. Question is, what methods can be used to “talk” to your audience?
How to Talk
Firstly suggested is to post a viral video (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.103). Certainly harder than looks, this method lets you talk to your audience on a level they enjoy and are willing to listen on. The important aspect is that users would be inspired to share with other people and they would do the same; thus the definition of viral.
Next, engage in social network and user generated sites (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.103). What better way to communicate with your audience and potential users than on a platform of equal footing. I love organizations that take advantage of this in a fun way and it’s especially become popular as of late. Businesses and brands such as Denny’s, Sonic the Hedgehog and ThinkGeek take a fun and entertaining approach to not only market their business/identities but also proactively communicate with their audiences. With approaches like these you avoid falling into an image of intimidation and being only a business.
Next, join the blogosphere (Bernoff & Li, 2011, p.103). Like Denny’s in the previous example, they take a blog that enables them to not only communicate their interests and talk with their audience but also follow suit in their ability to listen to those who talk to them or to listen to those that bring relatable topics that they can follow. It should be noted however that this requires hard work through consistent content and editing.
My favourite source for blogging is not WordPress but rather Tumblr because it enables any user to easily listen to relatable topics and mentions of themselves through an interesting and interactive combination between social networks and blogging.
Lastly, I talked about establishing communities earlier this year. Establishing your own community allows for an organization or brand to directly learn from their audience in a closer way than just by talking to them through Twitter. The example I used last time was Nintendo. Nintendo established their own set of communities in 2012 after establishing their own social network, Miiverse. Through this network, they’re able to converse directly with particular audiences based on their interests but also inspire participation.
Regardless of the method that is used by an organization, there are certain aspects that should be remembered.
First, interactivity should be encouraged. Unless you want to stand still, there should be some recommendation of either sharing your content or even simply commenting. None of this is useful unless you have some part of participation from your audience.
Second, have some factor to be somewhat unique. There are more than seven billion people on Earth, each with their own ideas and it’s important to distinguish yourself from the millions of other organizations already on the web. For example, Denny’s uses consistent jokes revolving around breakfast foods.
Lastly, you have to know if something’s not working. Through the analysis of analytics from the amount of participation or visiting, if something’s not working you have to be willing to drop it. It’s no use to waste time and resources on something that’s not inspiring participation or communication.
The Business Approach
Talking rather than shouting enables you to control where your message goes. As a freelance website developer, I often have used Twitter more than other way to share my opinions and development features. Problem is that I need to have a more direct focus rather than simply sending it out. This can be done by establishing a hashtag or topic link to split my knowledge from the majority and allow for a more direct message.
Check out these 17 sweet #jQuery Plugins. There's definitely a few that I'm going to consider usinghttps://t.co/8mGOHhgw30#WebDevelopment
— Nick Petlock (@Redeyes1357) March 12, 2017
Earlier this year I talked the Social Technographics Profile and came to the conclusion that a majority of my audience are joiners and collectors. Simply sending out messages works to my advantage with these particular groups however, I’m going to need to learn how to better talk with my audience and prospective clients through a more direct fashion as previously described but I also need to find a way to inspire more interactivity than just simply retweeting.
Perhaps, through these next coming weeks, I’ll be able to finally share a method for this. Who knows, maybe it’ll be as simple as creating conversation.
SOURCES
Bernoff, J., Li, C. (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies (expanded and revised edition). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing