Page 73 - MYM 2016

➤ You’ll need to develop or acquire the right tools (or the right partners) to permit you to monitor and adjust your ad and marketing spends in real time so you can be proactive rather than simply reactive – feeding your winning initiatives and shutting down the losers as soon as possible.
As the people who run real businesses and actually pay the bills wake up to measurable, perfor- mance-based marketing, the old ruses and standard routines will end, and end badly. Best to stay far away.
Stupid Sharing
If celebrity, fashion, and pitiable personalities aren’t your thing, there’s still a ton of other digital clutter – made-up news, phony courses and cures, medicine based on miracles – which is constantly foisted on all of us along with the thousands of cat videos, singing parrots, dancing dogs and music videos from the dark ages.
I’m not exactly sure when the major brands just threw in the towel and decided that any visibility (regardless of the context or the accompanying asso- ciations) was better than being le out, but things today are totally out of control.
If you put your brand and your business’s good name out there where you can no longer control the content, the context, or the conversations, you’re jeopardizing years of credibility and hard work for a “bene t” that’s uncertain at best. It’s better in many cases to wait it out rather than to wallow in the muck that passes for online media.
Solicited Sharing
I’ve been pretty hard on solicited social sharing services, whether it’s users of free samples, in-kind or cash payments for pictures, blog posts or other excited write-ups that are bought and paid for, etc. It seems to me that you have to consider the source, the motivation, the integrity, and the value of this kind of content before you decide if it makes any sense to listen to what these “endorsers” have to say about anything.
It’s the same question we all have about celebrity
endorsers who exceed the scope of their experience and their actual quali cations and lose all their credibility in the process. How many of us nd the professional advice of the “doctors,” “nurses,” and even “su erers” in TV ads to be valuable when the FDA makes them reveal in big bold letters that they’re actually all actors just hired to sell the stu to gullible consumers?
But I’ve been giving this particular bucket a second look because it turns out – much like the battery of psych and employment tests which we all think we can game, but we can’t – that it’s completely shocking how much people today will inadvertently share in their tweets, shares and sel es without even knowing it. And smart data mining companies like Pay Your Sel e (one of the more advanced busi- nesses at our startup incubator, 1871) are learning how to aggregate and analyze shared images and then identify, extrapolate and provide these very useful insights to brands and manufacturers.
Smart Sharing
Encouraging and amplifying smart sharing, on the other hand, makes sense for everyone because word of mouth (whether it’s analog or digital) is still the most important and prominent way that
we learn almost anything. Smart sharing has four basic elements: (1) immediacy; (2) authenticity; (3) personalization; and (4) credibility. If you can con- centrate on these attributes and avoid the ine ective solutions described above, you’ll be way ahead of the game. It’s so much better to avoid the potholes entirely than it is to get a great deal on xing your at tires. ■
Howard Tullman is the CEO of 1871, a Chicago-based entrepreneurial hub for digital startups. He holds a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law, USA.
social MeDia
OCTOBEr 2016 MINd YOUr MarkETING | 73