Don’t try to buy your customers’ attention. Earn it.
AdAge has a smart piece in which Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson tells companies not to buy media but “earn” it:
As a venture capitalist, Mr. Wilson said, he’s funding companies that address the new marketing paradigm, from earned-media platforms such as Twitter and social video site Boxee to next-generation ad agencies such as Federated Media and Clickable, and from analytics firms such as ComScore and Quantcast to tech platforms such as FeedBurner and Dave Morgan’s Simulmedia.
What do earned-media campaigns look like? A lot like Burger King’s "Whopper Sacrifice" effort on Facebook, which resulted in 234,000 "killed" friendships; like Disney’s building a following for the Jonas Brothers online and not on the radio; or like the gourmands behind the Kogi BBQ trucks in Los Angeles, which have 14,000 Twitter followers who are alerted when the Korean taco truck is in the neighborhood.
The challenge for marketers and agencies, then, is to engage with social media in an authentic way, and know they are going to be punished by its denizens for any perceived spam.
Emphasis mine.
On both individual and professional levels, I’ve agreed with this notion since the idea of “attention economy” came into vogue.
You can rarely buy your way into a customer’s attention landscape, because attention is very human and subjective and can’t be genuinely engaged unless – get this – something earns the attention. In fact, the brain is hard-wired to only pay attention to interesting things. Today, with the average person consuming tens of thousands of ad impressions every day, attention is at a premium. When media advertising debuted, the media slots were at a premium, and people had far more attention capacity.
Today, the inverse is true.
If you want people to notice you, earn it. Be creative, be human, be authentic. No matter what business you’re in, people want to feel connected. This includes brands. The good news is that there are more tools out there than ever to help you do this. The bad news is that you just can’t throw money at the problem and make it go away: to really engage your customers is hard work. You have to be who you say you are.
Nobody cares anymore about what companies say about themselves; that’s commercial narcissism. What people do care about is how a company acts, the behavior it exhibits, the values it demonstrates.
When it comes down to choosing a company with similar commercial value propositions, I’ll choose the more demonstrably authentic company every time. And in my conversations with partners and customers, they tell me the same things in their own words.
A big lesson here for those willing to listen.
