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Social media marketing, and why we shouldn’t talk to strangers

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Public service message: please don’t push strangers in front of oncoming trains (by freshelectrons on Flickr)

When we’re using push channels like display ads, direct marketing or pull channels like websites or search marketing — numbers are what count, and numbers are enough. But when we are talking about social media channels, we shouldn’t target strangers. Instead, we should look at our existing relationships and learn how to make the most of these to our mutual benefit.

I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience of meeting someone famous in an ordinary context (in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue). I have.

It is a profoundly disturbing experience. For a split second your brain tells you that this is someone familiar but not why. Since you’re not expecting to meet David Bowie in your video store, your brain leaps to the most probable conclusion — this is clearly an old acquaintance or a friend-of-a-friend. By the time you realize who it is, you’ve already been staring at them too long, possibly waving and beginning to say hello.

What’s unnerving about this experience of course, is the asymmetry of the relationship; you know who they are (and possibly even some intimate details of their private lives) but they have no idea who you are. For all that you think you know them, you are in fact complete bloody strangers.

The circle of complete bloody strangers

At Porter Novelli, we’ve been trying out a new way of helping people think about the targets for our social media activities. Targeting in social media is one of the many places where conventional marketing experience fails to help; and indeed, generally hinders. For want of a better name, I’m calling it the “circle of complete bloody strangers.”
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Tags: Add new tag, douglas rushkoff, influence, marketing, social currency, social media
Posted in influence, opinion | 10 Comments »