AUDIENCE(85)
At events, you should seize every opportunity to convert ATTENDEES into SEEKERS, AMPLIFIERS, or JOINERS—something you can do only if your PAD Goals are front of mind.
Audience Exercise #9: Be in the Audience Moment
The next time you’re an ATTENDEE at an outdoor event, take a good look around. Are SMS, website URLs, or mobile apps promoted as a way to engage with sponsors? Does any signage encourage you to become a SUBSCRIBER, FAN, or FOLLOWER? If you were in charge of the event, what would you do differently and why? What would your changes cost versus what they would deliver? Ask these questions, and trust me—you’ll never look at an event the same way again.
Tactic #26: Social Widgets & Mosaics
Social widgets enable you to showcase a curated stream of content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social network you leverage. They can be placed on giant screens at your events or integrated straight into your website or other Owned Media. The net effect is to entice SEEKERS to engage with social content such that they become AMPLIFIERS and/or FANS and FOLLOWERS.
To get a feel for how far you can push social widget integration on your website, go check out www.Interscope.com (@Interscope). The website for the record label of Lady Gaga (@LadyGaga), Eminem (@Eminem), and Imagine Dragons (@ImagineDragons) abandoned static page design in favor of a mosaic of constantly updated posts, tweets, images, and videos from all of its artists. The impact is stunning, and you’d be hard-pressed as a VISITOR not to explore some of Interscope’s other artists (something the artists must love, since it helps them build their proprietary audiences too).
Resource Recommendations:
Mass Relevance (@MassRelevance)—www.massrelevance.com/blog
SocialMedia.org (@SocialMediaOrg)—www.socialmedia.org
Tactic #27: Appending
I’ve chosen to wrap up our discussion of the best ways to build and engage your proprietary audiences with a tactic that causes a lot of confusion and concern among marketers and consumers today: appending. The first thing you need to grasp is that there are three different types of appending efforts for marketers:
1. Data appending: The process of adding behavioral, demographic, or psychographic information to a PROSPECT or CUSTOMER record.
2. Email appending: The process of adding an email address to an existing PROSPECT or CUSTOMER record.
3. Reverse appending: The process of adding personal information like a name or postal address to a SUBSCRIBER’s record where you already have obtained permission to communicate (via email, SMS, etc.).
Consumers benefit from appending because it allows companies to better tailor their marketing and customer service communications to each customer’s needs. This helps deliver on the promise of one-to-one marketing long ago envisioned by Peppers and Rogers (@PeppersRogers)—when communications become more relevant, timely, and meaningful to each individual.
The downside of appending concerns permission, privacy, and security.
Permission. In permission marketing channels like email, it is of questionable efficacy and legality to assume that just because someone is a PROSPECT or CUSTOMER, they also want to be a SUBSCRIBER. This is why email appending is against the policies of major ESPs.
Privacy. While social media and the NSA have both helped erode our expectations of personal privacy today, it is still a hot-button issue for consumers. Marketers must therefore always seek to comply with prevailing local and international laws regarding the acquisition and use of personal data.
Security. The last thing any company wants to do is expose consumers to personal risk. And yet every year we hear of thefts of credit card numbers and personal account information. As Spider-Man’s late, great Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” If your company is going to leverage Big Data, it must also have Big Security.
In short, appending opens both a world of personalization and a Pandora’s box of legal issues. This is one tactic where you’re best advised to consult your attorney before doing anything. Both laws and social mores are evolving too fast to suggest otherwise.
Looking for More?
No single book could hold all of the PAD Tactics available today. For that reason, if you’re looking for more ideas and inspiration, I invite you to visit www.AudiencePro.com, where my colleagues and I:
Maintain an ever-growing list of ways you can build and engage your proprietary audiences.
Debate the merits of PAD Tactics with experts from across the entire spectrum of marketing today.
Provide how-to instructions, images, and videos to help you put each PAD Tactic into practice.
While I hope to see you on the site, our Proprietary Audience Development roadmap’s next point of interest calls for a bit of color—red, to be exact.