Recently, I’ve been chatting with both artist and corporate folks about how to engage with their audience or reach a new audience and the biggest topic to emerge out of those discussions is how do have a conversation with our audience, not a one way message.
It seems to be an issue that most people thought would be taken care of with social media but that too has become so business friendly, that the current generation is turned off by the commercialization of it all.
The desire to have true conversations with the target audience you’re going after can only be achieved by shaking off the things you have been taught, I know that sounds scary but go with me here. Not leave the the foundational information you have been taught but don’t feel restrained by speaking to your audience like that. We need as individuals and organizations to step back and ask how we would like to be spoken to. What would motivate us to action, find out more info, purchase or share information?
It seems that the social realm is starting to take notice of this as well. Twitter just announced a new feature for advertisers, the conversational ad (Wegert, 2016). This new feature will allow companies to ask questions, poll, survey or create a community for a particular product or topic with specifically designed handles and hashtags. It will allow people to ad their own comments to their retweets and help the companies respond to the answers as they come in. It is still in the beta testing stages but it will be interesting to see what other social sites jump on the bandwagon and engage Wegert, 2016).
In a noisy world, the companies, individual and organization brands that evolve in response to the world around them will be the ones that succeed and move the “conversation” forward. Authenticity and trust is an proven strategy and this is the next step in creating that once again.
References:
Wegert, T. (2016, January 16). Should you use Twitter’s new conversational ads?. ClickZ.com. Retrieved from: https://www.clickz.com/2016/01/21/should-you-use-twitters-new-conversational-ads
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