Staying on top of technology changes is hard work. Understanding how to apply those changes is even harder.
I had a conversation recently with a totally unscientific sampling of middle school, high school and college students, all of whom use smart phones as constant companions. I asked a simple question. Whom do you connect with?
The answer was unanimous. Friends.
Then I asked what they share with their friends and the answer, also unanimous, was pictures. After a brief pause, a few added, videos, too. In fact, a favorite pastime seems to be trolling for fun pictures and videos to share in the hope of getting comments back.
This is the medium of communication for this generation. Forget texting, and emails are so old school! Pictures and short (really short) videos are in. (Does anyone say something is in anymore?)
So what is a marketer to do? If the growing market of digitally savvy consumers has created micro-network circles of communication, and they only communicate with pictures and videos, how do we get a message to them?
The answer may be that we don't.
In order to get our message to be picked up and go viral through their networks, we need to have them find us and get infected.
One way to do this is to turn our message into an event, the way one of our client's did. Her message on teaching children to share was originally aimed at parents. As a family therapist, that makes sense, but the break-away thinking here works much more elegantly.
Jeanne Rollins created a character, Gracie, who feels she has to do everything herself. In the musical, and the accompanying children's book, Gracie learns the hard way that being "Greedy" with the tasks of throwing a birthday party for her friend Gina can have dire consequences.
The musical, "Greedy Gracie Shares the Happy," premiered in November, just before Thanksgiving at the Westchester Sandbox Theater and parents and kids left each performance humming and singing the tunes, carrying the message in the lyrics.
True to form, Jeanne followed her own advice. The production was a totally shared event. While Jeanne wrote the story and the lyrics to the songs, she relied on the amazing talents of Marshall Toppo for the music and Jason Summers for direction and choreography. The book was also a collaboration with illustrations by Kathleen Jordan.
What Jeanne has done with Gracie is to shift her strategy. She doesn't wait for people to find her. She finds ways to go to them.
The other thing that Jeanne is doing that helps her grow her following is to put her message everywhere she can imagine, including her website, Facebook pages, Twitter, even on local store shelves with her line of note cards.
So, you might say all this is hard work and you would be right. Fun, but exhausting at times. Ask Jeanne. But she loves what she does and that makes it all worthwhile. She never stops.
The lessons we can take away from this are:
- Stay on top of what is changing in the market and in technology.
- Discover how your market audience communicates.
- Focus your resources on the right strategies.
- Don't be afraid to try multiple strategies.
- Never give up.
Is anybody out there?
Yes! But they may not be looking for you, so you need to go out and find them!
Image Copyright: vukvuk / 123RF Stock Photo