Swim The Channel

The first telephone owner... clearly not much of a conversationalist. First TV channel... a one-sided thing. You get the idea.

While various means by which companies communicate with their prospective customer base come and go, the thing to keep clearly in mind is who's listening? And the answer to that question does tend to be "it all depends". It depends on your audience.

Social media is all the rage at the moment. Hardly a day will go by without some message from a company who'll apparently make all of your sales problems go away simply by using social media. Undoubtedly there is a huge role for this communications channel in many businesses, but not in all.

We did some work for an organisation in the IT space. The young guns there were keen on social media and deployed their own marketing activities through Twitter, Facebook and Google+. We had reservations because we didn't believe that the average IT decision maker was likely to be spending precious time browsing Twitter.

Over time they grew a respectable number of followers - all well and good you may say. But on analysing their following, not one of them was an IT manager or indeed influencer of any kind within their target markets. In fact, their followers were people from other companies who wanted to sell to our client - office supplies, furniture, couriers and the like.

So was this wasted effort? Yes and no. Yes because it didn't achieve the goals of the marketing activity. No because social media is seen as a "good thing" by the search engines, so regular, relevant activity in these channels can help to promote your website.

Would we recommend social media - absolutely yes. But only if it's right for the client. There are many other ways in which we can communicate with our prospective customers, some of which may seem a bit old-hat. But if on-one else is using such old-hat methods... wouldn't you be able to stand out?