The Most Powerful Advertising Money Can’t Buy.

With the popularity of social media, many marketers have been left scratching their heads and wondering how they will get in. Big mistake. Don’t get in! Don’t get involved in horizontal conversation—Be the catalyst!

Like Seth Godin put it “It’s not yours to use. It belongs to the people who are in it, not to greedy marketers who believe they have a right to ride along. The opportunity is to have a tribe, a group of followers, loyal people who are connected to each other and to a movement.”

What you need is  people who act like unsolicited, un-sponsored, un-bribed promoters of your brand on the social medias, simply because they know you and like what you are doing. You don’t need thousands of evangelists to succeed.

Remember Jesus got only 12 disciples, but with a simple command “As the Father sent me, so I send you” …“Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the Good News to the whole of creation”. And so the disciples set out to tell the Jesus story. They go to places, near and far: James to Jerusalem, Peter and Paul to Rome, Thomas to India. The rest is history.

In the new  economy the main media is conversation.  And when it comes to conversation, the power belongs to the consumers. Conversation is customer-created advertising . It’s very powerful, and growing more powerful everyday with the explosion of social and professional networks.

In years past, the most powerful media was TV, print, radio.  That’s where marketers put the majority of their advertising and marketing dollars. Now the new media is conversation —fragmented, personal, uncontrollable, uncentralized —and guess what?  You can’t buy time or space on conversation!  Needless to say, marketers view this situation with uneasiness.

The narcissist marketer wants to talk about his company and his product. He feels the need to be in control, but guess what?  Control has shifted to no one. Who do you contact to buy “conversation?” There is nobody at the end of the line

Conversation is The most powerful advertising money can’t buy.

“Many marketers are complaining that in the new social media world there are not enough opportunities to reallocate their traditional fat advertising budgets…. Maybe you do not need the same traditional fat budgets to achieve the same results.” François Gossieaux

The question now is how to recruit your promoters and spokespeople.

Become a consumer-empathetic business. Howard Mann put it most succinctly in his book “Your Business Brickyard: Getting back to the basics to make your business more fun to run”

The choice is yours. If you enjoy tracking sales pipelines, opportunities, sales quotas, and ‘deals’ then there are a ton of systems out there that fill the need and work quite well.

If, on the other hand, you hate the idea of cold calling and prospecting, simply go to that address book and list out the 20 percent of your contacts who matter most. Do you know their interests? Their biggest dreams and goals (professional and personal)? If you don’t then that is a place to begin.

Once you do, mark down next to each name what specific actions you can take that will help that person realize those goals. What connections can you make for them? What knowledge can you transfer to them? Call them up. No agenda. No ‘asking for the business.’ Just deliver value relevant to them and keep doing it.”

Good Luck.