Corporate Social Media Needs a Human Face
Posted: April 21, 2013 by Alex Chan
The hardest task in any advertising or marketing strategy is defining a target group. Reaching out to your audience and getting positive feedback, or any feedback, is every social media marketers focus. Defining users and customers is not simply a statistical task where people are divided by gender, age, marital status or whether or not they have children. When you ask people to tick a box, it does not really tell you who they really are!
People have many attitudes depending on their surroundings – professional at work, personal at home, friendly and casual for friends, and so on. We adapt to different situations and different people. We simply cannot be divided into two strict groups – a corporate or a personal being. A person can never draw a line between the personal and the professional side when addressing issues in everyday life. Both those sides are an integral part of one's persona and each persona takes part in the decision making process. Trying to address just one of them is a big mistake that corporations and advertising agencies make.
This is why companies today put enormous efforts into reaching their customers on a true, personal level. Statistics are no longer crucial when addressing customers. The goal is to get to know your customers as you know your friends – their likes, dislikes, preferences, desires, dreams, problems and goals. Companies must have a "human face" and a "human ear" that will enable them to gather information about customers. By trying to learn all this information, you earn their trust. By becoming a trustworthy company, you slowly build a good reputation which customers appreciate and respect. People in general hate to be part of a statistic, or part of any analysis. They are alive. They have feelings. They have troubles. They are unique. When treated as a potential sale, people tend to rebel and usually that kind of marketing backfires in a negative way.
Marketing strategies that combine the personal and professional status always provide positive results. That is why many companies learn the "Art of Authenticity". When something is authentic, it is genuine, real, and unique. Art on the other hand is all about passion and creativeness. In other words, companies that are authentic when promoting their products can truly reach people and are widely accepted. The point is to create art not copy and paste something but rather something genuinely interesting that your audience will react to. For good or bad.
