Businesses that Blog and Meerkat Marketing
By Sara Smith, ViaMetric Managing Editor
Back in the day, it didn’t matter if you were a Nebraskan knitting fanatic with three dogs and a pink front porch or a vaccuum cleaner salesman from Louisiana with a taste for fine wine and socialist politics. You sat down in front of the television at 5:30 every night, and you watched the evening news. Along with everybody else in America.
Those days are gone, of course, and now people can watch COPS or Law & Order or that adorable show about meerkats for literal hours on end. This is a fine arrangement, because broadcasters are giving people what they want. But it makes it very, very difficult for them to give people what they don’t want but probably need — like the news, for example. Once people have a choice about what to consume, they tend not to consume what’s good for them. Or, put a little differently, people often choose not to hear what they don’t want to hear.
So how does a person market on a blog, when marketing and sales are, in a sense, telling people what they don’t want to hear? (When’s the last time you said to yourself, “I’m really in the mood for a sales pitch”?) And how do you keep those fickle readers from clicking away when your audience is anything but captive?
You tell them something they didn’t know, something useful, or at least entertaining. You do not tell them, “Observe my wondrous product, with its many features and benefits.”
The stakes are only getting higher when it comes to digital marketing. Nike just put Wieden + Kennedy’s venerable old running shoe account in review, and it looks like it was due largely to deficiencies on the digital side. In B.L. Ochman’s opinion, Wieden and Kennedy’s failings were mainly structural — that agencies and their clients aren’t set up for the new, nimble world of the Web.
A larger problem is that too many people on the client and the agency side still treat digital marketing with equal parts suspicion, awe, and incomprehension. For them, all things digital — and blogs in particular — are mysterious, powerful, and dangerous tools that they’re pretty sure they need but have no idea how to use. But a blog alone won’t remake your business. It’ll give you a new channel to talk with customers, if you’re prepared to hear what they have to say. It’ll give you a chance to show the world a different side of your company, if you’re prepared to show it. It all has a certain altruistic component, sure. But our friends the meerkats might agree that sometimes altruism is the savviest form of self-preservation.
You are so right about the way digital marketing is viewed in the corporate world. big companies, astoundingly, have only recently begun to take digital seriously and now they need to play catch up.