William Buist

At a recent conference Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old boss of Facebook was talking to 250 or so “middle aged” advertising executives about the new ways that Facebook envisaged advertising developing. His thoughts are indeed interesting. “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation”.

That phrase – ‘Part of the conversation’ caught my eye. What does it mean to you?

If advertisers are going to be part of the conversation, will we let them in? What would make us do so? and once they are in the conversation how can they add value to that conversation, or are they there just to extract value through sales? If so, will it be a short term visit to the conversation?

Advertisers engaging with a community in a social networking environment create an interesting new way of presenting old products and services. We know on Ecademy, that overt promoting products on services ‘in the conversation’ (as opposed to where it is expected in Marketplace) has a strongly negative effect if handled badly but that building relationships, “joining in the conversation”, can create an opportunity to build advocacy and brand awareness very fast. The trick for most of us is to find the opinion leader within the community. When we influence their opinion they influence others opinion on our behalf. Good or bad.

But social networking creates an opportunity for advertisers to eavesdrop a conversation as well as take part in it. That creates a difficulty for all of us, in that, the things that we communicate about are seen by those who are silent. Silent but not inactive. They are reading and assimilating the knowledge they gain in order to be able to better position their products and services for us. That’s no bad thing, for, if we are approached for the things we need, at the time we need them, with a product or service that meets that need, and is good value then none of us will complain.

The question is can they be good enough at acquiring this skill?

William Buist, Director of Abelard Management Services, specialising in rapidly improving the trust and community spirit in teams and groups.

Ends