Spoiler Alert: This post has nothing to do with two headed antelopes (or llamas, if you’ve only seen the Dr. Doolittle of the movies) or talking to animals. It is about connecting with your constituents in health, wealth, and wisdom and a process for building a personal relationship with each of them.
You know, now that I think about it, it does have a little to do with two headed critters. The two-headed beast I’m talking about is a combination of push and pull marketing or the merging of social media and 1:1 multi-channel marketing. Social media provides the pull and 1:1 provides the push, and continues the pull. The result is a communication loop for engaging people on an individual basis and developing lasting relationships.
The model is quite simple: Pull to listen and engage, push to fulfill brand promise.
I’m convinced social media is exploding because we crave a lost sense of community and desperately want to be heard. [There are oodles of reasons for this that I intend to explore in later posts — disenfranchisement through suburban sprawl, the death of the front porch, new urbanism as a cry to connect, the four generations and our propensity to repeat history, what and why we join or the development of tribes, the paradigm of tribal choices, the economics of consumption vs. accumulation — all sorts of stuff.] At its core, social media is surging because it easily lets us connect with one another regarding things we care about and gives us each an equal voice. That’s powerful.
Social media is filling a void in our lives; it is desirable and provides an opportunity for engagement (see how it worked for Barack Obama). You enable the pull by using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to attract like-minded individuals in an open forum to exchange ideas. One of the best parts is its also possible to track it, capture registrations, and continue the conversation — or to engage. To fully engage you need to listen and respond. To listen and respond you need to capture, record, interpret and respond. This is where social media meets 1:1 multi-channel marketing.
Social media begins the engagement and constituents elect to participate in a two-way exchange.1:1 technologies enable us to capture their input, interpret their needs, and respond in a meaningful way, thus continuing the conversation while fulfilling brand promise — the push.
It creates a cycle — pull, push, pull, push. When done properly, in a manner that is relevant to the participants, the result is investment, enrollment, commitment, donation, and so on. The process is trackable on an individual basis. Each person is engaged, responded to, recognized, publicly promoted, and personally thanked. That’s pretty much what most of us want.
