Social media is revolutionizing the world of marketing. Tom Flanigan reports a master of the new media was giving lessons to some of Tallahassee’s top communicators last week….
The old way of marketing was to get your message in front of as many people as possible. New York City-based Social Media Consultant Jason Keath says the new way of marketing is to reach a much smaller, more select group of people. He calls them “influencers”.
“You know it takes what people do in PR and it applies it to this new class of new media content creators that have their own audiences – that have these growing large audiences – and even it they’re not large, they’re very small niche topics and audiences that people are trying to get access to in new and creative ways.”
What would be an example of one of these “influencers”?
“So if you’re reaching out to say a ‘Mommie Blogger’, which is a classic example of influencer marketing, she may not have a million followers on her blog or hundreds of thousands of e-mails on her list, but she may have a really passionate fan base of 10,000 women - 10,000 parents – and that’s still attractive to like a Kraft or Pepsi or P&G to have access to 10 or 20 of those publishers.”
So if you’re an advertiser now targeting a very select instead of a mass audience, your job should be easier, right? Actually, Keath says, the opposite is true.
“You have a new content creation challenge, which is growing in many ways. You have to put messages out on Facebook and on blogs. And then you also have, working with influencers, you have the task of creating content for them to share on your behalf and that’s a different type of content. It’s not as robust as a Superbowl commercial, but it’s a larger scale of pieces of content.”
Keath says this whole concept is so new, even the nation’s top business and marketing schools haven’t gotten up to speed on it yet.
“Even the schools that are teaching sort of social media and content marketing aren’t really teaching it at the level for the most part that’s useful in the real world yet. They’re giving people a good level of knowledge to start from, but more or less you just have to jump in full-body into the water and learn to swim as you go.”
So where does the marketing person who wants to be on the cutting edge go to get started and then polish those skills?
“I think you get your degree by going to agencies that know what they’re doing, or you just start showing up at meet-ups, start introducing yourself to bloggers and start learning their system. Learning their eco-system.”
Jason Keath spoke last week during a luncheon meeting of the Capital Chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association in Tallahassee.