A Paradigm Shift
It used to be that marketing writers—like me—were always helping our clients to sell. And that worked for a long time indeed. It worked when we used to send out direct mail and slide infomercials into magazines, and it worked when we created websites and landing pages and advertising copy.
But change is the only constant, and the web is changing faster than anything else, it seems. The new paradigm, the essence of social media marketing, isn’t helping people sell—it’s helping them buy. Changing the focus from pushing Product X to pulling people in to buy Product X. It may seem like a matter of semantics, but if you think about it you’ll see that it’s far more radical than that, a seismic shift.
It doesn’t mean that other forms of marketing are obsolete. In fact, social media marketing sits in snugly with search engine optimization, because at the end of the day, it’s still all about content, still about getting people to one’s site and having them buy once they’re there.
And there are as many ways of getting them there as there are people in any given conversation. But that’s another shift, isn’t it: from advertising (i.e., talking at people) to evangelizing (talking with people). Social media types find advertising invasive, anyway, so we’ll be seeing less and less of it; but one can evangelize from within—a community, a club, a social group—specifically because one is a group member. One belongs. One listens. One supports.
So the first tip for those of you who want to join the conversation? Listen! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, SEO, Words, search engine optimization, social media marketing, website stuff on May 7th, 2009