The Future of Internet Marketing: People Not Markets
I have to agree with Ed Dale‘s assesment about internet marketing in 2008. However it’s with caveats.
My girlfriend lives on Facebook, she is constantly on there sending messages to friends or checking the latest photos posted. People at my office spend their lunch time on the site. Facebook has become an addiction and it is showing no sign of stopping it’s growth.
One of the unique things about Facebook is that it’s built around the relationships of people, and they make it difficult to develop fake personas to infiltrate the system. It’s not so obvious how to take advantage of Facebook as compared to say MySpace where it was easier to spam.
In order to get any visibility on Facebook people have to seek you out, they have to want to see what you’re doing on there. You have to be genuinely interesting.
There are no shortcuts
I was thinking. The ultimate goal has to be to make sales. You can’t make money without sales. So what can you do to leverage a site like Facebook to ultimately land more sales.
The point is to have a traffic funnel for yourself. Your Facebook profile page is simply a way for people to follow what you’re doing. If you’re doing something interesting they may continue to check you out. If you develop the impression of being the expert of a niche within you’re network then hopefully everyone will be aware, and you’ll have them and all the people they interact with offline and online coming to you if and when they have an interest in your niche.
For example, I have Ed Dale as a friend in Facebook. Everytime I log into facebook now I can see the latest twitter updates mixed in with all the latest updates on my home page. He’s developed a persona of being the internet marketing guy in my network. Ed will be on my mind whenever someone talks to me about internet marketing. That’s potentially an instant reference.
People trust word of mouth referrals
It’s better than targetted advertising.
So I said there was a caveat. Here it is: It doesn’t scale easily. It’s not like tapping into Google’s search traffic or getting an instant digg front page. You have to start with what you’ve got and attract people to you.
Everyone else has control in this new world. They will listen only if they want to hear and otherwise they’ll simply turn you off, unsubscribe, and ignore your existance. So be careful.
When Ed Dale said 2008 will be about people not markets he may have hit on what will turn out to be a fundamental change in internet marketing.
[...] The Future of Internet Marketing: People Not Markets – 495 pageviews [...]