Tomorrow I am going to Hell ... literally. There is an area on Grand Cayman Island nicknamed "Hell" thanks to some black limestone formations that (as legend has it) caused a local at one point to explain that "this is what hell must look like!" As you might expect, the area has been turned into a tourist destination, where the star attraction is a Post Office which specializes in letting you send a postcard home directly from Hell (with official postmark included).
Imagine for a moment that you had the challenge to create a destination based on a normal natural phenomenon like these limestone formations. Sure, a catchy name like "hell" would certainly help ... but your real goal isn't just to create a memorable experience - it is to create a shareable one as well.
How many tourists do you think visit Hell and DON'T send a postcard home? Not very many. Part of the fun of going there is sharing it with friends and family back home. In Hell, they don't have signs asking visitors to please join a neglected Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. Their marketing is built into the experience itself - and it works because of it.
The next time you are considering some method of desperation marketing to get your customers to talk about the experience you offer, remember that the ideal solution might be to find a way to make word of mouth an inherent part of how people interact with your business. The result could be creating something as shareable as going to hell and back in an afternoon.
Earlier this year, an issue of Fast Company magazine featured an interesting article by Chip and Dan Heath talking about the art of brand names. They focused on Lexicon, one marketing agency with a track record for creating iconic brand names like Blackberry and the Colgate Wisp. The process they uncovered is part science, part serendipity – but it wa a telling exploration of an effort that for many large businesses is worth pouring months of time and millions of dollars into. If you have heard any of the stories of research that went into Microsoft’s quest for the perfect name for their new search engine (which is now called Bing), you’ll already know this phenomena well.
How much time and money did you spend identifying the name you were going to use for your business? Perhaps the name came to you and you always knew in your head what you would call it. Or maybe you asked dozens of people and spent a long time going back and forth about it. However you ended up where you are, that process has likely come and gone – and this is not a post about convincing you to change the business name you already have.
Instead, you should ask yourself if you really know what your brand name is saying about your business? Many potential customers will likely hear the name of your business before they hear anything else. And once they hear that name, they are likely to have a first reaction to it. In my experience, there are five methods small business owners typically use to choose a business name.
To help you get the most out of your brand name, here is a list of 5 different brand naming methods, along with some potential benefits that you should aim to leverage if your small business name was chosen based on one of these types:
1. Familial (Example - Clark & Coleman Legal Offices). Some of the world’s greatest companies like Ford and Dyson started this way – simply by taking the name of their founder. If your business fits this model, chances are you have a strong personality at the head of the company. This person is likely the voice of the company and will give people a personal connection to the business. The more opportunities you can create for potential customers to relate to this individual, the more business you will likely be able to do.
2. Logical (Example – Fix-It-Fast Plumbers). Logic is a great and sometimes underrated way to name a business. Next Day Blinds is one great example of this, and if your business was named with this in mind – the biggest benefit you likely have is that it is immediately obvious to anyone who hears your name what kind of business you are in. Use every chance you can find to remind people about your business by promoting the name. Put it on the side of your business truck. Repeat it often on your website. The more you can establish an ownable brand around the distinctively logical name you already have, the more customers you can draw.
3. Thematic (Example - Nirvana Indian Restaurant). A theme can evoke an emotion for an entire category. Restaurant owners tend to be particularly active at using this type of brand name to describe their establishment. The added benefit of this is that more than most other types of names, going with a theme provides you with a canvas from which to create an entire experience for your customer. In that way, the theme gives your business the chance to fit multiple pieces together to offer unexpected value and a more complete experience to your customers.
4. Localized (Example – Cedar St Hardware Store). Clearly the most important aspect of a name like this is location, location, location. By using a specific location in the name of your business, you have highlighted that your location is going to be a key reason for customers to visit you. Much of the value you can gain from this, then, is by having smart ways to reach out to potential customers who are already close to the location you want them to be at.
5. Random (Example – The Blue Frog Wedding Catering). For some businesses, having a unique name is the most important thing – simply because the name can help you to stand out and be memorable. If you have a name like this, chances are you have focused on creating a logo or visual version of the name that you want to be recognizable in your industry. Consistency is the key to making a name like this work for your business. Make sure you use it on all your printed materials, that it is repeated often and that it is integrated into everything that you do.
Yesterday I spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit, a big gathering of some of the best minds in leading social media efforts on behalf of large corporate brands. The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media - and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists offered real case studies, answered tough questions and generally demonstrated that there is real hope for large corporate brands to actively use social media to generate real business value in multiple ways. Here are some of the biggest lessons that 10 brands featured on Day 1 of the event shared in their presentations:
1. American Express* - "Altruism has a long tail."
Uniquely qualified to talk about the impact of altruism, American Express Open Forum VP of Social Media Laura Fink went behind the scenes of the hugely successful "Small Business Saturday" campaign that American Express launched back in November of 2010 to create a day where consumers could get rewarded with a $25 statement credit for shopping at a small business location. According to Fink, the campaign engaged more than 1.2 million small businesses around the country and also helped those businesses to see a 28% sales lift on the day of the promotion. Perhaps more importantly, it showed that doing something good can generate a real business impact for customers as well as for the big brand putting on the campaign.
2. Union Pacific - "Never underestimate local communities."
One of the largest railway companies in the United States, Union Pacific has also been around for nearly 150 years. To celebrate this heritage, Senior Manager of Media Technology Tim Mcmahan shared a case study of a crowdsourced competition that Union Pacific held to get people to vote on the ideal route for one of their old steam engines to take on the "Union Pacific Great Excursion Adventure." The voting was split into several rounds, with some fierce competition from unexpected locations. Through each round, Mcmahon shared that the consistently surprising result was that smaller towns like Tuscola, IL were routinely outpacing big metro markets like Chicago. The point, he noted, was that sometimes the most passion for a campaign like this can come from smaller local communities for whom winning may be a bigger deal. Across the campaign, there were nearly 200,000 votes recorded, over 100,000 email addresses captured and the brand plans to reprise the campaign next year.
3. Coca-Cola* - "The most important number in social media is 360."
Through the brilliant video below, Coke's Director of Digital Communications Ashley Brown told the story of a big ambitious PR idea which turned into the largest social media campaign the brand had ever done. The mission was to send three lucky travelers on a journey to all 206 countries around the world where Coke was sold. The trio embarked on their journey on January 1, 2010 and anyone could choose to follow their travels and adventures on the website Expedition 206 (which sadly doesn't seem to be available online anymore). Their goal in each country was to find what made people happy - which Brown noted was perfectly on strategy for Coke to build on their existing brand platform and marketing campaign centered around the idea to "open happiness." The answers they got ranged from family to music to dancing to soccer (yes, they made it to the World Cup in South Africa). Through the lens of this beautiful social experiment disguised as marketing, the team managed to reach what may be the most profound conclusion of all ... that happiness is always simple, whatever form it takes.
4. Best Buy - "Nobody owns social media."
In one of the most eye-opening talks of the day, Gina Debogovich shared some big lessons learned from her time over the last 3-4 years building up the Best Buy customer service and social care center to what is now called the "Twelp Force. As a former customer care person herself, she talked about how Best Buy uses the overarching mission of "creating meaningful communications in the virtual world" to guide all of their efforts. They have an inner circle of about 26 team members dedicated to social media at their team, and then an extended 3000 employees who are actively encouraged to use social media and offered lots of different forms of training on how to do it. Her team is a resource that individual stores can use for advice on such tasks as how to effectively use Facebook specifically for their store. In addition, their team is the only customer care team in the world who currently has their own production studio for creating content such as their Best Buy Unboxing feature. In one case, Gina shared the unheard of stat of how they managed to reduce the volume of one "call driver" (customer service lingo for a top reason that people call a contact center) by 50% simply by producing a video to answer that question.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Gina spoke.
5. Samsung - "Negative experiences are our biggest opportunity."
Samsung is a brand that has made lots of strides recently in integrating social media into their customer service, and has been very active in joining conversations about their brand online. One of the leaders of this, Jessica Kalbarczyk (@samsungjessica) shared her insights about how her small team of four colleagues manages to engage people online about Samsung, and help solve their problems. For Jessica, coming from a marketing and PR role into one more focused on customer service was a fulfilling role because every day she manages to address real problems and change consumers experiences one by one. Anyone in a marketing role who has suffered through never ending meetings about social media without a real vision or tangible outcome will easily be able to imagine how nice a feeling it much be to actually solve real problems and the sense of accomplishment that would offer on a daily basis. As part of that, she shared a point of view which is common among customer service pros ... that they would much rather find negativity and have a chance to fix it and change that consumer's perception. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to run scared in the opposite direction from any negativity. There is clearly a lesson here about the necessity of integrating marketing and customer service more closely.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Jessica spoke.
6. Dell - "Forget ROI and focus more broadly on business value."
At the top of most analyst's lists of brands that have managed to integrate social media into their operations in a real and tangible way would likely be computer maker Dell. During his talk, Richard Binhammer from Dell shared a historical perspective of how social media became integrated into the organization, and one of the most powerful points in his presentation was where he shared the six business areas which have fully embraced social media for different business reasons - marketing, product development, sales, online presence, customer service and communications. While other brands focus on one of these at a time, Dell has reached a point where they can "inhale and exhale at the same time" as Richard shared in his talk. Ultimately, his biggest point is that "ROI" is such a restricting term when it comes to describing what social media can offer and there is a much stronger way to describe the real value behind it that we need to think about including in more of our discussions.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Richard spoke.
7. Southwest - "Have fun and be human."
Fun and airline are not two words that anyone would typically use in the same sentence, yet Social Media Manager from Southwest Airlines Alice Wilson devoted a good part of her talk about how Southwest creates a more human brand by using an irreverant voice. The questions that keep many other large brands up at night in terms of making sure they have backup for employees who are running social media channels, or mapping everything back to some specific campaign or column on a spreadsheet don't seem to matter as much for Southwest. They have guiding principles around their social voice, yet Alice shares that most people who speak out for the brand "just get the hang of it." Without that formalized training or overly bureaucratic approach to managing every aspect of Southwest, the brand succeeds because they have such a strong culture that people start to take it on as their own from day one and this translates into social media.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Alice spoke.
8. Kodak - "Real time listening pays off."
Kodak is a brand that has won a lot of respect for how forward thinking they have been in moving into social media over the past several years, even publishing a guidebook which was available for the attendees on how to use social media and what they had learned. In his talk Tom Hoen, the Kodak Director of Interactive Marketing, shared a number of examples demonstrating the power of listening. In one example, the brand awoke to a barrage of negativity from fans of a Nickelodeon TV show called Degrassi because there was a rumor that the brand had pulled all their advertising due to the show's sometimes adult themes. Fairly rapidly, they were able to use social media to diffuse the rumor (it was actually just a natural pause in flighting for their ads) and engage those angry voices - leading one person to share on Twitter "Now I feel bad. I told the Kodak people to eff themselves sideways, and they sent me a tweet being all nice." Aside from the newly found good feelings, Degrassi and Nickelodeon offered up 2 free spots to Kodak during their season premiere. Not a bad ROI for engaging a few irate teens.
9. New York Life - "Brands need to trust their people."
An unexpected voice at the event came from Gregory Weiss, the AVP of Social Media for New York Life. He started with an entertaining look at the hypcritical nature of business, and how many large brands are afraid of what their employees might do with social media even though they let those same employees have phones and use fax machines and talk to people outside of the company. His main point was that if you can't trust your employees to do the right things and make the right choices, then maybe you need to hire better people. He offered several real tips for using social media in a corporate environment, including supporting your existing sales force, getting on the agenda of new hire initiations so you can tell them about social media, and even simple things like encouraging people to add your social media properties to the end of their email signatures. A point I took away as well, though he didn't mention it was about the importance of picking your battles. Apparently, New York Life also has a vetting process they use internally before any social media property can link to an outside website. That might seem like overkill for many brands, but Greg manages to work around it without making it a big issue.
10. Pepsi - "Reward people for everyday behaviour."
The last presentation of the day came from Josh Karpf, who focuses on an area that more brands should consider having as part of their marketing efforts ... digital research and development. His group runs many forward thinking experiments on how to use social media to engage consumers, and he shared some real examples and hard data from a few of their efforts around trying to offer couponing as a layer on top of geolocation and encouraging people to check in. For one campaign with Hess convenience stores, they found that using a Foursquare promotion in a particular location offered a 47% boost in volume of purchase over previous weeks where the campaign was not running - a great result for the retailer. On the Pepsi side, they interesting learned that coupon redemptions were much higher when offered to people as a reward for some type of behaviour, which seems to offer the logical conclusion that people are more likely to follow through a claim the discount or product from a coupon if they feel they had to "earn" that coupon in some way such as by checking into the gym for 10 days in a month.
*NOTE: Several of the brands mentioned in this post are current or previous Ogilvy clients. In particular, Coca-Cola and American Express are both clients and some Ogilvy team members may have worked on both of the campaigns mentioned. In both cases, I did not work in either campaign and also have not been compensated or encouraged in any way to write about these two brands or these campaigns. I am also a contributor to the American Express Open Forum website.
Of all the small business marketing issues that I have spoken with colleagues or clients with, there is one that seems to come up with regularity. This so-called million dollar question is around the tricky topic of whether to specialize or talk about your services or products more broadly. On the plus side, if you make it publicly known that you focus on a particular service or product – you are likely to get customers interested in that. The flip side argument is that by specializing, you may be limiting the potential of your business by unfairly “pigeonholing” your entire business into what may just be one small aspect of it.
Specialization is about more than saying you choose a particular industry. If you have an Indian restaurant, specialization means you only have north Indian or Punjabi food. If you install home theaters, you specialize in Sony or Panasonic systems. The point of specialization isn’t to just be working in a particular category, but to make a hard choice about what EXACT part of that industry you will focus on.
For that reason, this is no easy question to answer, but getting it right can mean the difference between having the right positioning to help your business stand out, or the wrong positioning that puts you into the sea of sameness with your competitors. So how do you get it right? Here are a few questions that can help you uncover the truth:
How hard is it to find your products or services? Generally if you offer the types of products which are very hard to find – it may make sense to specialize further. If your business becomes synonymous with offering a specialty that is rarely found elsewhere, it can be easier to encourage word of mouth among your current customers and also to promote your business specifically to those seeking that rare type of product or service that you offer.
How many direct competitors do you really have? If you are in the business of repairing luggage – you might have several competitors in your area … but if you are the only licensed dealer in a 500 mile radius for a particular brand of luggage – you may not have any direct competitors in that space – which means it might make sense to specialize.
Does one product or specialty account for the bulk of your profit? When you look at your range of products or services that you offer, is there one that stands apart for being the most profitable? For many eye specialists, their most profitable patient procedure may be the Lasik operation, which is why you see so many of them focusing on promoting their services in that specialty.
How large is the potential market for a single specialization? Predicting a future marketing for any product or service is not an easy task to get right. When it comes to specialization, however, you need to find a way to get the right amount of information so you can make a best estimate. You may have the only mechanics in town who can work on Rolls Royce cars, but if hardly anyone in your location owns them – it probably is a bad idea to specialize.
What impact would specializing have on your workforce? The one softer element of specialization to consider is how choosing to specialize might impact your workforce. In a marketing agency such as mine, for example, it could make perfect business sense to only focus on doing Government work instead of any other industry – however this choice would likely be taken negatively by some members of the workforce who have a passion for also working in other sectors, even if those other sectors are not as common. In this case, specializing on just one industry isn’t likely to work because the workforce behind the company would not believe in it.
This post is republished from the original article on the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.
Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get from their home countries to Australia is certainly part of the reason - and the long history of violence against the native aboriginal people (much like the US history with the Native Americans) has led to drastically reduced native population.
Until just the last few decades, Australia was a place which also held onto a fairly racist immigration policy - legislating first against all immigrants, then against Southern Europeans (such as Greeks and Italians), and then against all others until finally in 1973 the country finally adopted the same open immigration policy as most other developed countries of the time. Slowly, the country began to actively court people from all cultures to come to Australia. When I lived there from 1998 to 2003, I remember being struck by how invested the government was in getting people to join the culture and become Australian. They even had television ads where the call to action was "become a citizen."
Last year, the Australian TV channel SBS launched an interesting documentary series online designed to celebrate one sector of the immigrant experience - people who had come from Africa and built their lives in Australia. Told with an interactive website featuring videos of real people - the campaign offered an inside look at the success stories and real lives of African immigrants in Australia.
It is exactly the kind of campaign that every country should do more of. The immigrant experience is a critical part of the success of many countries, and recently it seems to be under a sort of undue scrutiny from many cultures as reactions to fundamentalist groups, potential terrorism and misguided fear mongering have led to a new rise in popularity for isolationism.
Preventing immigration is not the solution. Australia may have been one of the slowest countries in the world to realize the value of an open immigration policy - but now they celebrate it with campaigns like this one. Let's hope other developed countries can follow their example.
About two months before I turned in the final manuscript on my first marketing book, it was available for pre-order on Amazon. You could see the cover and the writeup about the book, and unknown to anyone who might have visited that page – the book wasn’t even finished yet. I admit, I did pre-order a copy, mostly out of curiosity to see what kind of communications I would receive about it in the months leading up to its release.
Unfortunately for me, it didn’t make writing those last few sections any easier … but it did give me a good measure of exactly when the book was available and what someone who had preordered the book might experience. Since then, I have made it a point to always purchase products that I might be writing about or those that are sold by a client’s company (within reason, of course – I can’t always buy a new Ford or every new laptop with the latest Intel chip in it). There is nothing like going through the purchasing process as a consumer to get a different understanding about a product and business.
As a small business owner, here are a few ways that you can start to adapt your behaviour to experience your business the way a customer might – so you can continue to improve your business.
Find your products or services online. The simplest search to do is to type your brand name into Google and see if you come up in the top ten results. While it may be easy to do, it also is nearly meaningless because you are only focused on the people who may have heard about your business. Instead, search online for products or services such as those you sell without using any keywords about your business name and see if your website still comes up as highly as you would like.
Read and respond to reviews. No matter what kind of business you are in, there may be customer reviews posted about your business. Sometimes they are not linked to your exact business name, but rather a version of your business name that you don’t use but people could easily search for (ie – your name without the “Inc” or “& Sons” after it). These reviews are highly likely to be seen by those who happen to read about your business online – so keeping track of them and responding if you have something to dispute or offer to the person who shared it would be entirely appropriate.
Read your marketing materials out loud. When producing a brochure or a website, most of us are tempted to lapse into using business or marketing language instead of natural language to describe our products or services and what we do. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of language that customers DON’T respond to. Reading your materials out loud is an excellent way to check for yourself to see if you are using overly complicated language – so you can fix it and make it work better to sell your business.
Follow your call to action. You can’t always buy your own product or service if it would be obvious to your fulfillment person or if your business offers a service such as tax preparation. Instead, you can follow the queues that your website offers and complete the call to action on your site. This could be filling out a contact us form and seeing how long it takes for someone to get back to you (likely using a false name, of course). If you can order your product relatively anonymously, go ahead and do so and track how long it takes and how it gets fulfilled.
Ask your average customers. Aside from all the tricks I have shared above, there is really no substitute from learning firsthand from the experiences of your customers. The problem is that many small businesses try to collect this feedback from their biggest or best customers primarily. Doing this will likely give you biased results. Instead, try to profile an “average” customer – someone who only buys once in a while, who has low personal involvement with you and your business and who could relatively easily be swayed to go to your competitor next time. The insights this type of customer can offer you are worth chasing.
This post is republished from the original article on the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.
If you could have chosen a completely different path for your career, what would you have done? For generations, asking this sort of question was usually an exercise in idle daydreaming. Yet imagine if you lived in a world where you didn't have to choose. Where the alternative career path you never chose could still a part of your life - even though it had nothing to do with what you did for a living.
Several years ago, before the current buzz and attention on Facebook or Twitter, the darling of the fickle interactive marketing community was a virtual world called Second Life. The site allowed users to create a 3D virtual version of themselves and spend time in a completely virtual environment. It was frequently misunderstood by the mainstream, and seen as a waste of time - as this clip from The Office illustrates:
Yet for a core group of users, it offered an entirely new way to interact - without leaving your current life behind. The title of the site predicted the future in a way that few people understood at the time. Today, social media has offered millions of people the chance to pursue their own "second lives" around the passions that they always had. Did you always want to start a brewery? Now you can, and then blog about your experience. Amateur photography? Share your images online and even sell them to stock photo collections to make some money. Whatever your dream job - now you can join a community of others who share that dream and can help you to explore it ... all without quitting your day job.
When anyone is free to pursue their second lives - innovation can come from anyone anywhere. The separation between professionals and amateurs is blurred - leading to the rise of new groups like citizen journalists (CNN iReport), advertising co-creators (Doritos Super Bowl Ads) and many crowdsourced communities (Wikipedia, Toyota Ideas For Good). Everyone is an expert at something - and now technology has made that expertise easy to share.
The next big idea to change the world may very well come from the researchers at Google or the scientists at MIT. Or it might come from a stay at home mom writing a blog about physics.
Late last year a crippled Carnival Cruise ship was brought into port with thousands of disgruntled customers. Their vacations were ruined, they were stuck at sea and the media was having a field day covered their plight and the potential downside of the entire category of cruising. If you were Carnival, what would you do?
If you are lucky, you haven’t been faced with this real question looming in front of you for your small business, but at any moment you might be. You could have a rogue employee who does something foolish, or a product that doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, or a completely unreasonable customer who decides to take to blogs and start publicly bashing your company. In this 24/7 always connected world, the next crisis can be right around the corner.
Trying to prevent it from happening is obviously the best choice, but what if it does happen? Here are a few steps that crisis communications pros use when faced with this exact situation to help deal with a crisis, rebuild a brand reputation and save a company.
Express authentic concern. The worst thing you can do when you start dealing with any crisis is to give the impression that you are not bothered by the crisis itself. In the case of Carnival, they ruined people’s vacations and the public needs to see them feel bad about it. Feeling bad won’t fix anything on its own, but it does demonstrate that you and your company have a heart and that you care.
Share the facts, not your defense. As the crisis plays out, chances are you will still be gathering the facts. If there are lawyers involved, this can be particularly tricky – but when you have concrete facts, it is always a best practice to share them. This doesn’t mean using them to assign blame to a subcontractor or pointing fingers. It is possible that the crisis wasn’t your fault, but in the beginning that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you demonstrate you are trying to be honest and authentic as you and your team work to solve the issue.
Outline a believable solution. The important thing in this phase is to not declare victory over a crisis prematurely. When you know that you have really solved the issue, give the public a real description of how you fixed it and how that fix will make it impossible for the same issue to happen again.
Detail (or elevate) the real issue alongside the solution. Once you have done the first three steps, you can get to the point where you really share who was at fault. This is not the moment for you to point fingers, but rather to elevate the issue if it is warranted. If it was an employee that screwed up, this point is where you share the new policies that you have in place to fix that in the future. If it was a subcontractor problem, you talk about how you will be revising your entire supply chain to manage this type of issue.
Emerge as a leader. The final step is what can turn a crisis into something that you just sit through and hope to survive through into a critical moment where you could transform your business. After you have emerged from the crisis, the question to ask is how you can lead your industry and help make sure that this crisis doesn’t happen to any other company. This may involve creating a partnership or working with a third party group, or even starting one. The goal of this phase is to go above and beyond just fixing a problem, and demonstrate that what you learned from the entire experience was that this issue is critical to solve for the entire industry – and you are going to be the one to try and do it.
This post is republished from the original article on the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.
In 1987, Patrick Dempsey starred in a movie that gave geeks everywhere hope that they might have a shot at being popular. The movie was called Can't Buy Me Love, and the somewhat far fetched storyline was that a geek paid a popular girl at his high school $1000 to pretend to be his girlfriend. Over the course of the movie, he does become popular, then gets outed for the fake relationship and loses his status. The film ends with the girl realizing she actually does love him for his "inner beauty" and they ride off into the sunset on a lawn mower. The irony of the title is that money does indeed accidentally buy him love.
When it comes to social media, this idea that you can't buy affinity also seems to be a basic truth. Most self respecting social media users and any consultant with half a shred of credibility would strongly counsel any client they had against trying to buy followers on a site like Twitter. Imagine for a moment that this same Twitter account were an empty restaurant that you were walking past. No one wants to eat in an empty restaurant - there is usually something wrong with the food. If that same restaurant were full, mahy diners would reconsider dining there.
Following this logic, it could be more likely that someone would follow your Twitter account if they see some critical mass of followers, rather than very few. On Twitter, you can buy those first followers. Are they likely to be completely useless and not engaged in what you have to say? Yes. Is this the ideal way to grow a Twitter account? Of course not. Will it break some unwritten (or perhaps written) rules of social media and have social media gurus raising their 140 character swords ready to fight? Probably. But the sad fact of Twitter is the most of anyone's followers (whether grown authentically or not) are simply not engaged on a frequent basis.
Perhaps having a large initial pool of unengaged followers is not so bad, especially if those initial followers can help you to attract the right kind of followers who actually will be engaged. This month's Entrepreneur Magazine featured a column from Jonathan Blum titled "Rented Friends" where he tried an experiment in buying 5000 followers for $430 on Twitter to see what would happen. As he noted for a conclusion, "5000-plus followers does count for something in the nutty social media world. The bottom line: Yes, some of these followers may not be real. ... social media is so bizarre that whether or not my followers are real is almost beside the point."
I will probably never buy my Twitter followers, and am not quite ready to start suggesting to clients that this is a good strategy. Still, part of evolving with social media is being open to even the most heretic of ideas. The ultimate principles of creating great shareable content and engaging authentically in social media still matter. My only point is this: You still can't make someone fall in love with you or your brand ... but maybe a little cash can help stack the deck in your favor.
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
