by Andrea Bridges-Smith- Flash Producer
February 12, 2010
I remember the days when a URL started to show up at the bottom of TV commercials. Those companies were instantly thought of as being on the cutting edge, because not everyone had a website back then. (And then we walked to school barefoot, in the snow, and it was uphill both ways…)
Nowadays, it’s common knowledge that your business is nothing without a website; those URLs at the bottom of ads are ubiquitous and expected. But now I’m noticing all the Facebook and Twitter and MySpace logos popping up at the bottom of ads. It’s no longer enough for a company that is serious about marketing itself to simply have a website. Now you have to have at the very least a Facebook or MySpace page, and preferably a Twitter account to go with it. And that original website should have a blog. So what changed? I believe it’s mainly two things:
1. The explosion of Viral. Social media takes plain old word-of-mouth and puts it on steroids. The results can turn a normal British woman or a kid coming home from the dentist into an instant celebrity, and the possibility of that happening to your product is too tempting to ignore.
2. People are less willing to try something based on a cool ad campaign alone—they want some proof before they jump in. When a user goes to a Facebook page and sees that the product or company has 600,000 fans, they’re more likely to let their guard down and give it a shot. If a restaurant has bad reviews on Yelp or City Search or Urbanspoon, it’s a big problem because that’s where people are going to find out about them.
Consumer engagement used to go something like this: create a great ad campaign and people would buy. Now the process has changed: consumers find out about the company or product and get hooked through their advertising, look up their website to find out more info, and then investigate them through social media to make sure they’re worth the investment. Consumers are willing to do a lot more homework before they spend their time and money these days, and businesses have to be willing to do theirs too.