How Rock Stars Will Save Your Marketing and Your Business

Most companies have completely missed the enormous business potential of the marriage of social media and mobile devices.  As smartphone ownership continues to approach ubiquitous levels, marketers are salivating at the opportunity to market to customers at home or on the go.

This is where most marketers tripped over the starting line.  “How can WE use social media to push OUR marketing messages to customers?”

Simply asking this question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how its customers are using social media, and of its customers as a group.  No one joins Facebook to be marketed to.  We aren’t using social media tools so brands will have another way to pimp their shit to us.

We are using social media tools because we long for human connection.  We want a way to share our voice and make an impact on the world and on others.  We want to interact with friends and to make new ones.  We want to have personal communications with people, not business relationships with brands.

Now if you’re a self-centered marketer, you’ll read that and think that social media can’t help you because you are only interested in leveraging personal communication tools in order to drive direct sales.

But if you’re the smart marketer, you can read between the lines and see that the intersection of social media and mobile marketing could be the most fundamental change in how you market successfully since the invention of  the television.

Think about this for a minute: If we accept that most people use social media tools for personal communications, then we also can assume that most of the same conversations that these people would have offline, they can now have online via social media, and with social media sites and tools on mobile devices.

In other words, Word of Mouth just moved online.  What form of communications is universally accepted as the most trustworthy when it comes to convincing customers to buy from a brand?  A recommendation from another customer.  Thanks to social media sites and tools, those recommendations that were formerly trapped in an offline world where they might only impact 1 person at a time, can now be shared ONline, where its impact could literally reach millions.

This is where the Rock Stars come in.

Rock stars have always understood the business power of Word of Mouth.  As a result, almost all of a rock stars’s marketing efforts are geared toward connecting with its fans.  Because those fans are driving sales via word of mouth.  Rock stars don’t try to ‘acquire’ new customers because rock stars understand that by connecting with its existing fans today, that it will acquire new customers tomorrow.

So now that social media has brought the power of Word of Mouth into an online world, its created an enormous marketing opportunity for your brand if it is willing to embrace and empower its biggest fans to market for you.

In Think Like a Rock Star, I close the book with this passage:

“Because your fans are the real rock stars.  Your job is to build them a stage, give them a microphone, and listen to the beautiful music that they create.”

Your fans are the rock stars that will save your marketing, and your business.

Pic via Flickr