Look Both Ways When Crossing the Marketing Street

If you think back carefully (if you're old enough) to the 1960s when advertising was born, you'll remember that for the most part, messages were sent out on a one-way street.  Companies fed impressionable consumers, usually housewives, with products and services that would improve their lives.  Advertising taught  them that Ajax was "stronger than dirt" and that McCormick Schilling seasoning would make their meatloaf tastier, and better yet, have their husbands coming home for more.

Until now, marketing has been a one-way street.   It's not enough to just send messages out to your audience.  With the technology boom, people are continuously receiving and exchanging information right at their fingertips.

Creating unique content and pushing it out through the major platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn is essential to the success of your business.  It's also just as important as receiving and responding to the flow of comments that come back to you.  Make the most of the web-enabled marketplace and engage with your customers.  Give them information at the time they need it.  Refine your content until you get the comment, re-tweet or "share" that you're hoping to achieve.  Interact with your target consumers.  Looking both ways will get you there.


Image courtesy of Human Descent.

How a Magazine Writer Uses Social Media

As a freelance magazine writer, I've come to rely on obtaining information and even inspiration from the Web.  Having loads of great PR contacts and receiving their steady stream of press releases and emails is always appreciated.  But, I don't I rely on them entirely when sitting down to write the story.  I let my fingers do the research.

Like a spiders crawling websites, I, too, search and search and search for pertinent, relative and authentic information to help build the story.  I may go to Linkedin to find out more about a person's business expertise, to Twitter to gather daily thoughts and ramblings, to YouTube to catch someone in action, to Four Square to see where people are in the day, to Facebook, to keep in touch with businesses and people in general, and so on.  Then, of course there are blogs written about a certain topics, or published articles to compare the content, tone, or to discover new angles.

As a freelance writer, I also have to know who I am writing for by understanding the publication thoroughly and being aware of their readers' interests.  Through social media, I can easily keep up by following their tweets, visiting their online magazine (although content for print is usually distinctively different than online versions), and reading back issues of publications that I am interested in submitting queries to.

The information is all there.  Best of all, it's not a one-way street.  There's plenty of opportunity for interaction to take anything, from writing a story, to building relationships to the next level.