Digital Handshakes
danah boyd gave a short talk at the Personal Democracy Forum on Friday ad she’s put the rough text online. Reading it, it is easy to apply the same statements to many companies in how they treat the web and their online customers. Brands are the same as politicians in the way that they often treat the web as a broadcast medium and not a place for interaction. Even if a brand tries for an integrated experience, tries to engage the customers, it is still often one way only.
Whenever i suggest this to campaigns [responding to online ‘friends’], i’m told that politicians don’t have time for this, that it’s easier to broadcast. No doubt it’s easier to broadcast, but it’s not nearly as effective as meaningful encounters. Politicians know that they have to travel state-to-state to talk to people on their own terms in their own world. Well, for much of the under-30 population, a huge part of their public life is online. Why are politicians not taking the time to do this? This is what i mean when i say that it’s time to start digitally shaking hands.
It’s exactly the same with brands, the time and resources to do this take time to build up, the skills required are not there are the time, the behaviour needs to change. For one brand I work with, we look at MySpace Friends as a metric, but we are moving towards more of an engagement measure and and a better metric is the number of comments that we (I mean the brand or the agency) make in the conversations. As a marketer, you need to look at how you can be making digital handshakes, not just how to push a message across in a broadcast manner.
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POSTED IN: Engaging the Customer
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