Chris Writes.

A lot of people gathered in one place does not guarantee that you can get their attention, if they’re not gathered there to listen to you in the first place. In fact, at the *person* level, I think it might be harder to get someone’s attention when they’re already distracted by the reason they’re part of the crowd in the first place.

Think about the last big music concert you went to: there were a lot of people there.  Probably thousands.  Maybe tens of thousands. All around the show were lots of $BIGNUM  advertisers, in all sorts of guises, and yet sponsor recall is notoriously low – except maybe for the name of the stadium, though even those change often enough that I still call the nearby SF stadium by it’s old name, SBC Park, `cuz it works well for the mnemonic of “Some Big Corporation”.  The point is: people are there to see a show.  The fact that there are lots of people doesn’t necessarily make it a good medium for advertising.  Budweiser and Coca Cola may disagree, but they have an advantage: within that environment, they’re valid. They get to sell their stuff right there in the stadium.

It’s largely the same with big TV advertising campaigns: we live in a world of increasingly fragmented and competing consumer interests, coupled with a frustratingly fixed amount of time in the day.  This means that messages seeking a narrower target than “18-45yr old males” fail to work in a crowd setting.  A TV ad for a bike company (like the one I work for) that plays during coverage of the Tour de France is valid, but this same ad should not be expected to have much validity in the middle of a Thursday night sitcom.  Even though the sitcom has millions more viewers, the validity is orders of magnitude higher when shown during the Tour de France.  Collectively, the marketing world is finally realizing this, and social media continues to charge forward as the proof in this pudding, providing scalable ways to connect at a virtual one-to-one level with relevance, authenticity, and validity.  Particularly at scale, I think it’s safe to say that social media can connect valid messages with relevant groups faster and more efficiently than any other medium.

And yet, companies are now turning to Facebook and Twitter for the same wrong reason that stadiums and prime time don’t work for them: “there’s a lot of people there, so someone must need me”, and the classic “if I just sell $1 worth of stuff to everyone on Facebook, (or on Twitter, or in China) I’ll be rich”. This method isn’t reliable, and it’s usually embarked upon because time isn’t spent figuring out what the most valid approach would be.  In the short term it’s almost always easier to try to blanket the world and then see if we can get 0.001% of the people to care.  This is the attitude, you might note, that brings spam to your email inbox every day.

So what’s the point?  it’s that you need to be valid first, and then present second.  If you’re not valid on Facebook first, figure out what it will take to achieve the same validity that CocaCola has at a concert, or that Lego has to an 8-year old boy, or that bike companies have during race broadcasts. I’m pretty sure that the time spent to figure this out is always worth it.