Why Your Values Don’t Matter
The other day, I was talking with an acquaintance who is a very successful residential real estate agent specializing in high end properties. When he asked what I do for a living, I explained that I provide outsourced marketing and social marketing services for businesses. We talked a bit about what was happening in his industry, and his comment was “people who tweet and are on Facebook don’t buy houses.”
I’m recounting this anecdote because it is emblematic of the reaction I very frequently get from prospective clients – particularly those in the Baby Boomer generation. For many of them, social networking is kids’ stuff. They see it as a place for people to gossip or kill time, rather than a forum for genuine relationship building or networking – this despite the large volume of well-documented evidence that people of all ages, educational levels, and degrees of affluence are spending increasing amounts of their time online.
It wasn’t until I read a recent blog post from one of my favorite social media bloggers, Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation, that I realized why this attitude is so frustrating to me. Mitch wrote a post called “Good Old Fashioned Values” that hit the nail on the head. In it, he reminds us that “your values are not THE values.” This simple statement is a powerful reminder that, particularly in the marketing world, you cannot use your own cultural, social, moral, ethical values to reach out to your audience – you have to identify the values that your audience holds dear and find a way to connect with them that is meaningful to both you AND them.
Mitch goes on to state, “The same people who say that kids today don’t interact because all they do is text one another or update their Facebook status’ are completely missing the point. Every generation says this about the generation that comes after them. Our parents said the same thing about us using the phone or playing video games when we were growing up.”
Amen, brother! We can shake our heads all we want at the amount of time people spend on Facebook, the kind of information they share on Twitter, or the videos they choose to watch on YouTube, but the reality of the situation isn’t going to change. People are going to continue investing their time in these online mediums, and just as advertising seeks to expose an audience to a message where they are most likely to see it (this is why we have ads on the doors of bathroom stalls, people!), today’s marketers need to accept that the sheer size of the audience that can be reached online, coupled with the amount of time that audience spends online, makes the digital realm one of the most important marketing channels of our time.
And that, my friends, is what I’ll be thinking while you’re shaking your head!