advertising saturation by Will Lion
Getting noticed has always been an issue for salespeople and businesses. We strive to create differentiation in our professions so that we can be the chosen provider of services or goods for our chosen demographic. As a Real Estate practitioner, I was viewed by the public as part of a monolithic industry, and my job was to explain why I was different than all of the other real estate agents at all of the other companies. As the owner of a real estate company, I had to establish the quality and variety of services offered by my firm as opposed to other firms, many of whom had substantially different business models.
Our dilemma is compunded by the number of advertising impressions received by the consumer every day. When I started in the real estate business in 1971, the consumer received around 560 advertising impressions everyday! Today the number has grown to 3,000 advertising impressions every day! How can anyone be heard above the din of so much “white noise”?
Typically we chose to network. We built our sphere if influence by attending local events, volunteering, meting new people and impressing them with our personality, skills and caring attitudes. There are even business organizations like LeTip that are focused on building the person to person referral base of a business through personal meetings and promotion, but in today’s world, that is both time consuming and somewhat limited (though like any program useful in its own way). Many people just don’t have the time to travel to the meetings, make their presentations, and live up to the time commitment such a group might demand.
And that is where Web 2.0 comes to the rescue. With Virtual Networking taking the place of physical networking through online meeting sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, people have the opportunity to reconnect with business associates they may have previously worked with and to meet new people through their association with their current contacts. In my case, I recently reconnected with a friend in Texas who was the manager of a large National firm in Philadelphia before he moved on to other community based work. Though we had an excellent business relationship, life sort of “got in the way” and we lost track of each other for a few years. Now he reached out online from his current business in Texas, and we are well on the way to re-establishing a new business relationship which I am sure will be mutually beneficial.
New potential clients benefit because the anonymous nature of the internet connection allows consumers to connect in a non-threatening way, and decide , after observation of different individuals online, who they wish to do business with. By using other sites to aggregate their activities online, and publish them in an interconnective manner, using programs like twitter and plurk, and mybloglog, the professional increases their reach, decreases their time, and expands their potential base of customers. In this manner the Web 2.0 user gets not only a much larger reach geographically, but a much more convenient manner of building and maintaining his or her network by differentiating their brand.
Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, Plurk, real estate, Social Media, Twitter
