Noah Elkin writes in a article -'real-world data ...might affect my purchase decision.'
That's is so true. When you see a salesman, you feel he has an agenda to sell his products. So, we get a lot more cautious. We raise our defences. When you see an ad, you know they will have to say nice things about the product to make you buy. Hence, we normally filter these messages and add our own 'trust filter' to it before we make a 'buy' decision. So, where do we really get real world data?
- In our informal conversations with our friends, relatives, family members, associates etc.
- In our formal conversations when you first believe that the person who you are talking to is an expert and therefore you can trust his/her word.
- Or news that you pick-up in the newspapers, TV, internet etc - Sources that you believe provide unbiased information.
The sad truth is such data is never archived till social media came-in. Noah writes:
This kind of dialog long predates the meteoric rise of online social networks. Content has always connected us as consumers, and similarly, we have always found ways to share our thoughts and feelings about what we've consumed. The dramatic change that has taken place in the past few years enables us to capture, create and share our own content, moving us in essence from a one-to-one model (the proverbial water-cooler conversation) to a one-to-many model, opening our opinions to networks that span space and time.
He suggests two simple rules of social media:
- Listen to your networks.
- Be useful to them.
According to me, this should be the foundation of any communication that we design for consumers in broadcast media now. But, it starts from the other end.
- It must be interesting enough to be useful to them first.
- Then, they will listen to it.
- And it must be useful enough, so they pass on the message to their network of friends.
I guess this triggers a dialog - the world of real data, which will then convince them to buy the product.