What if? A simple guide to early adopters, opinion formers and social media

What if? A simple guide to early adopters, opinion formers and social media

Listen to any agency pitch and you'll usually hear the same old blarney. So some of it must be true and form the basics of any campaign, right?

Then the big, or small, brave and bold agency will show you why they are different, their point of difference, their POD, their unique selling point, their USP...and then the outright upstarts, the rebels, those showing you how they'll challenge the conventional.

For you as the marketer, all you have to do is believe in them and decide where to invest your budget to get the right results. And unless you are working for a brave new start-up with pots of investors cash at your fingertips, very young and inexperienced or just downright risk -addicted, you'll probably go for something pretty safe that seems to have a good chance of pulling in average (but acceptable) figures for the business, or you may use a small percentage of the budget to try something new, but nothing too risky. (and you get to keep your job for a while longer!)

For now get back to basics, one thing that all of these pitches should use as a basic foundation is pretty much text book stuff, they'll tell you about the need for "early adopters" and "opinion formers". Depending on the product or service you are trying to shift, this can sometimes be guesswork for the agency as to where to find such an audience.

Research will be able to find similar demographics to those that bought similar or showed an interest in your last product, those using a similar/competitive one, or those based on a few sketchy factors that may have an interest now. The thing is no one really knows, so it takes a bit of experimental targeting to see where the best take up is.

What you are looking for here is not just people that actually purchase, if you think about it, the agency pitch to you is more B2B (business to business) marketing, what they are trying to get you to do (if your product or service is for consumers) is B2C (business to consumer) marketing. However, the world has changed over the course of the last five years or so, there are more people watching (and actively participating in) the social media channels such as Facebook, bebo, foursquare, myspace, twitter, hi5, Linkedin, YouTube etc. That is, larger audiences than there are actually watching prime time TV programmes.

Consumers have, for many years, listened to the messages broadcast from the big brands, their taglines, their elevator pitches, their reasons why eight out of ten cats prefer their products over those of a rival. Then things changed as consumers, the ones that had actually consumed one of those products, had the foundations and tools at their fingertips to broadcast their own experiences, thoughts, likes and dislikes of a brand, product or service.

Many years before the internet and online world enabled the masses to get up on their soapboxes for a global show and tell, this used to be known as word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), it still is in parts of the world where people have the social skills to communicate with one and other in a good old fashioned face to face manner...more social etiquette than "I haven't been out for months, never meet anyone and prefer to do my social networking online".

Joking aside, it's a fact, C2C (consumer to consumer) marketing needs to be the core component to any marketing campaign, you need the early adopters, the opinion formers, the buzz builders to spread your word far and wide, in a more trusted manner than you can, to the masses and beyond...and more importantly you need to be able to manage the process as much as possible. I can't quite remember who said "there's no such things as bad PR" (probably Max Clifford!), but you don't want wild fire awareness filled with negativity.

Komail Mithani a twenty something recent graduate and social media believer put together a neat strategy for managing the flow here -

A social media strategy for your personal brand http://bit.ly/cDYabS

So you definitely need an early adopter, influencer, opinion former audience at the core of your next campaign. Where do you find such and audience?

You may have ready access to the audience from your own historical/current customer data, however you would not want to cannibalise this base if the product, service or offering is still on the market. You could brief your media agency and they'll get back to you with a large spreadsheet of where your audience "may" be found. You could commission some research into customers of your competitors, challenger brands and so on.

Or you could go directly to where such consumers hang out online, where do early adopters, those that want the latest coolest stuff, or even those that aspire to be ahead of the curve, those that want to appear cool by telling others that they where the first to know about the latest gadget, band, club, drink, trend, fashion. Where do they spend their time?

Well you could check out sites like http://www.coolhunting.com/ for starters, they are one of a network of thirty or so online publications reporting on the next big thing, combined audiences across these properties is around 16 million/month.

Online ad networks like http://www.largetail.com provide the ability to get your message out to this audience.

So now you've found your audience online, they'll be able to tell others...online....who in turn will tell others...and you've then practically cracked the first, and most important step, for a successful campaign.

In summary -

Your opinion former channel sorted!

Good luck.

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