Labyrinth

New Year’s Resolutions for New Media December 28, 2009

Let me first say, I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions. We know the number one resolution is to loose weight, and the word “diet” is a four letter word–though my son has said he wants to go vegetarian for January to see what happens to jump-start weight loss.  It will be an interesting month for us.

Though today, there are a number of applications that can be downloaded to assist in the pursuit of sveltness.  For companies specializing in helping us loose weight, this should be an emerging media they are exploring if they have not already embraced it. Take NutriSystem which has several online tools, but no evidence yet of being able to download those tools as a phone application that can then be uploaded to one’s personal log on the site. Or getting Tweets of encouragement.

Those who are thinking about loosing weight can always get some inspiration and encouragement from videos.

Let’s hope that companies, organizations and other entities seeking to use new media to promote themselves also make a resolution (or two).  Regardless of whether the media is e-mail marketing, Twitter, Facebook (and other user-content generated media), the first resolution should be to develop or re-visit the strategy. Without strategy, use of new media is likely to fail and possibly do more damage to an image than it will help. Look at how businesses who use new media well are engaging their customers and see how this can be adapted to your product or service.

Resolution number two should be to seek a balance. That is, find how often your customers/prospects want to receive communication from you. Seek to reduce the annoyance factor, which is especially prominent in email and Twitter. Twitter is perhaps less controlable, but email offers many options. If the software isn’t sophisticated enough to be able to group addresses by frequency of contact, find a program that is. This past holiday season held a high annoyance factor from this consumer’s viewpoint. When receiving more than one email a day about this deal or that deal that were simply deleted before even being read, or burying emails I wanted to get, I wound up unsubscribing to a number of business email lists.

More than two resolutions is probably overkill, but if there’s room in the strategic and marketing budget, the third resolution is to be sure that when using social media, that you’re prepared to use it as a two way media. Be ready to get compaints, send kudos, help a customer without sending them to the customer service phone line, and above all, create the personality you want your brand to project.