Is your platform online or offline?

jeremyschell

I think best at 38,000 ft.

It could be the solace of having to stop from the busy daily rat race and being forced to sit for extended periods of time or the miniature Jack Daniel’s that continue showing up for me but it is the perfect time to stop and ponder…this is my time, thank you Mr. Hand.  During this flight, I was able to catch up on some blog posts from the past month and stumbled across an interesting article about the common rules of online engagement.

While reading the contextual muse, it was yet another rendering of all that which has been summarized before but then with one word it got me thinking, a simple mention of "platform".  For the past several years I have focused on designing and building digital environments for clients to engage their customers  and during that time my focus has been communicating with them exclusively through those, controlled portals or as we called them, platforms.  For regulated industries these portals can be a gold mine but for end consumers, forced communication through one restrictive channel can be detrimental and less than transparent. Throughout the course of the modern online history, or at least those over the past 10-15 years, this approach has shown results for these exclusive portals without social  integration to be marginal at best.

In the post, the author focused on communicating through social platforms and understanding where customers are within those and talking with them accordingly.  Respectively, how you market on Facebook is not the same as LinkedIn, twitter, Pinterest or any of the other tens of thousands of community networks available for online users. Based upon this post,  I would challenge marketers to think broader in today’s social age.  Yes, communication styles, mannerisms and voice must be representative and tailored to the respective social network but consumers exist, collaborate and engage on-line and more importantly off-line.  This means their desired platform may be Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, YouTube or LinkedIn but also could also be Email, SMS, direct mail, television, radio, trade shows and experiential events.

Advertising and marketing mediums are truly boundless but the lesson here is remembering to communicate where your customers want to be communicated with and the platforms which they want to be engaged within.

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