This could be an out of box post on Simplify360, but it is essential to understand how people are using social media for business. Simplify360 tracks millions of conversations and our team spends time going through them and designing an algorithm to filter out spams and irrelevant conversations. Some of the essential conversations related to brands are found in twitter updates, blog posts and customer complaints sites.
So it is usual for us to find these conversations related to the attributes of brand. It is interesting to go through these conversations and see if they bring any valuable insights in to the brand presence.
Most of these conversations look genuine but in closer look it is a false choreography designed by a business. Most of the population in the internet won’t be able to decipher this. Most are fraud and some are creative campaigns carried out by a business. We think it is better to be labelled as Con Artists acting to be someone they are not and misleading people.
Twitter is full of con artists, fake profiles and fake professions carried out to gain confidence of people. If there is genuine interest from business to help their customers, then creating profiles to help them out is fine. But in most serious cases, people are simply carrying out frauds.
Just to illustrate this point and how they work out in internet, you need to explore the comments of blog posts, comments in Youtube videos and other sites where people are communicating. These con artists have acute sense of what their target audience are after, so they are pretty thorough in their design of the conversation. Using the right words and tone in the comment is essential to invoke an idea in the target audience’s mind.
Looks pretty daunting to realise that they exist, but they are normal practises in internet marketing. Some time back there was a blog post on how to get your videos viral, the trick was to use lot of these con artist and create a conversations around you content, which will ultimately leverage your promotional activities.
Due to social media, the internet is crowded with people who are busy engaging in conversations and doing transactions. So what is the relevance of these con artists in social media and what can we learn from them? One of the most important things is to understand their methods which every business should know?
Most business are too tied up with huge numbers like followers and fans that they forget the quality of these audience matters a lot, for proper engaging. In a heated competition to gain followers and fans, people end up having a lot of junk profiles in their network. If there is one thing you must learn from Con Artists are that they are highly focused in their target audience and do a thorough study of their target audience.
Research work is very important, which requires a lot of listening conversation and tracing out the path of customers. Once an insight in driven from these research works, a plan needs to be laid out on how business could reach out to these target audience. And what sort of campaigns need to be carried out.
Remember that the most important thing for a CON to work is to gain enough trust from your target audience. Therefore, a very tight measures needs to be taken to ensure that, your profile is perceived in exactly the way, it should be.
The time period of the campaign can be from weeks to months. It’s all about building relationships and ensuring trust at every moment. But unlike con artists who leave after the campaign is over, you as a business needs to carry it out every day. It’s the attitude and image which you will have to commit in social media till your business exists.
Certainly, the above idea looks general and simple. But the whole idea of the campaign is that you need to make sure you understand the mind of your customers. Though these are some important traits of Con Artists, it makes every sense to utilize their methods in to your business and execute them properly.