Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of people trying hard to have a big social media audience? I’m sure you’ve seen things like television shows promoting their Twitter and Facebook. You’ve probably seen companies running contests and offering free goods if you will just follow them. You’ve undoubtedly seen the links all over the Internet screaming “Follow Me”. On the more absurd side, you’ve likely had complete strangers with nothing in common, and no real interest in you, follow you or send you a friend request, just to add to their perceived worth.

A couple years ago, I described it as the “Twitter Follower Frenzy“, and it still persists.

Seeking an audience is not all bad, but it is one of the more misunderstood components to social media marketing. It has been widely promoted that if you can gather a big audience, it will provide some unrealistic value to your business.

Once the audience is assembled, many people talk about “engagement”, but then don’t even know what that really means. They will say how important it is to “engage” your audience, so a lot of companies take that as just trying to make friends and be chatty with everybody they can.

Friends are fine, but that is not marketing. That is networking, and social networking can do amazing things for your marketing, and building social media equity is important. However, by using tactics without a strategy, social networking alone will lead most companies to huge disappointments.

I am being pretty generous by using “spam” and “good people” in the same line, but I am trying to be forgiving. As surprising as it may seem, there are instances where otherwise good people will do spammy things which tarnish their business hopes. I don’t mean the canned meat, SPAM®, either. I mean the spam that happens when people try anything to get your attention.

I view spam as a desperate attempt to be productive while using counterproductive means.

When I say that it is an otherwise good person, it is often simply because they don’t know any better. They get confused by so much hype about the Internet, and end up doing spammy things that tarnish their business hopes, and hurt their chances for successful business communication.

I have an uncommon analogy for you to consider today. I sometimes feel a bit like a mad scientist slinking into my secret laboratory, just a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein. It seems especially real on days when I sit at this computer for sixteen hours, nap for three hours, and then return with my crazy mad scientist hairdo and coffee breath. Creepy? Perhaps, but it is always fun to exclaim “It’s Alive!” after it all comes together just right.

I realize that some people are squeamish about biology, but don’t worry, we are just imagining this for a few minutes. Think of it like a science fiction movie scene.

Try to picture the Internet as a sci-fi creature with living tissue, nerves, and blood vessels growing every day. It is alive and growing, and it has defense mechanisms just like most organic life forms. If you introduce a foreign object, it will either accept it, or it will reject it.

Do you sell something that has a potential market of “everyone”? Maybe you sell widgets, doodads, or gadgets that everybody in their right mind should own. If you treat your marketing that way, you are probably pretty frustrated.

I learned this the hard way, many years ago, by thinking that “everybody” was my target market. I remember when I sought out my market with thoughts like “Who wouldn’t buy my stuff? They must be crazy if they don’t buy!” Then I parked my bicycle and quit my paper route.

I learned what it meant to target my marketing. I stopped wasting time and money trying to reach everybody with a good reason to buy my stuff. The result was that I sold a lot more stuff.

When I stopped viewing everybody as a potential customer, I also stopped seeing them all as the “deadbeats” who wore me down and just wouldn’t buy. I started loving them more each day, and it turned out that my business grew massively.

Shoppers lie. It happens all the time that they say they want one thing, but the truth is actually quite different. This happens because most shoppers feel a bit insecure about their purchases. Just picture yourself walking into an auto dealership to understand this better. You probably make up reasons to say “no” before you even drive on the lot. It is how consumers “protect themselves”, and it is rooted in cynicism. People want to buy things on their terms, and not the seller’s terms, and if that means they have to lie, they will often lie.

I am not going to call everybody a liar. No, I am not going to do that. What I will say is that during the purchase process, there are often things which are not exactly as they seem. This begins in the very earliest steps to a purchase, and it is the marketer’s job to overcome those smokescreens. We do this in many ways, including fact-finding about our market to better understand the ideal customer and how to meet their objectives. We perform careful propensity modeling to determine exactly who to target. Then we create a strong call-to-action to entice customers to take action now, before they can dream up another lie to help excuse themselves from committing to the sale/purchase.

It should not be surprising that much of this process is made far more difficult by trying to market to the wrong people. A lot of marketing efforts miss the target miserably by skipping the research and trying to sell to people who are only marginally interested in the offering.