Is Your Website or Social Media Presence Merely a Narcissistic Selfie – Part 2
In our last article we introduced the idea that many websites and social media channels miss their target audiences and fail to make the needs of the audience the primary target of the content .
Research shows that consumers complain that content that misses the mark is often perceived to be:
- Is either egocentric or essentially narcissistic in self promotion.
- Interrupt the audience with content that is either misleading or of no interest to the audience.
- Offends the values and feelings of consumers.
- Attempt to manipulate or subtly coerce consumers into engaging or purchasing.
- Has no clear call to action or purpose of content is not clear.
- Contradictions between one part of the content and another.
The goal of any business online has to be to build an audience who loves your content and whom aligns to both your message and your brand values. The messages should stroke their interest and tap into relevant themes in their life and latent or active needs they have.
Brand values are a two-way street. The brand values of the business must align to the personal values of the audience and that must be reflected in the conversation or communication process that leads to engagement.
The goal will always be to create loyalty and followers. This can be termed fellowship which naturally over time leads to subscription, purchase, buy-in or adoption in its many forms that equates to the retailing aspect of that business.
The goal is to either create a sale or desired behaviour, or to create passionate subscribers to the brand. Ideally they will become brand ambassadors who talk about you, promote you, and share or like your content.
There are some good strategies as well as some poor strategies or examples which one should avoid. In the last article we touched on the key points that a content management strategy should seek to satisfy.
We will expand on that theme in part 3 of this article series. The scope of this article is to argue more about what not to do or emulate if a business or personal brand wants to build a successful audience assuming that both the business and the audience have some set of positive values representative of the average person in society.
There is a lot to consider to get it right and you need to get it right as there is so much online noise out there that getting heard is hard enough. However getting heard and then being misunderstood or ignored is a tragedy to be avoided.
For the full version of this article click Is Your Website or Social Media Presence Merely a Narcissistic Selfie – Part 2
