Standing in the rain on the hard shoulder of the M23, I had no idea that the experience of breaking down at 7am this morning would inspire a blog.
After about an hour of waiting behind the crash barrier, looking pretty fetching in my yellow water-ride-theme-park-stylee plastic poncho (thoughtfully donated by a passing traffic officer) myself and my boss were picked up by a kind chap in his recovery vehicle.
On our way home, he started talking about how incredibly noisy it is on the hard shoulder, and how he recently dragged his wife out to stand on said hard shoulder with him… for no reason other than to help her understand why he watches the football so loudly on the TV. In essence, his wife needed to experience the noise herself to understand just how noisy it actually was.
This got me thinking about how noisy social media has already become. Fastly turning into the ‘must have’ medium in most of our marketing strategies, content is being blared out left, right and centre in the hope that the right people hear it at the right time.
Maybe it’s time we all stood on the hard shoulder to find out how noisy it actually is? Have you or I actually put ourselves in the shoes of our audience and taken a look around the social media forums they are interacting with? In our efforts to hone and target our messaging, maybe we should do just that to find out what and who is influencing them, and how.
So here’s a suggestion. Why not take half an hour out, and swap online roles with one of your target audience. Search for what they might search for… have a listen to what they are exposed to. You might be surprised at how noisy it is out there, and decide it’s time to become more refined and targeted with your content to make a difference.
If you’re still with me on this one, then hey, at least something has come out of a pretty bad start to my day 🙂
