At the End of the Day It’s About Sales, But That Doesn’t Mean Every Day

I saw this photo pop up on Digg today and it really had me thinking:

For starters, I thought of Los Angeles, my home for the past 4 years.  Even though you’ll never take the New York out of the boy, I love this town.  Yet anyone who knows me knows of my heartache over the number of billboards here and the incredible impact they have on the visual landscape around us. For me it’s always been about how billboards affect the aesthetics of the city, but the image really puts it in another context.  Being inundated with sales messaging for every square mile in one of the worlds largest metropolis’s is as frustrating as it is ineffective.

Which brings me back to what we’re always talking about here on the blog - social media. More and more every day as an industry we’re maturing and beginning to get down to the dollars and cents of it, ROI.  And that is a great thing. It’s something that’s been primarily ignored since the infancy of the space, and no matter what, at the end of the day it’s the most important detail of our efforts as marketers.

Still, it will always be important to remember that it’s not about the sale all day every day.  Social networking tools provide the ability to break down walls, have one-on-one interaction with customers, and establish a comfort zone in the community that was never possible pre-2.0.  Inundating your audience with branding, like the billboards that line these city streets, chip away at that comfort zone.  It’s great to be on Facebook, but if you’re simply regurgitating marketing messaging in the form of status updates, you’re missing an opportunity to form the connections the platform was designed to help establish.  Not to mention building on the natural tendency of your audience to become desensitized to all-things salesy.

Food for thought.