Seth Godin nails the big, big change in marketing in his post, “The platform vs. the eyeballs”: it’s not about renting customer “eyeballs” by advertising in media, whose purpose is aggregating a big volume of eyeballs. And where you might get a .5% conversion rate.
Value comes from owning your own platform, e.g., a communities, blogs, and filling it with people who people who want to hear from you, and maybe getting 90% conversion rates.
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You’re not renting an audience, you’re building one. You’re not exhibiting at a trade show, you’re starting your own trade show.
If you still ask, “how much traffic is there,” or “what’s the CPM?” you’re not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?
The challenge we’re seeing is that marketers are measured by old metrics, so they don’t have the time or interest to build a platform of fans. The measure of big volumes still dominates — we have 40,000 page views a month, we had 800 people register, we had 4,000 people watch the video.
But, as Godin points out, this is momentary attention. To build interest and affinity, marketers have to give to get, constantly providing value in new ways to customers and potential customers. They have to be more interesting to get interest. This new fan-based marketing is expensive and hard work. But those companies who do it will ultimately realize much greater ROI on their marketing investments.