Jackpot! Maximizing Exposure to Gain Followers
By Vincent Frazzetto, Intern
There is a lot of buzz around the $1 billion Powerball lottery regardless of the 1-in-279 million odds to actually win the drawing. People continue to pay into the hype of being the one in the equation. In today’s competitive capitalistic business culture, this parallels to gaining exposure through your business in that Public Relations professionals sometimes feel like earning their client’s exposure can be as probable as winning the lottery.
The state of the game is changing. In the fast-paced, ever-evolving times we live in known as the information age, access to unlimited knowledge lies at our fingertips. Development and release of the newest and latest forms of information retrieval are updated and revolutionized every day. It is the organization’s job to establish the means through which they will most effectively send their message to prospective customers. However, in the time where attention spans are at an all-time low while desire for the newest, most important information is at an all-time high, this task seems insurmountable. This is where content management and research into consumer statistics are so important, but the elusiveness of their nature proves another challenge.
Between niche social media sites, search engine optimization and marketing (SEO, SEM), user-generated content, paid advertising, earned media, and the many additional manners through which organizations generate buzz, the idea of what is most successful can become cloudy. The easy answer would be to touch on each of these sources, but when people are bombarded by content, perhaps covering all bases is the only feasible option available. Exposure is the name of the game, and the more opportunities generated to garner exposure, the more likely your business will be seen and heard from.
Adaptation is key to survival in any format, thus it is imperative for organizations to change with the times and succumb to the preferences of the consumer. Consumers, however, are strewn across the far ends of the spectrum of information aggregators and while customer A and customer B may have very similar interests, the tools with which they consume information may differ drastically. Christopher Brogan and Julien Smith said in their book Trust Agents: Using the Web to build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust (2009) that “One strategy to combat creating a very limited view of who you are is to try to leave many messages all over the place, from Facebook to Twitter blog comments, ensuring you connect with a lot of people all the time, if only peripherally,” (105).
While this quote only reaches one aspect of the media chain, its message stands solid: reach out through various outlets and in different ways to reach the widest corners of your market. I’m not telling anybody to go out and buy 400 Powerball tickets anytime soon, but if you’re not in the race your odds of winning fall to zero more quickly than if you buy into the hype. The same goes for exposure; don’t send out the same message to every outlet available, but personalized messages are noticed and doing the small things adds up one view, like, share, or stumble at a time.
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