March 17, 2009

Engaging Your Audience in One-to-One Conversations

It's easy to overlook one of the best features of the Internet and social media: The opportunity to communicate on a one-to-one basis with individuals who are interested in what you do.

A lot of time is devoted to creating content for one's website, blog, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and email newsletters. And an equal amount of time is spent distributing and marketing this content to one's audience. But, often, less time is devoted to communicating directly with your friends, followers and networks.

By direct I mean one-to-one communications--often through email or the private messaging tools available through social media sites. While it definitely takes time to engage in one-to-one communications with your online audiences, there is simply no more effective approach to building interest and generating enthusiasm for your performances and programs.

In this post, I would like to offer specific examples of effective online forms of direct communications and also highlight why these one-to-one conversations sometimes do not take place:

1) Facebook events: If you create and market performances, classes and other programs through Facebook, you probably send invites to your friends. But once people indicate that they will attend or might attend, there really is no guarantee that they actually will show-up. So why not send short personal emails to everybody who has indicated "Yes" or "Maybe." Even sending out 200 such messages is not that time consuming. And it's probably worth it. If a large percentage of people on Facebook who said they would come or might come, actually showed-up, you might have a good size audience.

2) YouTube: Can YouTube users send you a direct message through your video channel? Within your "Privacy" settings, you can decide to only allow friends to send you messages. If you're using YouTube for marketing purposes, I recommend that you not limit messages just to friends. This way people who are interested in your videos can send you a message and you can then respond directly to the questions and inquiries. If people can't communicate directly with you, then there's really no way to know what opportunities are missed.

3) Email Marketing: When somebody replies directly to one of your email newsletters or updates, what happens? Is the proper email reply address entered into the "To" field so that you will receive responses from your subscribers? This is a good thing to check. Then, once you receive these responses, it is a good practice to follow-up as quickly as possible.

4) Blog Comments: I think it's a good practice to follow-up with comments to my blog posts with my own comments. I appreciate that readers take the time to comment on what I've written and I like engaging in conversations about these topics.

5) Twitter: If at all possible, it is a good idea to follow people on Twitter who follow you. If somebody follows you and you don't follow them, then they can't send you a Direct Message (DM). There have been cases where I've wanted to send a DM to somebody on Twitter but they weren't following me. So I had to waste a lot of time going to their website to figure out what their email address was.

6) Posting Your Email Address: There are still times when I go to websites and cannot easily find the email address of the people I want to communicate with. To me this is incredibly frustrating and a complete waste of time. Or people force me to fill-out web-based email forms with small message windows, and I don't really believe that these messages will even get routed to the right person. So my recommendation is to make it easy for people to find email addresses on your website. You can, of course, use department names in your emails and you don't need to make the addresses clickable.

7) Checking Your Spam Folder: Many conversations don't take place because messages end-up in your spam folder. So it's important to check your spam folder on a daily basis to see what you might have missed. Also, you can experiment with adjusting the spam filter levels to see what works best for you. I keep mine on medium so most messages get through to me immediately, including some spam.

My overall recommendation is that you:

- Consider all of the possible ways that your audience can communicate directly with you online.

- Identify all of the roadblocks that prohibit your audience from communicating directly with you.

- Create a gameplan, formal or informal, for how you will go about communicating with your online audience in a one-to-one manner.

There's only so much time that any one person or organization has. So trade-offs have to be made. But in the end, one-to-one communications are invaluable and any steps that can be taken to facilitate and enhance these direct conversations will probably be worthwhile.

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