Because you are in business, you are soliciting votes every single day for your services. A non-stop campaign for your “votes”.
You get those votes in the obvious ways such as sales, and lead inquiries. But we can also think of our votes in micro touches, like traffic and even commentary, reviews and stars, as well as likes and shares.
More so than ever there are ways to share a micro world with our marketplace. To foster rapport that leads to affinity, that unites in a sale.
One method that many do not yet get is the concept of persona authority building. That is you as Colonel Sanders of your company.
Whereby you represent the values of your business personified and demonstrated across the web.
Years ago this concept hit me across the forehead when I learned from a pay per click mentor that most of his followers in social media were fans of the rock band Rush.
The intersection was because my expert friend is overtly libertarian as is the band Rush. So it makes sense that many that latch onto his ways, would have an affinity towards the same likes and demographics as he.
Connect through those similar likes and you are in instant rapport. And now you can understand the brilliance of a Facebook.
Why I mix my Coach Tim material interchangeably with sports, marketing, business and SEO. And why I have interviewed some of the greatest sales trainers on earth in the context of football.
Elections are about math.
So is your marketing. Or it should be.
In an interview with Bruce Newman a political professor in 2015. He declared that George W. Bush won his second election by identifying and speaking with what I call the “sub-cultures.”
How to Find A culture within a culture.
In other words, he went directly to not the religious right. But the religious that shared common and desirable demographics beyond just the faith.
Christian, fundamentalist, disenfranchised, and in swing districts. To name a few.
Now anyone that has been in business a few months, can recognize the above attributes as demographics.
Over the years psycho graphics fit into this mix of categories also.
Drilling down into a tighter and tighter group is where the sweet spot is for your marketing.
In fact, in the early 90’s Tony Robbins taught me about a formal study into collective values. Called appropriately the VALS study by the incredible team at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
From the SRI website
“The original VALS system was built by consumer futurist Arnold Mitchell. Mitchell created VALS to explain changing U.S. values and lifestyles in the 1970s. VALS was formally inaugurated as an SRI International productin 1978 and was cited by Advertising Age as “one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s.”
In 1989, VALS was redefined to maximize its ability to predict consumer behavior. A team of experts from SRI International, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley, determined that consumers should be segmented on the basis of enduring personality traits rather than social values that change over time.
By using psychology to analyze and predict consumer preferences and choices, the current VALS system creates an explicit link between personality traits and purchase behavior. “
SRI is the place where many of today’s most influential disciplines enjoy their genesis.”
The segments:
That should make perfect sense to us all.
Storage and Computational Power Gave Us AI and Big Data.
Then came Moore’s Law which states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years, and we will pay less for them.
That means we can measure not just larger demographics, but micro demographics. We always could but at great cost.
However, with todays digital world. We are leaving footprints from soul seemingly by the minute. Creating the ability to crack not just our collective code. Meaning the groups we herd with. But also our personal code.
Enter Big Data.
Big data is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract nformation from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. Wikipedia
Anyone who knows me, knows that I like politics. Not just for my favored candidate. But mostly for the persuasion.
Nothing can give us a glimpse into human behavior and markets like politics.
Because the money and stakes are so high that strategies and tactics that came at a giant cost, get revealed often as the players come and go from term to term.
In 2012 the NY Times claimed that “Big Data” won the day for Obama over Romney.
Well you might be asking what is big data?
Big data is simply huge data sets.
Imagine the data that I listed above inside of an excel sheet.
Imagine having a continual hose that feeds more and more numbers into the existing categories, but reveals the sub categories in each set. And that compilation can be added to another excel sheet and they all are built with correlation formulas to determine any relational relevance.
So of our Christians, perhaps they were mostly 45-55 years old males, lost their mom at an early age like 20. Own a dog of which 40% are German Shepherds. 80% own a firearm, etc.
Can you go into that conversation with these people with a baked in level of rapport? You sure can!
So in 2016 Big Data roared and was claimed to have put Trump into the white house. Just like in 2012.
However, this time the marketing was claimed to have been through Facebook. Sort of.
A new age marketing firm became internet famous. Cambridge Analytica.
There has been many stories about this company. But the short version that I understand is that these guys leveraged data that they compiled from the “game” aps from Facebook. And married that data to Facebook’s.
You know the ones. When is your birthday? “You are a Pisces and that means that you are extraordinarily smart and caring and something else everyone wants to be.” And you post a photo they give to you as your trophy.
Coaxing more people to do the same and to give up their privacy.
Now they have your birthday, ip address, your browser, your carrier, probably your name.
There was a privacy outcry about these guys and to be honest, I am not sure whatever happened to them. But at one time it was grim. That is when I talked with them.
It was about early 2018. I was assisting a local Doctor to win in a Congressional battle.
We had heard of the miracle that Cambridge had supposedly done for Trump. We wanted some of that miracle.
As we sat around the big board room table with the cell phone on speaker placed in the middle.
And after some connection issues, almost appropriately a man with a distinguished sounding English accent came onto the phone.
He described how through big data they were able to identify voters as an example, most likely to volunteer for Trumps get out the vote phone calls. And the phone list that would most be susceptible to that particular callers personality. And for good measure, the name of their dog or cat.
Now, I am not sure if they really were able to do all that. Because on the next closure call, none of the team were nearly as impressed. We are not sure if they dialed down the hyperbole because of the hot water that they were in legally. Or that we got a more honest representative. We had to take a pass.
Nevertheless, big data allows for what they said to happen.
When you hear about Google’s AI machine. This is nothing but big data getting massaged for search.
It is simply getting enough numbers to statistically find correlation between data sets. And then exploiting them. Like calling on someone asking how their cat snickers is doing. (That might be creepy lol).
To manipulate Google’s AI, I call it feeding the Google monkey. I should do a podcast on feeding the monkey lol. Similar concept here:
We are the product. And so is your target market.