Twitter, Facebook, My Space, email, text, mms,video broadcast,podcast, blackberry, iphone, chat, blog,…. Pick your poison…

“A message came back from the great beyond
There’s fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on’ - Bruce Springsteen

I see the value of the social media tools but it just reminds me of the 1992 Bruce Springsteen song, 57 channels and nothin’ on’. Remember the simple days when we thought cable TV was overwhelming amount of content? That funny little brown box on top of your TV set and you had to dial in the channel. Hey Billy, spin the dial to the cool new sports channel… What is an ESPN?

57 channels and nothin’ on’

ESPN at 2 in the morning used to feature table tennis. Now I have hundreds I follow and followers on Twitter and it seems like 57 channels and nothin’ on’ multiplied by exponential values.

The information glut is on more than ever. The  land rush to the social media tools to stay connected is absolutely crazy. Drinking from a fire hose, sticking your head out the window doing 100 mph, what ever analogy you want to use. Now we are being overwhelmed with streams.  The more connected you are today with the more tools you use, the stream grows from a trickle to a flow to a rush to the damn amazon river of data rushing at you.

All I want is to be connected. Hyper conneted to some, hmmm… well, maybe. Over connected, turn it off.

57 channels and nothin’ on’…. crank it up, let it breath. yep, 57 channels and nothing on.

57 channels and nothin’ on’

57 channels and nothin’ on’

57 channels and nothin’ on’

Connect with you later.

In the previous post, we talked about the first step of getting the attention of the target audience and activating the reticular activator of the brain. If you are just jumping in and did not read that post, I recommend a quick review of the step 1 post.

On to step 2

Now that your content has gotten the attention of the target, or made the first attention connection, it’s time to get them engaged in a conversation.

This can be called engaging the customer. Hopefully your headline that pulled them out of the comma created by information overload has them on their heals a bit and now starts the education process.

In the engagement step, you need to tell the target that solving the problem  or concern you raised in the headline is easy with you use the product or service you are presenting. Let’s go back to the meal replacement example.

if you used the headline of:

Three reasons why most protein shakes taste like ground up chalk

A good engagement statement that starts the conversation might be:

It’s easy to enjoy a great tasting protein shake that meets your nutritional needs when you learn about the science behind a well made shake. Lets us teach you about what is inside.

You have yet to sell them anything, made any claims, your content just started them down of path of the target wanting to learn more. Education marketing is the key. Teach them and they will follow you to the sale because its an educated choice the buyer makes, not a sale.

The engage step of content, regardless of if it’s written, audio or video is essential to  transitions the target to a conversation. This is the bridge from interrupting them to conversation, a two way conversation to educate the customer.

The next step is education..

Connect with you tomorrow.