marketing is about conversation (although we usually stink at it; it’s much more fun to shout at our consumers and ignore the conversations that they are already in).  social media enables us as marketers to listen and converse with our consumers like never before.  here’s a lesson from my personal life that will hopefully help other marketers navigate the social media landscape.  

i’m ruining the conversation.  i did not do it on purpose, but the day i linked my twitter account to facebook so my status updates would seamlessly post on both i messed up.  i didn’t know it at the time, but i knew it after long.  but that didn’t stop me.

how did i mess it up?  the conversation on twitter is very different for me than the conversation on facebook.  the human beings are interested (at this point) in conversing with me about very separate things.  would you go to the party with all of the people you know from your school, geographic, and professional networks and have the same conversation you would have with a bunch of strangers?  probably not.  and that’s what i have been doing.  so at this juncture i have three options:

• edit my updates so that they appeal to both targets.  this is the approach i subconciously began to do and is the path well traveled by most marketers.  in an attempt to speak to everyone, we water down our message and speak to no one.  
•  get all of my facebook friends to follow me on twitter and vice versa.  that sounds like a lot of work and i’m not even sure i want to have the same conversations 100% of the time.
• stop shouting at everyone, take no short cuts/disconnect my twitter from my facebook, and have conversations that are relevant and customized to my audience and the platform.  

 i choose the latter.  apologies to my “friends” and “followers” for ruining the conversation.