Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

For the sake of this story, let’s assume you’re single and you’re looking for a date for this weekend. Instead of getting a date the way you used to do it – church socials, ads in the newspaper, consuming large amounts of Jägermeister and waiting for bar flies to take advantage of your suggestive state of mind – you’re going to micro-segment your network. For further sake of this example, let’s say you belong to a social networking website like Facebook or MySpace. You’re a popular person and you’ve got 200 online friends. These are all people in “your network.” How would you go about finding a date among this group of people? With one click, you can send an email to all 200 friends, asking them if they’d like to go to the movies with you on Saturday. But you’re unlikely to do that. Even though a mass email gives you the greatest reach among your network, you intuitively know that a blanket message requesting a date isn’t going to be welcomed by everyone. Before you select a potential partner, you’re going to micro-segment your database. First of all, you’re going to eliminate all of the people in your network of the gender you don’t want to date. In my case, it would be everyone of the male sex. You may decide this is a cross tab that you don’t want to exclude one side or the other. As the Scarecrow told Dorothy, “Of course, people do go both ways.” Next you want to eliminate all your family members. As fun as my Aunt Bertie is, she’s not going to respond well to a romantic invitation to the cinema from me. Your message is wasted on your relatives. Because you’re an upstanding individual – and because of several mandatory training seminars from HR – you are not going to ask out any of your co-workers. So again, you ask the website to remove all your co-workers from the list. By now, your network of 200 friends is considerably smaller. Maybe you’ve got 40 or so candidates who are still in the running. You may micro-segment further. You’ve never been able to live down what happened to you freshman year at the pep rally, so remove all your old high school friends. There was an embarrassing hazing incident in college, so all those people come off the list (at least the eyewitnesses). At some point, you might decide that your date would also have to be single, so eliminate all the married people. You want someone local, so eliminate everyone outside of your zip code. And you’re not interested in someone who’s enrolled either in Medicare Part D or in 9th grade honors English, so set up some age parameters too . Now let’s assume you’re down to about 15 people. As you scan the photographs of who is left, you will micro-segment even further. Either in your mind or on the screen, you’re dropping people who have the wrong color hair, those who are too tall for you, or live with their mothers. You’re keeping the ones who have a bright smile, a good sense of humor, a great job, superior wit, and a supermodel physique (a tall order for inside your zip code – but call me an optimist). You’ll keep going until you’ve whittled it down to one person, who you’ll now ask out to the movies. Considering you started with 200 people, it may seem like cycling through all these preferences is a lot of trouble to locate only one person. But think about this: you already knew that 160 of them where people who would not find the content relevant (because they’re already married to your sister or something). Deploying messaging to those 160 people would be a waste of your resources (even if it’s only an email). You’re also likely to offend a few of them…and you don’t want to be confronted about your romantic email request by someone in the health club locker room. This process-of-elimination exercise is a good example of how to most effectively conduct marketing in the 21st century. Sending a mass email to the network is just like running broadcast advertising, blanketing a neighborhood with direct mailing, or dropping leaflets from a helicopter. At least 75-80% of the message is wasted on people not in the market for what you’re selling or highly unlikely to buy. The content is irrelevant and could hurt your chances of reaching them when you have a product offering that’s not suited to their needs (like say a bachelor party or an Irish wake). The other 20% of the network – the potential customers – are much more likely to be receptive to that message. Whether you’re looking for just one person (like someone to date on Saturday) or you’re hoping to grow a customer base (like a sultan starting a harem), this is the space in which you want to play. A targeted email to this group (whether it’s to 40 opposite sex, unattached, non-relatives or to one smoking hottie) is more efficient than emailing everyone you know. Plus, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign based on the email replies you receive. You can also begin an ongoing dialogue with these potential customers, depending on how well the dinner conversation goes. If all goes well, you’ll soon be doing to the date what a number of AIG executives have been doing to their investors for years. If this is what effective micro-targeting and database segmentation can do for your social life, just think what it can do for your product!