If you are like so many others, you may be wondering exactly how all this “social media” talk is actually going to effect you and the product or service you are trying to market. The first breadcrumb in this forest is that social media is there for people to connect to other people. They don’t want to connect to your brand, they want to connect to people they know or to people who share common interests. So just showing up and raising your voice in their conversation will not get you the right kind of attention.

Here is my revelation: Tell a story. Tell a story that your target audience will find interesting, or intriguing, or irresistible. And as Seth Godin points out, it’s not about how many you appeal to, but rather how well you appeal to the focused few.

To illustrate this point, I have a personal blog on songwriting, which is a hobby of mine. I started it two weeks ago with the intent of chronicling the process of having professional demos made of some songs I had written. I knew this story would be of great interest to other songwriters, so I emailed two groups of writers to inform them of my intent. Sure enough, as the story arch progressed, the site got more and more hits. The peak day was when the final demos were posted. This chart shows the activity per day.

Since the story is virtually over, the hits have fallen off but not completely gone away.

So the takeaway for marketers is to find a compelling story, one that your target wants to get involved with, and deliver it in an easily accessible way.