July 24, 2018 – Crosswalk –
In this excellent and thorough article, Lauren McMenemy shares the importance of deeply listening to your audiences She emphasizes, “marketers know that content strategy must start with the audience, so why do so many of us ignore them when we’re planning our content? We must make room in our workflow to truly listen to our audience and our customers and ensure it’s their needs and challenges driving our content, not the whims of colleagues who neglected to loop in the content team before starting a campaign.”
I can’t help but to see parallels between this article and the massive drop in Facebook’s stock that just occurred (7/26/2018). People have been complaining about the lack of privacy controls and the mining of personal information for targeted advertising for years. With Facebook’s access to so much data about people’s opinions, thoughts, and trends, the only conclusion is to assume that FB just was not listening to the insights that their audience was telling them. I don’t think that this is just a FB problem either. Google and other companies who sell advertising based on their user’s personal information do not have an incentive to listen to their user base, but to their actual customers, the advertisers.