The Power And Magic Of High-Tech High-Touch Marketing
Hiring a sales rep is expensive, and it's tough to make a qualified hire fast enough. That's where this awesome new approach comes into play. I'll explain what high-tech high-touch marketing is, and why it could be the answer to your hiring needs!
It turns out that most of the time we're just lonely at work. After all, humans are social creatures who crave interaction with others. Connecting with others on a level deeper than work helps us feel engaged and fulfilled at work, because we don't have to carry all that weight ourselves. If you check out the sidebar, you'll see that most of us are craving human interaction in our work relationships.
Since this is true, it leads me to believe that if companies can find a way to offer more social interactions within the office, they might be able to attract better quality employees. Take a look at this infographic here which shows us that people buy from people . We like dealing with people directly; the less human interaction there is in an organization the less likely we are to do business with them.
That's where this approach comes into play. I call it high-tech high-touch marketing, because it involves using technology in a way that makes direct human interaction easier and more effective for both parties. The idea is that by using simple tools like video chat, text chat, and social networking platforms like facebook and twitter, companies can make their employees feel more connected to each other.
Video chat allows people to talk to each other face-to-face over the internet. This is one of the most popular ways to communicate with people, and is also used when you want to communicate with someone who doesn't have your phone number. The other advantage of video chat is that it forces people to be more engaging, because they aren't missing out on the visual cues that come across in a video call. This can result in less passive behavior in conversations; everyone may just be more engaged in communication because they don't have to lower their guard out of fear that they're talking to a computer.
Text chat has been around since the early days of cell phones, and it's still used today. Simply put, text chat allows us to text each other back and forth quickly over cell phones and email. In business, text is often your best friend, because it's fast and convenient. Phone calls can be expensive and inconvenient, especially if you're on a conference call with multiple people. Texts are also the least intrusive form of communication - everyone always has their cell phone with them.
Finally there are social networking platforms like facebook and twitter, which allow us to communicate with each other in real-time within our respective networks. What's more, we can see each other's updates in our news feeds right away. That way, we feel like we're always in the loop with the latest news.
These tools give the companies that use them the ability to offer more social interactions. In-person meetings can be replaced with quick video chats on some project or another. Asynchronous communication is great, because both parties have time to respond at their leisure - they don't have to attend a meeting or get on a call at a specific time and date. Social networking helps keep everyone in touch with each other and in the loop on what's going on, so that nobody feels left out of important conversations.
In a world of email and text, people still need to feel like they're connected in some way. That's where this approach comes into play. It helps companies use technology better, and it also helps them deliver more social interactions. It's not that hard to do either; most of the time all you have to do is find a service that offers video chat for free, and you're all set! Text chat services are pretty common too. For more information on this approach, check out this infographic . I think it does a good job of explaining what high-tech high-touch is.
So there's my answer - high-tech high-touch marketing! This approach can help companies use technology better, which can increase their efficiency and make sure they create less waste in their work processes. It can also help them offer more social interactions, which in turn will help them attract better quality employees. This is a win-win, because everyone is using technology to be more productive and helpful. It's really the next step in human advancement; we're using our fingers to connect with each other and usher in a new era of human peace.
There's a great scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo is trying to convince his friend Cypher that he can't just give up right now. He finally goes off and leaves Cypher to fend for himself, and Cypher makes the realization that he wants out of the matrix badly enough to just walk into the dark abyss that is the real world.
I feel like social networking has brought us to that same place. MySpace started out as sort of a rage against the machine; we were used to paying for content and interacting on forums, but it seemed like an unnatural demand when Facebook wanted us to pay $5 a month for status updates. It marked the start of a new era in human communication, where we could create profiles and interact with our friends in real-time.
Now that Facebook has become the default platform for social networking, we can no longer expect to pay anything for social interactions. Instead they've started to push us into a system where they offer us "locking in" our friends with limited access options to avoid overexposure - which is really just another form of subscription. We now have to pay a fee for all that content that we need to see; we have to pay $5 a month or $10 a month, or whatever it is these days.
Conclusion
The reason we hate Facebook so much is because the app is broken. It's not just that it's buggy and slow, but there are these hidden fees. Once you've signed up for something like this you can't really opt out of the social contract - you don't have the option not to interact with your friends until next month. That's why we have a great deal of anger towards social networking in general; we no longer trust these companies to keep us connected with our friends, because it seems like they're always trying to take more money out of our pockets.
Facebook is by no means alone in this, either.