Are you or your clients convinced that your product or service is too niche for anyone to care about? That your appeal is so limited that investing in social media engagement or blogger outreach would be a shot in the dark? Well, that’s not only a pity but patently wrong. The Internet is so vast and self-selecting that there’s nothing that you can imagine that’s not an obsession by at least 1,000 people. Seriously. It’s already a thing: Rule 34: “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” Rule 34 is a generally accepted Internet rule that states that pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject. And, like any unlikely fetish, the Internet allows disparate passions, curiosities, and voices to discover each other and create their own ad hoc communities. Olly olly oxen free!
The Internet has been able to bring people together in new and exciting ways — and yes, that often results in very interesting pornography — but it also means that social media digs a lot deeper and can give you a lot more access to categories and sub-categories to a dizzying level of granularity.
And you can keep digging deeper and deeper with greater levels of marketing precision than you could ever imagine — until you cannot anymore. There is a limit, surely, but your marketing vertical and your target audience is surely there and in large numbers.
And, like porn, when folks are really into a fetish, they love and adore it! And, when it comes to less pervy things like shoes, bags, watches, tools, apps, yarn, figurines, beer, radio programs, podcasts, socks, hot sauce — anything and everything (even your brand of nail, widget, adhesive, duct tape, carbon, or spork) most probably has a passionate advocate–a real fanboy.
It very well might not make any sense to you at all — and why should it? You’ve tried everything, marketing- and advertising-wise, and you’ve come up snake eyes.
The Internet is a different beast entirely: it’s the entire online world that exists primarily to allow folks who would never have met ever, ever, ever, were it not for the lubricant of social media.
All this being said and all the good news that’s just fallen into your lap doesn’t mean anything if you remain lazy when it comes to search and discovery, you may never have any luck. And, when you finally do discover these cliques, tribes, and clubs, what then? That’s another story altogether.
What this blog post is all about, first of all, is to remove the mental barrier that you have to accepting and embracing social media as an important part of your PR, marketing and promotional channel; second of all, it’s time to call your PR and marketing team out. They have either been BSing you that social media is a bad investment of your time because “your product/service/agency/
Either way, if it exists there’s an online community of it. Besides, rules 35 is: If no porn is found at the moment, it will be made. So, either way, you’re golden.
