If you are in sales or marketing and above 25 years of age, you are probably wrong. The assumptions you base your decisions on are severely limited. We often thank our kids for ideas, for keeping us “in touch”, but it is much much more complicated a matter. And extremely important. I have hundreds of fake profiles. Not sure if “fake” is the correct term. I pretend to be someone I am not as a form of market research. In fact it is often the first thing I do when presented with a new project.
It starts with a fake Google account. This is vital. Search results are personalized. You will never get it all perfect, but if you at least persuade it that you live wherever you are researching and then make sure you do Google searches logged in from this fake Google profile, the world you are seeing will be a little more like your target. Sign up for whatever products and services you are looking for from this signed in Chrome browser. You have to try and live the part.
With Facebook things are even more dangerous. That person in marketing you think is “up to speed with all this new stuff”, well, just isn’t. If I have a really successful Instagram account, or a very active personal Facebook profile I only see what that particular profile’s take on the world is. Some days I might whiz through multiple profiles to check up on them, just housekeeping. Hard to describe just how different it feels to be in each newsfeed. Some are simply based in different locations, with friends from a particular island or city. Age differences are even more stunning. The same political event which fills your friends’ timelines when you are 50, doesn’t even appear when you are 16.
It isn’t fashionable anymore, but I always make sure my fake people have a website, blog or other public trove of information on whatever topic I am researching. This gives me unique insights into what people are looking for. It is the “honeypot” approach. In content marketing it is easier to just start testing ideas like this. And when the first organic google searches land my way, it is like Christmas day! Somebody wrote what they wanted to know in Google and came to me, fake me, this particular person. Why? How? What cyberspace hole did I fill with what I just did?
If anything, building a fake profile is a humbling experience. Because you realize just how complex a web social beings like humans create. We earn trust. Slowly. A “follow” by a 13 year old is a very, very, very different action to a “follow” by a 60 year old. He then posts what he just had for breakfast without thinking about it, while the senior citizen is carefully crafting a comment as if he is writing to the Economist.
Marketing people are often fooled by their own brand. In the case of social media they are also sidetracked by their personal profiles and habits. These are extremely dynamic, immature new mediums, still jostling for position, changing architecture and interfaces. There is no agreed way to assess them, no specific assigned meaning to what we all do with them. So get off your high horse and mingle with the natives.