I refused.
I wasn’t trying to be difficult or in any way unhelpful, I was simply adhering to a golden rule that should apply to all forms of marketing, business or creative endeavours:
Know your audience
I like to think that I know my audience on the Haigh Fest page pretty well.
They hit that big ‘Like’ button at the top of the page so that they could find out what’s happening with the festival, occasionally tell us off when we don’t pick their favourite band (or the band they play in) and get the odd update about the local music scene in general.
Going out in front of all those people with whom I think we’ve built up a certain amount of trust over time and suddenly giving them a blatant advertisement for a gym would have been social media suicide; they didn’t sign up to the page to have their news feed spammed with gym advertisements, and I wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d quickly disowned us.
Unfortunately, Lionsgate Films don’t seem to share my Don’t advertise fitness stuff to people who didn’t ask for it, philosophy, and were quiet happy to do just that.
So I was surprised last week when, some months after hitting ‘Like’ on the page for House of 1,000 Corpses (hey, don’t judge me, I like horror films and Rob Zombie) and gradually getting used to the odd attempt to shill a special edition Blue-Ray, I logged on to Facebook to see House of 1,000 Corpses, a bloody, low-budget horror in which an insane family hack innocent people to bits, suddenly telling me to go Youtube to watch some fitness videos and get in shape for 2012.
At time of writing, the post was still online, and you only need to trawl through a handful of comments along the lines of ‘WTF? I didn’t sign up for this, DISLIKE!’ comments to see it was a bad move on Lionsgate’s part. The image below shows only a very small handful of those comments.
Golden rule? Know your audience. Give them what they want or they’ll up and leave…or at least be very cross with you.
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