The idea came from watching cigarette smokers trying to quit. More specifically it came from pondering the successes of the electronic cigarettes in helping people conquer their addiction. It’s as much about the physical actions, the experience of your senses, in craving a cigarette, as it is about the actual chemical dependency. In similar ways, customers persistently attracted to more archaic marketing methods need to be coerced into more modern and practical forms, but only through consideration for their sensory perception.

What I mean by this is that we instinctively want to move our customers onto more exciting and elaborate ways to encounter us online. But we often forget that many folks out there running into Flash-driven visual explosions of marketing content still consider that kind of tactic, developed years ago, as being too in-your-face. Some people have a hard enough time navigating simple hyperlinked instructions if the site you’re posting your link on is littered with overzealous advertisements. Forget about the right string of words here – if you fail to bring yourself down to the comfort level of your clientele they won’t be looking for anything in particular.

If you somehow were to find a way to ask your customers directly what’s in the way of them finding their way through the maze of modern internet marketing strategy, they’ll end up saying all they want is something easy to navigate – to use. This is where social media and social networking sites come in so handy: even your most inexperienced online shopper is going to typically understand any marketing applied to the sites they visit the most. More and more generations are getting onto sites like Facebook, which are in many ways the online equivalent of the fake cigarette: they provide familiar action and experience in steering users towards modern advertisements.

It’s shocking then to read about a Harvard Business Review study that revealed not only did 75% of more than 2,100 companies polled not know where their customers were spreading positive buzz about them online, but about 30% aren’t even taking measurements of how social media affects their business. In a time when it’s a certainty that many of these businesses are trying ways to have new means of marketing affect valuable customers who have a hard time responding to these new techniques, it doesn’t make sense that they’d be ignoring what could possibly be the bridge that closes the gap: social media.

Our customers seem perpetually addicted to certain ways of conducting themselves online: mostly ignoring information that comes at them in alarmingly different fashions than what they’re used to. The smoker craves the actions of their habit. Encourage online habits of conservative searching and lack of interactive participation by seeking out a golden mean that uses a proven source of modern online marketing – social networking – to inaugurate newfangled ways of marketing onto the experiences of your customers. If it feels right to them, then it typically is.