What We Can Learn From Donald Trump

I posted recently about managing social media expectations after we lost a client.  We lost them because we didn’t do a good enough job of managing their expectations.  You never like to lose a client but sometimes it helps us reset, learn from our mistakes, and ultimately better serve our other clients.  One of the concerns our former client had was that we kept writing about the same subjects over and over again and that he was looking for something that might have been more like digital public relations.  And while that’s another service we provide and one we recommend to our clients, we first must ‘pour’ a strong social media foundation. We had just begun to do that so we felt the move to digital PR and media outreach was premature. While this was happening it struck me that the manner in which Donald Trump was sweeping primaries was consistent with our approach to helping clients own their own message online.  The preeminent message that brought Trump to the forefront of the Republican party and ultimately their nomination was that President Obama was not born in the US and therefore not eligible to be President.  Next it was “Making America Great Again”, “I’m going to build a wall”, and “I’m calling for a complete and total ban on Muslims entering this country.”  The point is not to make things up and repeat them over and over again.  The point is that in order to own your space online you need to state your message clearly and briefly and to repeat it over and over. Overtime your message will be archived and indexed online providing valuable organic SEO and leading people through your “digital front door.”  Another way of looking at saying the same thing in different ways is ‘bait.’ If I keep writing about Trump it’s possible that you might click on the message.  When you do that it will bring you to our blog and website where you might learn more about our business, our case studies and our satisfied clients.  So what we can learn from Donald Trump is that social media is a very powerful platform that when properly leveraged can get your message out, help you own the position online, drive engagement, and ultimately conversions to new business.