Just in case you think I'm alone in my views – here’s an article by Arianna
Huffington on the fetishization of social media – and she is one of it’s
greatest users. This is the article that introduced her quote, "The road to social media hell is paved with well-intended hashtags"
There are also other technological solutions to help drive businesses
that apparently I can’t live without.
Let’s dive into a few of the typical bits of advice and have a look at
them rationally for a moment.
1) Build a relationship with existing and potential customers
Ummm…. Sounds great, but I now have regular updates on the businesses
of my printer toner supplier, car dealer, furniture store, book store, software
provider, business shirt makers, soft drink makers, websites, and so on. The only thing I do now is delete their spam
and resent their very existence.
Sure, send me info on great discounts every now and then, but please
don’t kid yourself that I in any way shape or form am regularly reading your
emails. I literally don’t care!!!
I don’t know how to break this to you. People don’t buy your product a
second time out of anything more than habit. Loyalty has been found to be the
same across almost all products and industries. It is somewhere between 65% and
75%.
And, NO, as your customer I do not want to have a conversation with you
in any way shape or form. Life is too short and you are not a friend. Also, if
you are any good you will already have a follow up process on sales.
Go stick your Facebook page and Twitter account where they belong – in the
bin along with all the money you spent on those initiatives.
2) Build fan pages
This is great for big established brands where there may be occasional
freebies. If you are a smaller company good luck getting fans who aren’t direct
family or friends. By the way, have you read the incredible amount of utter
drivel that constitutes fan discussions.
And don’t even get me started on ‘paid for reviews’ – the people doing
them are so blatantly obvious. I now read book reviews on Amazon for
entertainment value rather than on whether to buy the book or not.
3) Drive word of mouth sales
Yes, word of mouth sales are vital for growing businesses. The problem
is that social media isn’t in any way shape or form a mouth. Word of mouth
means that somebody you know will pass on your existence to people who might be
interested. If you are a normal startup then nobody is coming to your facebook
page, reading your tweets, or are even aware of your existence.
4) Get to the influencers
This theory goes along the lines that if only you can get to those
super-connected social few who influence everyone else then some kind of
marketing nirvana is reached. Unfortunately this is now considered by many to
be sheer nonsense. Here’s why.
Let’s say a super-influencer gets to 3 or 4 people where a normal
person only influences 1 person, that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and
let your super-influencer can sell your product to everyone. You still need to be selling to the broadest
market possible.
Celebrity endorsement can work, but two things. First, you need to pay
a lot, and second, just because someone checks your product out doesn’t mean
they’ll buy it. Even worse, the effect is just temporary and you need to be
running those ads for a long time to have a real effect – which I guarantee you
can’t afford.
5) Viral video marketing
If you are stunningly original, or from a mega-brand, or have really
great visuals, then maybe, just maybe if you are lucky something can happen.
For the other 99.9999% of us the viral video gets lost in the lower levels
of YouTube hell. This isn’t predictable or worth spending the money on.
6) Crowdsource
Crowdsourcing is both fascinating and also a wonderful example of human
behaviour.
At its most basic level crowdsourcing confuses participation with
creativity. Yes, there are always some people out there who are willing to give
their ideas away or at a low price in order to fulfil their own needs of
participation or altruism.
Think about your own attitudes. When you first participate you are
excited to be part of a bigger thing and give up time and energy to contribute.
However, that initial “PASSION” quickly dies when you see other ideas taken
over your own, plus the quality of contributions are, to be polite, variable,
and even worse others blatantly copy your ideas.
On the buy side of crowdsourcing it is not straightforward – I have
done this.
First, your brief has to be written in clear but simple English – you
will have a lot of contributors for whom English is not a first language.
Second, you will get a lot of blatant copyright theft contributed as an
original idea – so you need to have an idea about the field you are
crowdsourcing about. Do not
underestimate this problem coming from the mashup generation – you could be on
the receiving end of some nice lawsuits if your company actually starts to make
good money.
Third, you need to spend a lot of time responding to the hundreds of
requests, encouraging people, telling people ‘no’ in polite language so you
don’t get flamed or a bad rating, etc.
Finally, you are exhausted and over it.
Here’s a radical idea – find out what the basics are in business (they
haven’t really changed in hundreds of years) and then go apply them. The
internet hasn’t so much fundamentally changed business as just provided another
channel to practice it.
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