I give a lot of presentations on blogging and social networking and a theme that seems to consistently recur is people telling me “I’ve tried to use social networks, but I don’t ever seem to get any result from them.”. Looking a little deeper into what they’ve been posting and how they’ve been using social media has given me some insight into why they’re not getting the kind of results they’d like to see.

What I’ve seen is that, even though people are using social media, they’re not changing their paradigm in respect to what they’re posting. Social media won’t work if you just use it to push the same old tired marketing messages. YOU CAN’T WRITE COPY AND EXPECT RESULTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA!

Social networking is about relationships, not delivering ultra filtered marketese. Your posts must have value. That value can be legitimate business value or can be of purely personal interpersonal value, but it can’t be thoughtless fluff. You can’t friend everyone possible on Facebook and then begin spamming their newsfeed with “FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY” messages. The verbiage of mass marketing is as dead as their delivery mediums.

The old adages like “It takes seven impressions to reach a target” are also no longer applicable. If you take industries that rely heavily on warm networking like real estate, much of the conventional wisdom states things like “people use REALTORS that their friends suggest 75% more often than cold agents with whom they have no relation.” This is still true, but “friend” has taken on a drastically different meaning than in the past.

In the mass marketing age, people passively absorbed entertainment, during which time marketers could throw messages at viewers and hope they stuck. Advertisements were shotgunned out to consumers and you could use hopeful estimates to assume how many of those messages would result in sales. The law of averages ruled the land. In the information age, everything is different.

One primary difference is the fact that the best leads are people who are currently SEEKING YOUR PRODUCTS PROACTIVELY. The internet, unlike magazines or television, is a two way medium. People who are consuming entertainment on the internet have no interest in being sold. Those same people, at any moment, may switch gears and begin to look for a particular product or service they require. It is these information hunters that make the prime prospect in the information age.

When you are dealing with a consumer that is seeking out information you possess, you don’t need to show him what you have seven times. He’s already pre-qualified, he’s already closed and is just trying to find the avenue with which to complete the sale.

Where people seem to go wrong regarding social media is failing to understand their role as passive receivers of these customers. Sales people have been forever trained to be aggressive and generate leads, effectively creating customers where there previously were none. In the new model, this is a flawed idea. The customers are ubiquitous. While salespeople are focused on going out to snap people out of the mode they are in and trigger them to buy, they’re ignoring the softer language of potential clients who are already in that mode. Message boards and social networks are loaded with people complaining of issues they’re having with their current salesperson for product X or their desire for a better mousetrap in industry Y. The salespeople that are there for these customers are the ones who will profit from the new marketing paradigm.

Real interaction also plays a major role in the world of social media. I have an associate who is very involved with multi level marketing and he’s always complaining that “Facebook doesn’t work” and that he’s “Always loosing friends”. A cursor examination of his profile explains why… you can’t load your feed with spam and BS and expect people to care what you have to say.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A GARBAGE FUNNEL. Two minutes of reading on my MLM friend’s page told me the totality of his social media presence, it was equal to infomercials at 3am. That’s not the point of social media. People do business with friends because they feel a connection with them. That connection allays the fear of being underserved or taken advantage of. If you provide no transparent access to your inner world through your social network, you’re not really letting people into that piece of you that serves to allay those fears.

Often times, while giving presentations, I hear the complaint “Well I don’t want people to know my personal business, that’s personal and invades my privacy”. I can understand that idea, but I also have to say that it flies in the face of what social media is attempting to accomplish. The new generation of tech users do not share the old concept of privacy. If you attempt to restrict that private element of yourself while social networking, you’re doing exactly the opposite of what people use social media for. The result will be that your messages get ignored, if you don’t just get outright dropped from their networks.

Social networks are not your own private ad pipeline.

I have a personal unwritten limit of about three posts from someone in my network that are pitches before I click the “hide” button and ignore what that person has to say. If you throw out pitch after pitch without providing anything of colloquial conversational value relating to your “real life”, you become a marketing machine and your future posts hold value equal to any random banner ad. If you’ve never commented on any of my status updates and you pop up in my Facebook chat to tell me about the “incredible business opportunity” you have to share with me, I already think you’re a jerk… just the way it is.

Social media gives you the opportunity to earn the right for people to care what you have to say. Make sure you use that opportunity right.
Transparency of person is the price that you pay to gain leads from social networks, in the same way that money used to be the price for advertising. For the older generation, the idea that “you don’t really know someone until you meet them face to face” is a hard and fast rule. Conversely, for the younger tech generation, that idea is morphed into “if I meet someone face to face, I don’t know anything about them… I won’t truly know this person until I read their blog or Facebook feed”. If you are a member of the older mindframe, it behooves you to understand this paradigm difference. If you cannot adapt to this concept, the result will be you will be unable to access this new market.

Younger people do not share the privacy concerns of prior generations. Most have never lived in a world of private interactions in the way previous generations have been able to. If you grew up in a world of instantaneous communication, irrespective of location or method, a world in which information was always moments away, face to face interaction seems like a diversionary sales tactic that subverts a person’s true personality, which is perpetually alive online. Allowing access to this inner world is the way relationships are formed through social media.

I understand some of these concepts might make people uncomfortable, but it is the new reality of social media. The users and salespeople who accept and adapt to these new perspectives will stand to benefit most from this new world of communication.