You have to put the SOCIAL in Social Marketing...

I'm hiring by the way ;)

Social Marketing: It's all the rage these days. For good reason too. It works.

A lot of people do it, but not many realize what they get themselves into though. Social marketing may seem like an innovation or a new concept, however, it is nothing new. Social marketing is merely the successful aspects of traditional marketing. Ever since the dawn of trade and commerce, there has never been anything more effective than the power of the spoken word...when your own customers sell for you without you even trying.

We do it in our everyday lives. We recommend great movies, restaurants or products to our friends. If we're not getting compensated for doing that, then why do we do it? Because when you recommend a good product or service to someone else, it makes you look good. In a way, it is also a way of repaying your "gratitude." Of course, there are those who do it because they want to share more things in common with their friends/loved ones to strengthen the bonds between them. Whatever the reason may be, the result is still the same. The company benefits without having to lift a finger or convince you further.

Effective salesmen and marketers for hundreds of years have known that the key to being successful is to connect with your customers and prospects on a personal level. It is what is known in persuasion science as "Liking" Of course, the most common reaction is "Well, duh!" Unfortunately, it's not that obvious. How many times have you run into terrible salesmen or dreadful marketing attempts? Too many times I bet.

One case in point: Tupperware. We've all heard of it, and they are wildly successful. How do they sell products so well? They hold "Tupperware Parties" all over the world. The company reaches out to existing customers and help them set up a tupperware party at home and invite all their friends to come. These parties would often just be normal get-togethers. House moms would share cooking with each other, socialize and have fun. All the while, the benefits of using tupperware are shown throughout the party in a very casual and personal way. Most customers would probably have done these parties for free, just for the social aspect. However, the company generously compensates them based on how much tupperware is sold after the party. Genius? Yes. New concept? Absolutely not.

The current craze for social marketing is not a revolution by any stretch of the word. If you remember from my previous posts, change is usually incremental. The reason why social marketing is so wildly popular now is because now we have new tools that make it easier than before to connect with people on a personal level. New tools for an age-old concept.

The key to successfully using these tools is to use a little common sense. Often times, I see quite a few people on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook endlessly spam links and sales pitches. I guarantee that the "throw crap on the wall and see what sticks" approach does not work very well. If you want people to be open to your marketing efforts, you need to show them that you are an actual person that talks and listens to them. The most effective people I've seen on Twitter do that, to great effect. They don't just blitz people with useless quotes, dumb links or empty sales pitches. They connect with people, and make an honest effort to be SOCIAL.

That's how you get the word-of-mouth referrals, by connecting with people, not spamming them. Besides, you'll have fun doing it, and meet some really cool people in the process! Some successful salesmen I know have made lasting friendships with people they've sold to in the past.

Of course, remember another principle I've always said in this blog, you need to add value. Tweeting/FB'ing about how you just took a giant dump is not connecting with people. It's true too, people do that...a lot. I saw one guy tweet about that he's currently brushing his teeth. I don't want to even know how he managed that. Others will try the "I'm hanging out with XYZ right now! Fun time!" Seriously? If you're having fun, then why are you on your phone updating others about it? Sounds like you're kinda bored to me ;)

So, what are some tools out there to connect with people on a social level? Well, these are probably obvious, but for references sake, here are some that work well:

• Blogging - Remember to try and keep it interesting and relevant to your target market. Try to have some interesting insights that people can learn or respond to!

• Forums/Message boards - Hang out in forums that are relevant to your target market.

• Facebook/MySpace - Great way to connect with people on a personal level. Try to stick with people that fit your target market.

• Twitter - An excellent way to interact with people and promote your business. In my opinion, it's even more effective than Facebook or MySpace due to the sheer ease of following people's Tweets and replying to them. Again, stick to your target market whenever possible.
  

There are others of course. However, these are some of the most popular ones out there right now.

Remember, the point is to have fun while doing it. Use a little common sense, and you'll get far!

Oh...by the way, I'm compiling a list of "Tweets Gone Wild" (i.e. tweeting while taking a dump). I am accepting submissions and will post the list on this blog when I have enough good ones. You can submit either by messaging me on Twitter, posting a comment here or messaging me on Facebook. For those of you who want to use Facebook, I'm known as "Floid Roflcopter" ;) Otherwise just click the Twitter link on the right side of the blog.

It all starts with KISS'ing...

I got splinters...

...sometimes you gotta paint the fence for an hour...gents ;)

To start, the term KISS stands for: Keep It Simple, Stupid. I sure as heck didn't mean the band. The term can also stand for Keep It Short and Simple...but that just sounds stupid. If it were up to me, I'd call it KISD - Keep It Simple, Dufus. The power of the word "Dufus" is so vastly underrated. Yes, I know it's also spelled with 2 o's, but that's for dufuses.

Anyways, I digress...

This principle of keeping it simple (dufus) is an essential principle to not only being a successful entrepreneur but as a person in general. That's not to say that anything you do should always appeal to the lowest common denominator. Otherwise you'd never have new and exciting innovations, and comedians would only do fart and dick jokes (which are always funny).

I talk to a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs. They're very ambitious, go-getters and great people in general. However, when they talk about their conceptual businesses with me, I sometimes feel my brain is about to hemorrhage. Heck, I've been guilty of this too in the past. It's natural. Entrepreneurs are people who want to change things, that's in their nature.

However, one must understand that change is incremental. We as human beings build upon an already existing foundation of knowledge and improve upon it. Some may argue, "Oh yeah? What about the internet? That was a revolution!" Not really. The internet has been in existence for DECADES, however, it was used primarily for military and - to a degree - academic purposes. It wasn't until it was commercialized and made much simpler that the masses began to adopt it.

Some of the greatest revolutions in history were YEARS in the making. It wasn't until things got much simpler and people realized "Oh, looks like I need to get outside and protest" or "Looks like I need to pick up my sword/gun and fight." that revolutions actually gained steam and created real change. Back before then, the seeds of those revolutions were complex. They'd start with a few intellectual treatises, debates, etc. Even the beginnings of the world's major monotheistic religions were seen as foreign and complicated concepts to people at first. One God? Heaven? Hell? Resurrection?

Change is similar to a volcano building up magma and pressure before that big eruption.

What can entrepreneurs learn from this? That if you really want your business to shine with flying colors, you need to make it simple and it needs to be an improvement over an existing concept, idea or technology. This doesn't necessarily ALWAYS have to be the case. The point is that you need to be able to serve an undermet need or create a need for your service or product. No matter how "revolutionary" a technology may seem, it is almost always an improvement over an existing technology. Don't be fooled. There are exceptions to everything, true, but we're not in the business of focusing on just exceptions.

Take, for example, the huge success of Twitter. 2 years ago, barely anyone heard of Twitter. Now it's all the rage. Why is Twitter successful? First of all, it's really mind-numbingly easy to use. You type in what you're doing (in 140 characters or less) in a nice little text box and press a nice big "UPDATE" button. Want to follow someone? No problem, just press the nice "Follow" button. Everything else is taken care of.

Twitter is just yet another manifestation of the ever growing social networking craze that was made popular by Friendster and then MySpace and Facebook. Twitter's an incremental change, they're not a revolution by any means. Many people STILL wonder, "Why the heck do people want to know what everyone's up to?" Well, because being connected is a social need, and Twitter's meeting that need. We're increasingly living in an age of instant gratification and an ever increasing fear of being lonely.

Lets take another example: Facebook. With MySpace so overwhelmingly popular at the time, how the heck did Facebook blind-side it and actually beat it at its own game? Facebook and MySpace are fundamentally the same. However, Facebook made a number of critical incremental improvements. Facebook kept user profiles very clean and simple. You have no idea how many MySpace profiles I've run into that have almost given me a seizure just by looking at them... Facebook also introduced very nifty features like a news feed, status updates, organized photo albums and other simple things. Facebook is clean, organized, and very easy to use. In fact, it is almost dufus-proof. Any schmuck can start a Facebook profile with ease without having to read the help section or ask someone for help. Same goes for Twitter, any schmuck can do it.

For a more classical example...Henry Ford was one of the pioneers of modern industry because of his invention of the assembly line. By giving each worker a very simple, dufus-proof task for each step of the manufacturing process, he was able to mass produce his cars and offer them to the masses. He kept it simple, real simple. His concepts are STILL used today. The core concept of "Lean Manufacturing" simply means making your manufacturing process dufus-proof and require a minimal amount of thought on the part of the workers. For all you uppity "experts" out there, KISS my ass, it's true ;)

As a current or aspiring entrepreneur, that's what you need to aim to do. You need to try and make all aspects of your product or service dufus-proof and require minimal thought on the part of your customer. People want things yesterday, and if they need to think hard, you've probably lost a good deal of them. If you got this "awesome" website, you better make sure people can use it without much trouble. If you have a great product...well...can someone use it with minimal guidance? Remember my previous blog post ("Size Doesn't Matter" - March) about the vegetable peeler guy? One of the reasons why he was so successful was because he showed people how SIMPLE it was to use his product. Boy, he wasn't kidding.

Before you launch something, take the time to let average joes try using your site/service/product. Then collect their feedback. You want to especially pay attention to their feedback on what they found difficult to understand or hard to use. You want to take that feedback, and make the needed improvements. In fact, KISS doesn't just apply to your customers, it also applies to you. Try to keep your own business as simple as possible to run. Automate where you can, and use COMMON SENSE. Keeping your own operations simple will also help keep your product/service simple for your customers.

Ok, time to press the big orange "Publish Post" button. Hehe, me so smart.

Be "selfishly honest"

For this blog's more "refined" audience (myself included):

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

For everyone else (myself included):


It sure is!

In fact, I posted up this picture because it brings about a fond memory. Anyone who lives in New York City will almost always see a panhandler on the streets or in the subways. Some are genuine, a lot of them are BS'ers. In fact, some of the younger ones on the street are actually film/acting students (How do I know? Word on da street...nukka.)

It is no mystery that the most successful panhandlers are the ones that earn their money. What I mean by that is that they either A) Seem honest (either they look really beaten up, etc.) B) Are funny or C) Demonstrate a talent of theirs. What do all 3 options have in common with each other? They're honest.

One night, I was walking in the streets of the city with some friends when a funny-looking man with disheveled hair and clothes walked up to us with a toothy smile. He stopped in front of us and said, "Hey brothas, could you care to make a donation to the United *insert N word that ends with "a" and an apostrophe* Pizza Fund?" We laughed of course. I then ask the man, "And what's that for?" Without skipping a beat he said, "It's a donation for pizza and beer, for *insert plural N word* "

I gave him money, and so did my friends. Rather than BS us about coming out of prison or feeding 6 kids, he honestly told us he was going to spend it on pizza and beer. It was a refreshing dose of honesty in a craft that is so often deceitful. Now, I'm not saying I'd have given the guy money if he said "Hey man, can I get money for some blow?" There are exceptions to every rule, of course! Being honest is one thing, being foolish is quite another ;)

So, what lesson can entrepreneurs learn from this? That you need to be "selfishly honest."

The beauty of moral values is that they are not only what make us human and noble, but they are also in our own best interests. Morality is why society is able to exist. If people didn't know right from wrong, you'd have chaos and destruction everywhere. You shouldn't feel bad if an act of kindness was "selfish." And yes, even getting "an emotional high" can be seen as a selfish motive. Whether you're religious or not, it is an undeniable truth that your actions eventually catch up to you. If you've done good things, good things will come to you. It is a simple law that for every action, there is a reaction (but not necessarily equal or opposite, as evidenced in physics!).

There are people out there who have either a persistent (or sporadic) world-view of, "Good people finish last. Only corrupt and ruthless people get ahead in this life." That's a dangerous belief. Subscribing to this belief corrupts you as well. Remember, while it may seem like we live in jungles of metal and stone, it doesn't mean we have to be one of the "apes" in it. Human beings are, by nature, good. That's why we have a natural compass between right and wrong and why we have a natural propensity towards order.

As an entrepreneur, you want to run an honest business. Why? Because people appreciate that. Think of the friendly waiter who doesn't recommend you the most expensive dish for example, but one that is actually cheaper but much better. Because of his honesty, you tip him more. The waiter in that example was selfishly honest. By being good to you, you reciprocate and be good to him. The waiter knows this. Besides, being nice to restaurant staff also ensures that your food doesn't come with any "extras" if you know what I mean...

In psychology, this phenomenon is called the "reciprocation" principle. By making a "sacrifice" or doing someone a favor, it triggers a natural instinct in the other person to repay the "debt" We have a fundamental revulsion to being indebted to someone and seek to repay the debt however we can. That's why even to this day, people who can't pay their debts are punished and looked down upon. In fact, it is no mystery that if you do someone a favor, they usually repay the favor in kind far beyond the actual favor's value. Why do you think we revere heroes so much? Think about that.

So...as an entrepreneur, you want to be honest to your employees and your customers. Care for them, and don't try to BS your services or products! You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. (That's coming from Honest Abe...or was it also Bill Cosby? JELLO!!!)

If you cannot run a business without resorting to BS, then you should reconsider why you're in business. It is not sustainable. Listen, that's not to say you shouldn't be very enthusiastic and sell your service or proudct like it was the best in the world. However, there's a difference between enticing people and misleading people.

There have been many studies done that show that what people appreciate the most are responsible businesses. Businesses that care for their customers and have strong values. It is because of strong values that these companies provide excellent customer service. You'll find that even if you're not the highest quality or lowest price player out there, you'll still have many loyal customers. Surveys of employees also favor an employer who embraces strong values and honesty. What matters most to us as human beings have always been those things that are intangible.

It is in your best interests to be honest and good. So go ahead, be selfish about it! We are all selfish. It's in our nature. There are REAL benefits to embracing goodness and honesty. That's the beauty of it all! We're not beasts of burden or sacrificial lamb! Even if being good causes you to lose out on something in the short-term, you will gain much more in the long-term. Be good, be patient and always perservere! That is the hallmark of a true entrepreneur.

Oh cool, my pizza and beer are here. Later!

...(just kidding ;) )