My Net Biz Blog

Scott Brandon Hoffman recently asked why most people don’t send a short message with a friend request. Mari Smith has given her advice on email and tagging etiquette. There have been numerous other discussion threads on similar themes…everything from “the top social marketing sins” to more irritated pleas for “no spam” to Brian Campbell’s “open policy”…

Two Sets of Rules?

Listen to this story I picked up from an email conversation with Kenny Barrow.
(Kenny gave me his permission to use his quotes)

“This individual attempted to circumvent my no spamming rule in the Millionaire Video Secrets group on Facebook and pasted a full page sales letter complete with an introductory paragraph asking everyone to come to his group to promote their videos.

In my eyes this was equivalent to the Burger King man walking into a Mc Donald’s birthday party and waving a flag saying “come follow me” enticing everyone to follow him to the Burger King store.

I took this mans flag by deleting his sales letter and asked him not to do it again. I also gave him the party analogy to illustrate how his actions were not social actions.”

He replied with a message:

“Hey Kenneth, its called Marketing !

BTW if you have taken down my discussion you have done your members a great disservice….”

”We had a few more posts with him getting more personally abusive but before we could finish our conversation he was booted from the system.”

What’s interesting is this guy didn’t seem to think he was doing anything “wrong”. If you read Mari’s post on email etiquette, you’ll hear a similar story.

So why do intelligent people seem prepared to damage their own reputation and undermine the relationship and business building opportunities available ?

Could it be that just not everyone’s personality is cut out for this social marketing game?

Natural Born Promoters

We have a family friend called Charlotte. She’s a school teacher. She doesn’t have her own business or any aspirations to start one…But geez, does that girl know how to get what she wants?…too right!

She’s a “natural born promoter”…

Whenever you meet her, before you know it, she’s enrolled you into her drama class, she’s “sold” you her unique ways of potty training, giving birth (no kidding), making pizza, packing a suitcase, whatever…she never stops…it’s just her way. Oh, and she does get on people’s nerves and offend people occasionally. She just doesn’t seem to notice..she just gets on with being herself.

I like her because there’s no fakeness, she makes no adjustment to her surroundings or social situation. You know what you’re going to get with her. And that makes her honest and transparent.

Now, if she ever did try to use social networking for business purposes, I think she’d be too impatient and too pushy to find Facebook useful. She can only be herself. For some people “promoting” and “cutting to the chase” is a natural part of the personality.

Natural born promoters want the quickest way from A to B, and that means getting their stuff “out there” as quickly and as often as possible. As Kenny discovered, try explaining the logic of NOT posting a link and you’ll come up against a brick wall. All they see is a wasted opportunity to “get clicks”.

So are there specific “personality types” that are more suited to traditional direct sales and marketing and others for social marketing ?

What Makes a Successful Social Marketer?

In traditional direct marketing, we’ll target our audience according to niche interests and we’ll typically look for people with problems we can solve.

Much of this work is about research, analysis, and metrics, which seems to be a different set of skills than those required for successful social marketing.
(I know, I know we still need to know all this stuff regardless of whether we’re using social networks or other means to get people moving through our sales funnel…but stay with me)

1.Do you need to have additional skills and/or personality traits for social marketing? (a different skillset from traditional direct marketing)

AND

2. Should we also focus our efforts on connecting with others who demonstrate the skills and personality best suited for social networking ? (remembering communication is most effective when there’s interaction or in marketing terms..”response”)

For our strategies to be effective, surely we have to be connecting with people more likely to check news feeds, interact, seek out relationships, and generally engage…at some point anyway?

Given the finite amount of time we have for say Facebook activity and the need to spend that time wisely it’s important for us to connect with people who are “connectable”…those with a “social networking personality” and generally speaking are those most likely to succeed the ones with most suited personality traits ?

Why bother with the “un-connectables” ?

Introducing “The Connectables” the New Super Heroes of Social Marketing…