Honest Marketing Secrets

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This is only the beginning. It’s going to get much, much bigger.
Social marketing is all the rage right now and if the signs are to be believed, this is a mere taste of the future. Part of social marketing involves joining various online communities in your niche and adding value to those communities.

Social marketing is most definitely not about joining as many groups as you can, regardless of their relevance to your niche, and spamming the living daylights out of everyone with “ME! ME! ME!” kinds of advertising and requests. This will get you banned, and rightfully so.

I wrote a post earlier that basically said marketing is really about making friends and exchanging value honestly and transparently with others in your community. I especially emphasized the importance of giving freely without immediate expectation of return, or profit.

Recently I’ve noticed traditional marketing folks who are excited to do this “new” social marketing thing and botch it up terribly by forgetting the cardinal rule of all human interaction. Namely, give before you request. Offer your assistance, advice, service and do so without expecting anything in return. Be a member of the community first and then you won’t be a so-called marketer.

[In online communities, the word, marketer has a fairly bad connotation. Members of a group frequently refer to an outsider who is trying to take value without offering anything in return as a marketer.]

Stop
If you’re ever banned, even once, you need to step back and take stock of your online behavior. And then change it; radically! Being banned means you didn’t follow the community rules. It also suggests that you’re in the wrong place, or offering information that is only self-serving.

Look
Whenever you join a new community, the first order of business is to read the guidelines and follow them very carefully. Next, if the guidelines don’t say not to, introduce yourself and don’t mention anything at all about what you have to sell. It’s not about pushing your wares, it’s about the opposite. You give people valuable ideas, answers, or assistance and they are eager to learn about who you are and what you might have to offer.

Listen
Are you getting repeated complaints about your profile, signature, or comments? Are you humbly taking the advice of the group? If people are kind enough to not instantly ban you, be grateful and listen carfeully to what they’re telling you. Assuming you are really interested in being a part of that group.

Be Valuable
Read all the hot discussions and get a feel for the group’s style of posting and responding. Follow along until you feel you have something valuable to add, whether that be an important, but so far unasked question, or a great answer to a previously posted query. Be a part of the group by showing up regularly and contributing excellent quality material and we will appreciate you and listen to what you have to say.

Social marketing is not about advertising. It’s not about yelling in the streets. It’s most decidedly not about appearing to be a member of a community so that later on you can sell the hell out of your products when everyone has their guard down. (Trust me, that’ll never work.)

Make connections with people and be a friend. Take the time to do it right and you just might find you’ve also made a bunch of great new friends who are as thrilled to become your customers as you are to become theirs.