Do You Really Like Me?

I belong to a couple of marketing forums, the Warriors, Market Crush and a couple of others. I read quite a bit in those places. Comment sometimes as well, not all the time, but often enough that I have seen a lot of marketing ideas come and go.

Often the ideas that go really deserve to die because they are so obnoxious in the first place.

I firmly believe that all marketer’s have the right to choose how they are going to market. I have nothing to say about that idea at all. There are, of course, some laws and rules and TOS that are important to pay attention to, but in general as an overall idea, I think people have the right to sell as they see fit.

And it is OK for me to have an opinion about how I like to market things and it is OK to have opinions on various marketing strategies and tactics. Lately, I have been reading about people debating the merits of  things like Pop Up Domination, and using pop ups at all.

Everybody is different, and I don’t particularly like them, I have no objection to people using them, if that it what they want to do.

My overall philosophy in marketing is that I want to bring value to the lives of the people I come in contact with. On the internet and offline as well. I have done well with this idea, I feel good when I offer something for sale, I get good results, and I make new relationships which are generally healthy.

There are some things I don’t like in marketing.

Hot Potato - Do Not Hold

One of the ones I really don’t like is Hot Potato Marketing. This is where you try to sell someone an idea that you know is going to  belly up as soon as a bunch of people start doing it. Or even worse, you sell things that already don’t work and never will again because you want to get your money back on your investment.  Those ideas bother me.

Another one I don’t particularly like is Social Media Marketing, or whatever name is being given to it this week.

I mostly don’t like it because I think the idea is doomed from the start. Take Facebook, for instance. Facebook is a marketing site. It is not a social media site. But the only person it is a marketing site for, is, Mark Zuckerberg. For everyone else that is trying to market on Facebook, it is either an advertising platform or a blog.

I Really Do Like Facebook And I Like Marketing

I Like Facebook

FB was designed that way from the ground up. It is not a problem. I like marketing, I admire the way Facebook was set up to be a marketing site. It has already made a lot of money while providing a service that people enjoy using. Sounds good to me. The other shoe is gong to drop soon, when the payment on the venture capital loans start coming due.

And my guess is that FB will start charging for business fan pages, or premium accounts or something along those lines, (for real, not just April Fool’s pranks) but that is just my opinion.

I Like Twitter Too

Twitter is another site that people have tried to use for marketing for a long time, and have had remarkably dismal results. Actually, one of my marketing friends wrote a post about marketing with Twitter, and I really disagreed with his premise and that is mostly why I decided to write this.

I don’t really think Social media Marketing exists. I think marketing exists and I think there are social media sites, kind of, I really think they are marketing sites for the  owners, but users see them as social media sites. But as far as anyone doing social media marketing, you might as well stop right now because you are barking up a tree that does not exist.

If you are marketing your goods and services, you are marketing. Plain and simple. You can use all kinds of methods and channels to get your marketing message across, but you are still marketing.

When people get letters in their snail mail boxes from companies they have not done business with before, in general they presume these to be marketing messages in some way. There may be a free gift, or a free presentation or 2 nights in a timeshare development, but in general folks recognize these as marketing messages.

No harm there, IMO, I like marketing and I still read direct mail letters. But I do not think that people are fooled into believing they are getting a personal letter from a company for fun. They are marketing. They are using methods that suit them.

In his post, my online friend was explaining to folks how to use Twitter as a marketing tool. And boiled down to 140 characters or less the message was “Send people your advertising messages in disguise so they won’t be able to tell they are marketing messages”

No.

IMO, there are a couple of legitimate reasons for marketing through social media, but one of them is not sending advertising messages in disguise.

If you are using social media for marketing purposes you could:

• Build brand awareness
• Fill up mindspace
• Offer discounts
• Tell people your hours of operations

There might be more, but those seem like they would work and they make sense to me.

But one of them is not, “Pretend you are not marketing something when you really are”

The reason for my thinking on this is simple. The people are either not going to get that you are selling something that they might want, or when they read your tweets pretending to be personal communications and find out they are really marketing messages, they are going to feel cheated.

And they are going to think you were the one who cheated them.

Not such great marketing positioning for the long term to be seen as someone who cheats.

Use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg and other social sites, for being social. You can be social in a business like way, especially if you identify yourself as a marketer. No problem there, build all the brand awareness and mindshare that you can. Make sure you are the one they think of first when they want to buy whatever it is you are selling.

But trying to trick people into reading your marketing messages because you sent them advertising in disguise and hoping they are going to want to buy from you?

There are probably better ways to spend your marketing electrons.

The border between poor taste and rudeness can wear pretty thin sometimes.

I had a post all put together about a marketing idea I had seen on YouTube. A girl wrote a song about people at Wal-Mart and posted it to her YT account. The tune is catchy and the music is simple.

But it has some really ugly lyrics right in the middle of it. The first time I heard the song I thought it was funny, catchy, one of those things that is destined to go viral on the internet. She’s an indie singer/songwriter from Tennessee and the video she made is pretty funny. Except for these three words.

I listened to it a few times to make sure I had not misheard the words she was singing in her song.

And I had not misunderstood them.
.

The thing is that most of the parts of her viral video campaign are working well for her. She’s getting her video passed around a lot on Facebook and its kind of like one of those MLM pyramids where you tell 2 people who each tell 2 people and all those people each tell 2 people.

So after a while, you have a mountain of people who are paying attention.

And then it happened, someone heard those three ugly words in her song and posted a comment on her YT comment area. Then somebody else wrote and then another person. And then she wrote an explanation of what those words meant when she used them.

She was wrong, but as far she was concerned she was right.

After thinking about it, I decided I couldn’t keep my original post, so I took it down and wrote this one instead. There are a lot of people who have different ideas about marketing than I do. I like marketing a lot, but there are just some things I don’t want to participate in.

I read sometimes about folks who are willing to do anything for publicity and are quite willing to write and say almost anything to get people to pay attention to their message. I guess that could work for some people, but not for me.

I have had a great deal of success in my business by helping people and doing things that are good for my customers and clients. And I feel good about that. Sometimes I disagree with what some people do and say and I am sure that folks disagree with me sometimes, but I need to be able to live with myself.

I am wondering if you have ever had a time in your online business where you passed some thing by because it did not fit with your personal viewpoint.

I know I have had a few things besides this, in particularly when it comes to working with CPA offers. And some black hat kinds of things that I just don’t want to get involved with. Hasn’t kept me from being successful, though. And that is pretty cool.

I get to do good, make money and feel good at the same time. That works out well for me.