Too often when digesting Social Media blogs, I read the same crap about how to take advantage of basic Social Media tools and methods to promote yourself or company. It's all the same crap about setting up a "listening post" by populating your google reader with tons of blog feeds about social media or using Twitter search tools like Summize or blog search tools like Technorai or just a good "advanced" and narrowed Google search to find where people are either talking about your brand or your niche. The idea is you find these blog articles or twitter conversations or whatever and go comment on them and attempt to interact with people, without hardselling them. That's pretty much the exact lesson that is reguritated in all these Web 2.0 blog articles. And they don't even say it as specifically as I do--they just abstractly say: "Setup a listening post and use X tools" and then some fluffy "everybody loves everyone" crap that connotes genuinely interacting with people you come across in blog comment walls, rather than hardselling them by saying, "come by this from X URL." At the end of the day, what they really mean is just go around blabbering around to important people, i.e. tastemakers, and eventually bring up what you want to sell to them as if that wasn't your intention in the beginning. My thoughts are: Yes this works, but only for small extremely targeted brands like mine, FaceySpacey, where I only need a few clients to make my nut...So I want to share with you a comment I left to one of the top "Social Media Gurus." Expand the whole article to see it -->

Here's where I left the comment:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/18/building-your-online-brand/

and here's the extremely long comment:

@Chris - Good answer. I do the same...I guess here is what I was thinking, and it's nothing against you whatsoever: more often than not, people are giving out the beginner's lessons, and I don't want to read that. I want to read an idea that in itself is just money. It's just too much of this Scoble listening post stuff "go out and genuinely relate" crap. It's not that I don't agree--I do.

My point is really this: we should make a reality show for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs, with the same crappy contest/elimination format as all the reality shows, to showoff their Social Media Marketing skills. And from that we'll see how it's really done, because what your sharing Chris is way too general, and the social media marketing knowledge most people share is way too general...So maybe it should be a documentary instead of a reality show. The point is that at the end of the day, what people really need to do to promote their brand website is way more painstaking than some gobbledy-goop. The main thing it takes is to do all those things we've mentioned, and just reach out over and over again with a ton of tenacity, trying different ways to approach people.  To me the tools will change, but it's still about reaching out to people and how you do it. Every vertical has a different way to interact with people. Some markets allow for being more salesy and others prefer a subtler (and sneakier) back-door approach.

At the end of the day, my experience is that complete social media marketing (i.e. not being spammy) is over-rated and works way less than people think. The point is that things like Friend-Feed take off because everything collides into a perfect pinnacle point for a piece of tech software like Friend Feed to become popular. The reason is because of this: Imagine tech bloggers on Mashable, etc, writing all day about real estate Web 2.0 tools. They really don't. But they do talk about Friend Feed since it pushes the technology envelope so much. Friend Feed is a tool, just like Twitter, that the masses will never adopt, not in these formats--maybe packaged into other vertical-targeted offerings. But the point is that because everything kind of collided at that perfect point where tech bloggers were talking about a piece of technology that only other tech savvy people can use, it virally took off, gaining everyone's respect (and of course it's a good product too). THIS PERFECT POINT DOES NOT EXIST FOR MANY MARKETS. It's only because of this Web 2.0 bubble where every 20 year old kid from southern california or Miami wants to jump on the Social Network train and make a couple million quick that we have this market. I've promoted several brands in different markets, and it's been so much easier to find people in Web 2.0 groups and convert them. The reason being is that it's super narrow niche of like-minded Web 2.0 fanatics that we're in, and it's so easy to find us, since all the places to go are obvious. You got the A-List blogs like Mashable and Tech Crunch, then you go the A-List single-guy blogs like Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang, etc, then you got the top Web 2.0 scene hangouts (twitter, friend feed, etc). It's just frickin cake for us to reach each other. Look, I'm talkin to the famous Chris Brogan right now lol!

IT'S WAY HARDER IN OTHER MARKETS! And every market has very specific things you can do. I'm honestly tired of extremely unspecific methods. This is nothing against you Chris--and it's probably something against me since I haven't been following all the blogs in a couple months since I've been busy building stuff. But, every time I pop my head out, all I read is the same regurgitated crap about genuinely reaching out to people. And the funny thing is that spamming people genuinely works 10x better. I personally am all about the product as the key ingredient in the product's marketing. Although my pitch is generally about building innate natural viral functionality into the product, I'm also convinced more than ever that it doesn't matter as much how you get the product out there, as long as the product is impeccable and you actually get it out there. Just get it out there the cheapest route. Also, from experience, the whole "beakon lookout post" thing only works once you already have a brand and people talking about you. Otherwise, you're just going to where people are talking about motorcycles and doing what I'm doing here, which takes a lot of work, and definitely not be a viable marketing plan for a big company unless done in a spammy way. It can get you to meet some VC to invest in your motorcycle part company, but it won't get you thousands of customers to your new laser tattoo removal service company. It might if the company has been around and has people buzzing about it on the web, but then you've essentially already made it, and it's not always the highest value in your marketing dollar to have guys go around to all the groups related to tattoo removal, trying to convert them into customers. In conclusion, Social Media Marketing works for very Web 2.0 networking very well, but less so in other markets. And when it does, your best suited by spamming, unless you want to actually build stuff--which is why I build applications instead. Social Media Marketing is just not real marketing--it's about building a product that self-markets itself (e.g. like Utterz). However, thanks to Social Media Marketing, I've built my brand: FaceySpacey.com. And maybe I'm just bitter I can't re-create it as well in the industries of my clients, but networking in blogs, groups, etc doesn't work anywhere close to how well it does in technology in any other industry. I'd prefer to use the latest behaviorally targeted ad-platform or setup a social networking spam engine.

What are your thoughts, Chris? I'm really interested to know. Are we just at some pinnacle point where perfect marketability occurs for the Web 2.0 scene, but not as much so for other markets???


James
from
FaceySpacey.com - "The Startup Incubator"
http://friendfeed.com/faceyspacey