Seth Godin is no douchebag, but he gets the fundamental disconnect between selling and marketing. In an another post, I lamented the idea that selling at SXSW was like, so uncool.
People who market at SXSW are douchebags. There was even a whole panel devoted to it. Being a douchebag covers all manners of sin, including looking at someone's badge to see where they work, spending too much as a company instead of participating in engagement, and even trying to get into a cool party or checking in too much on Foursquare. Also, don't introduce yourself to people you don't know. That whole meeting turning online contacts into real world contacts? That's out of line, buddy!
Seth pitches it differently, in that it's the difference between inviting and selling.
If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there's no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It's not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value and most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work.
He ends with this comment, which is very important to social media marketers.
But please... don't insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That's great work if you can get it, but it's not a career.
This is the fundamental disconnect most social media consultants have in generating results. They've never had to sell, or alter internal habits, or cut costs using their tools, so they mistake social activity with business activity. This is one of the primary reasons I pound the drum on not hiring people with little business experience to do your social media. If they don't understand how things get done, how can they understand social media's impact on how things get done? That's why metrics can seem hard in social media - they're not tasked to what you're paid to do.
But wait, there's more. Someone I met at SXSW, and with whom I now carry on a Twitter conversation, gave me a fantastic idea for how to look at social media, that solves the essential problem of how to measure social media. Felix Wetzel called social media a "preference layer." And in doing so, he opened up a new way of speaking about it without inducing a gag reflex.
Look at it as a layer.
Think of social media marketing as, well, marketing.
Think of social media selling, as, selling.
Think of social media customer service, as..okay, you get the picture. If we treat social media as a layer on top of other skills and departments, it loses its mystique, and also the negative connotations beginning to develop around the practice. We can stop some of the silly squabbles, like, don't sell with social media, if we agree social selling is different than social PR is different than social branding. Social selling is about selling. Social recruiting is not.
If we can narrow our focus to what someone as an individual is trying to do (get hired, increase mindshare of a product, selling tshirts through Twitter), then social becomes a tool to be discussed, tested, and then applied, and not a "new way of thinking."
Is Social a new way of thinking? Yes and No, but of more importance is that you can't get there, until you first walk through our current systems and connect social to their goals. More to come, with visual displays and pretty graphs.
