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The Key to Closing the Social Media Sale

Photo of the reverse side of the Key to the Ci...
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Recently caught a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Steven Hodson over on Winextra Shooting Bubbles (gratz on the rebrand!). He was talking about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of SEO and Marketers and how good white hat seo link building services are. The post basically covers how marketers jump into the social media space and flail around with no clue what they’re doing, all the while claiming to be “ninjas” and “experts.”

One particular section stood out to me because it’s the same exact line of thinking I’ve formed about marketing as it relates to social media:

You know who a successful marketer is?

It’s the person who you can talk with on Twitter or Friendfeed or by email and feel like you are having an actual conversation – not the target of a sales pitch or that you are riding trapped with them on an elevator. Sure you could be talking about product or service but the moment you throw out a buzzword or two you have crossed the line from being an interesting person to talk with to being just another marketing dreck.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Steven just gave you the key to the city if you’re trying to make money using social media. As a matter of fact, this same mentality works everywhere else.

I believe that every conversation ends in a sale. Problem is, nobody likes being sold or pressured. They would rather evaluate the situation and make a decision on their own.

How do you get someone to make the decision you need them to make?

This is such basic stuff that I’m surprised so few actually get it. You have to convince a potential client or customer that your product or service will benefit them or otherwise provide value. With standard sales, you’d go through a process like:

  • Engage – make an initial pleasant connection
  • Build Rapport – small-talk to make your target feel comfortable
  • Discovery – at this point, you are trying to find out how your product will benefit this specific person
  • Close – by the time you get here, you and your target are buddies. You know exactly how your product or service fits into their life and they feel like you are doing them a huge favor.

For some reason, marketers in social media just keep trying to close the sale, skipping all the important steps necessary before that. This may still work with email marketing (maybe), but it does not work in social media. These are real people you’re talking to and if you don’t treat them as such, you will never succeed.

You have to put the work in if you want this to work for you. This means being real and genuine. Trying to be a part of the community for the purpose of making money won’t work. You have to just be a part of the community. With the web heading towards real-time, it’s all too easy to spot a fake and I or someone else will point you out. If you’re not here to provide value to the community, you may as well pack your things and move along.

Oh, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…

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8 Ways to Make the New FriendFeed Work For You

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Image via CrunchBase

Many people can’t handle the new Beta FriendFeed design. It’s ugly, it’s too fast, it doesn’t have service icons, the layout sucks. This is pretty much the same thing that happened with the first beta and I bet most people don’t even remember what FF was like before that. Whatever the case may be, here are a few things you can try to make the new layout work for you.

1. Go Back to the Old FriendFeed

This may seem like an obvious choice, but you don’t have to use the new beta design. Only problem with this approach is that you will be totally screwed when the Beta becomes the standard.

2. Pause It

The tiny Pause button at the top of your feed will stop real-time updates until you hit Play. It doesn’t matter if you refresh the page or even log out, it stays paused for you. You can also pause the feed by hitting ‘q’ for quiet. This will emulate the behavior of the old FriendFeed, except that you have to manually refresh your browser…which many FriendFeed users were doing anyway.

If manually refreshing is a problem, try the ReloadEvery Firefox plugin or this Refresh Any Greasemonkey script that I Googled for you.

3. Kill the Comments

Get the FFLite Greasemonkey script by Matt Shaulis to hide all the comments in your feed. This will make it easier to scan as you won’t have to deal with random comments popping up while you’re trying to read stuff. It doesn’t appear that you can toggle the script on and off, so you’ll need to disable it to actually participate.

4. Use Filters

Filters are a powerful way to keep track of things you might be interested in and there are a couple of ways to create them. The easiest is to simply search for something and then click make a filter. The other way is to click edit on the “Filters” list (you have to hover it before you see the edit link). The second allows for much easier creation of really complicated filters, including filtering on how many comments/likes something has.

Check out the FF Filters feed for more on filters, including a bunch of examples.

5. Get Your Service Icons Back

Many people miss the little favicons that show you what service each item came from, so Chris Peoples created a Greasemonkey script to bring them back. It uses FriendFeed’s API to grab the icons. You can get FriendFeed Beta Service Icons over at Userscripts.

6. Make It Cleaner

Go grab AJ Batac‘s Cleaner FriendFeed (New Beta Widescreen) Userstyle. It makes the new Beta layout a little more familiar and gets rid of most of the empty space. It also makes it easier to follow conversations by highlighting your comments and those of people you subscribe to in different colors. The entire background of the comment is highlighted so that you can tell what’s going on at a glance rather than trying to focus on those tiny speech bubbles.

7. Tweak Your Twitter

The FriendFeed Twitter Tweaker Greasemonkey script by Ken Sheppardson (sensing a pattern here?) will make it easier for you to pick out tweets in your feed and see who they’re from. You simply create a new Feed that includes the phrase “twitter-friends” in the name and add the Twitter feed for each user you’d like to track.

8. Use Lists

I’ve never really liked lists but, with the hose at full blast, I’ve been looking at implementing them a lot more. The problem is trying to figure out where I should put people. The easiest way to add someone to a list is to hover their name or avatar and hit add/edit. From here, you can add someone to an existing list or create a new list for them.

List ideas: Tech, Social Media, Music, Favorites, Baconites, NSFW, FFersILF, Business, Pleasure, Politics, FFholics, Video, Fitness, Zombies (feel free to add your own favorite list names in the comments).

How Are You Holding Up?

I remember the original beta did cause quite an uproar, so we’ll need to do everything possible to make the transition smoother this time. What techniques, resources, or features are you taking advantage of to cope with the new Beta FriendFeed? Do you like the beta just the way it is? Let me know what you think.

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Chi.mp: It Only Sucks Because You Don’t Know What To Do With It

I previously talked about Chi.mp in regards to uniting your online identity. After getting a chance to speak directly to the Chi.mp team (Thanks guys and gals!), I gained new insight as to what the service is for. Chi.mp does have the ability to aggregate your data, but that’s not really what it’s for. It isn’t competing with any of your current social networking sites.

Click through to read the whole article (written by yours truly)

via Chi.mp: Not Just Another Data Aggregator