It’s nice to see so many old friends finding their way into social media. The nice thing about the title insurance industry is that, although it may often be slow to embrace a new technology (such as social media), when it does, it does so with gusto.
The only problem that I see (and I’ve blogged on this before), is that too many of us are using sites like LinkedIn or Facebook to run pure, out-and-out advertising. Nothing keeps you from doing that—but you just might scare a few prospects away.
The way I see it, social media is much more public relations than marketing. Take these two examples.
For purposes of my example, assume the following. You are an insanely busy lending executive. You tend to receive e-mails and voice mails in the hundreds every day, and respond (if you respond) on weekends or from planes and airports. You spend your 13 hour days bouncing from meeting to meeting, living life in 15 minute increments. Everyone in the world seemingly wants a piece of you, including the good vendors and salespeople able to sidestep your guardians and fortress walls. You do LinkedIn (if you do it at all) to keep in touch with contacts, maybe get a bit of the latest in your industry, or just in case the sky falls and it becomes time to move on.
Now, Mr. (or Ms.) Busy Executive, when you go to LinkedIn for the 3 minutes you have, which headline will catch your attention in the discussion segment of the “Mortgage Industry Professionals” section?
A. “Did anyone read today’s Wall Street Journal? Who else has found a creative loss mitigation strategy using minimal resources?
B. “LOAN ORIGINATION SOLUTIONS! I WILL SOLVE YOUR EVERY NEED. CALL ME FOR A DEMO AT 555-555-5555.”
Now, Ms. (or Mr.) Busy Executive, what will you do when you see this on your home module of Linked In?
Discussion 1: “LOAN ORIGINATION SOLUTIONS! I WILL SOLVE YOUR EVERY NEED. CALL ME FOR A DEMO AT 555-555-5555.”
Discussion 2: SELL! SELL! SELL! EVERYTHING MUST GO! RECESSION SALE IS ON NOW!
Discussion 3: MY PRODUCT IS FASTER, BETTER, CHEAPER AND LOOKS NICER. E-MAIL ME FOR A DEMO.
Anyway, you (hopefully) get the point. LinkedIn can certainly be used for marketing or sales. But it isn’t effective for advertisement. Not in the discussion sections, anyway. Most people—most especially your prospects—go there to get something of value, rather than just a cold pitch. And busy prospects who begin to sense they’re looking at a Craig’s List page instead of a social networking page, well, they’ll probably abandon the site faster than you can type your next ad.
So think hard when you’re getting ready to sell, sell, sell on LinkedIn. Your prospect is probably more sophisticated than you think!
Next time, we’ll delve into the next generation of social media—the 140 character world of the Tweet…
Thank you for posting this. I find that they typical life-cycle of all “Web 2.0” technologies takes a severe downturn the moment people start blanketing them with blatant advertising instead of intelligent marketing. Once people start “billboarding” the targeted social media tends to go the way of the My Space dinosaur, quickly.