It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.

For many, many years, the marketing and advertising teams out in the world had a very distinctive way of ‘talking’ in the materials they produced. This way of talking even has a name: “Ad-speak”. I’m sure that you don’t even need me to describe it to you, but it was always loaded with punchy, trendy words, phrases like ‘never before seen!’ and ‘for a limited time!’, and gave you the impression that the people who wrote it thought they were doing you a favour by telling you how lucky you were to now know about this amazing product.

The thing is, every product had that kind of pitch. Sure, some were more eloquently written than others, but ultimately their goal was to convince you that whatever it was that you were looking at was a better choice than all the others. Here’s an example: Do you know how many different ads for pickup trucks claim that they have the ‘most horsepower’, ‘most torque’, ‘biggest towing capacity’? All of them. And for some reason, they all seem to have won a ‘Truck of the Year’ award. Not sure how that works, but maybe ‘Truck of the Year’ awards are like the ‘participant’ ribbons you used to get at your public school science fairs. Everybody gets one just for showing up.

But does this really make a difference anymore? We see study after study being done that reveals the lessening effects of print and television advertising in swaying opinions. People just don’t give those types of messages any kind of credibility anymore, because they all sound exactly the same. So how do you turn off decades of habitual ‘ad-speak’ and switch it to something that doesn’t make people tune out? Start working in Social Media, that’s how.

Take a look at some of the companies that are successful in Social Media, and look at the way they write their content. When they tweet, when they update on Facebook, or post on their blog. How does it sound? Does it read like an ad? Or does it read like someone talking to you in a casual setting? I’d be willing to wager something marginally valuable that they aren’t shouting slogans at you, are they?

Social Media is all about starting conversations that go both ways. An ad on TV is one-way communication. An ad in a magazine is one-way communication. But a piece of content put out in Social Media is ∞-way communication. Anyone can post on your Facebook wall, anyone can reply, and anyone can reply to anyone’s reply. A single tweet can spread to hundreds of thousands of people, if it’s something that your followers care about. A blog post can generate insightful comments and valuable feedback, if people care about what you wrote.

The key is to keep your readers/followers comfortable. Keep them at ease when they’re connecting with you. Make them feel like you’re not just shouting at them, but actually talking as if they were sitting next to you in a coffee shop, or over a beer at the end of a long day.

Here’s two ways of talking to your audience about an upcoming trade show. You tell me which one you think would get people replying to you:

1) “Come on down to the Trade Show! Product X is now on sale!”

or

2) “Hey, will anyone be heading down to the Trade Show? What kinds of things will you be looking for?”

Post #1 is entirely one-way. It doesn’t elicit any kind of response from your community. Someone reads that, and they think “Ok, that’s nice.”. Now, post #2 on the other hand is flat-out asking your community for input. In one short post, you’ve asked two different questions that they can answer, and get them talking. If they’re going to the show, they can see that others might be, too. If they’re not going, maybe you can ask why and get some info from them on why not. Maybe they’ll tell you what they’re looking for. Seeing what other people are looking for might encourage them to check out stuff they might not otherwise know about. If your special price on Product X isn’t something they’re even interested in, maybe you adjust your promotion to be more in tune with what people are going to see. Both posts let people know where you are going to be, but only one lets them know that you care what they think about it, and want to hear it.

That’s really the key point here: Let them know that you really care what they think. Asking someone for their opinion makes them feel important. It lets them know that they have knowledge that you need. It changes their relationship with you from ‘customer’ to ‘partner’. They are important to your success, and you need to let them know that. How do you do this? By involving them in the conversation.

I feel I must quote Scott Stratten, @unmarketing, as he makes an excellent observation in his book:

“Why do we market to people the way we hate to be marketed to?”

Makes you say ‘Yeah, no kidding.”, and it’s a message that is ignored all too often. How do we like to be spoken to? Like a real person. Like the other party cares about what we have to say, and isn’t just preaching at us from the pulpit. If we can all keep this in mind, not only will our customers become our partners, but they will provide the ∞-way communication that we all need to be better at everything we do. You just need to start by changing your tone.

Do you have examples of companies that have changed their tone for Social Media? Let’s hear about your own success in getting people talking!

I’m currently reading “UnMarketing”, the brilliant book written by Scott Stratten (@unmarketing). To condense the focus of the book in to a few short words would be a fools errand. Nevertheless, I’ll try: I’d summarize it as “a combination of a triple-espresso, a cold shower, a smack upside the head, and a motivational speaker for businesses trying to understand Social Media”. What it does, and does well, is help you to realize that Social Media isn’t just a fad or a buzzword, but a fundamental shift in the way companies talk to their communities. It’s no longer a one-way, or even two-way communication between you and your customer. Now, it’s ∞-way communication. Anyone can talk to anyone, and everyone is talking to everyone. This turns the entire advertising world upside down, and means that you can’t talk to your customers in the same language of ‘ad-speak’ that was the default dialect of the marketing world for so very, very long. Too long. It just doesn’t work anymore, and everyone is tired of it.

While there are many out in the world who are fighting it and can’t seem to adapt to this shift, there are also many who have embraced this new method of communication as a welcome change, myself included. Fortunately I also find myself in an environment that consists of individuals who also are looking towards the future, and strive for growth. We’ve recognized that this means in order to be successful, companies need to abandon the old ‘BS’ ways of trying to push themselves and rely on the merits of their product/service itself, as well as the quality of the knowledge contained in their organization in order to pull people towards them. If you sell a good product, and know what you’re talking about, you’ve already got the basis for a successful Social Media presence. If you’re ‘faking it’, you’re already doomed before you begin, BUT if you’re legitimately knowledgeable, have a quality product, and care about your community, then customers will be drawn to you naturally. There’s no need to force yourself on anyone in these new channels. In fact, forcing yourself on your desired audience can (and often will) have the exact opposite result and drive them away. The quality of your content is what will attract people to you.

You might be thinking to yourself “Wow, what a breath of fresh air for businesses!”, and if you are then you can count yourself among those like myself and Stratten. However, you’ll also find yourself intensely frustrated by the need to sell Social Media to those who either don’t understand this shift and can’t adapt to it, or who simply haven’t looked closely enough at it yet to realize what’s really happening. Stratten summarizes this frustration in this one magnificent passage from his book:

“The thing that really gets me riled up about people questioning the ROI of Social Media is: If I offered you a tool 10 years ago that allowed you to listen in and respond to the casual conversations of your potential, current, and past customers, you would have paid me $20,000 a month for this 8th wonder of the world. But now, that it’s here, and it’s free, you question its value?”

Read that several times. Then read it again. Then read it aloud to everyone around you. It’s astounding, isn’t it? And it’s the root of why small-medium businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs are proving to be so much more effective at Social Media than large corporations. SMB’s are conditioned to seek out low-cost alternatives to gaining exposure, generating brand awareness, and creating buzz about themselves. They don’t have the resources to invest in the types of million-dollar ad campaigns that big corporations just love to use. But the thing is, because of Social Media, even big companies no longer NEED to spend ridiculous dollars on traditional marketing efforts. They can benefit just as much from Social Media as the SMB’s if they simply wake up and realize what this whole Social Media thing is really all about. Just because it doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Quite the contrary, in this case. It doesn’t cost anything; but it is priceless.

But we always come back around to the need to justify Social Media efforts. We still need to ‘sell’ people on it. Why? Aren’t the benefits pretty clear? Isn’t the activity there measurable? Doesn’t it give you a clear correlation between investment (time) and return (information/communication/feedback) that you can’t get through ‘traditional’ marketing?

How do you really compare a successful social media activity versus a successful advertising activity? Well, on the one hand, you spend hours of time developing a creative ad, cough up $5000 for space in an issue of a magazine, and then what? How do you measure if it worked? Well, first you wait. Then after a while you try desperately to correlate any increase in sales to the timing of the ad issue, hoping that the increase isn’t due to some other unforeseen factor, and then you say ‘Well, we think it worked’.

On the other hand, you have Social Media. You spend hours writing a blog post, and then what? You see if it was viewed, how much time they spent, did they share it, where did they share it, did the share bring others to your post, did they comment, was it a positive or negative comment, did they include a link to some other material, and on, and on, and on. Seems to me like the ‘return’ you get from Social Media efforts is more measurable than anything that traditional media can offer. Not only that, but it can give you a very clear idea as to what you should do next. Social Media is self-propagating like that. The more you contribute, the greater the amount of new ideas you can obtain for what you should do next.

If you ever need to ‘sell’ Social Media to someone, why don’t you ask them to ‘sell’ you on traditional media first, just to compare who’s got more good things to say. I have the distinct feeling that they’ll run out of words long before you do.

What do you think? Let’s hear your stories about your frustrations and instances where you’ve needed to ‘sell’ Social Media, and how you went about it!