Hi Everyone!
As you know, I’m working on Attraction Marketing under my friend and mentor, Linda Hughes. She sent me this instructive/informative two-part video supposedly detailing how an e-mail marketer made $10,000 to buy five live cows. If you’re in online marketing, you’ve probably seen it already.
But never mind about the cows. That’s not what the video is about. It’s not even about the undertone of amoral glee in the marketer when he talks about people being more vulnerable on Twitter because of how Twitter interacts with them.
What the video is really about is how people routinely fool themselves. They don’t know it most of the time. When they do know, they do it anyway.
Why do we add people we don’t know? To eavesdrop on them? Is there something voyeuristic about listening in on someone’s supposedly unedited comments with their friends? (Which is what a Twitter feed is supposed to be, right?) Maybe hoping to catch a stray gem?
You know how you might overhear someone talking about so-and-so or some website or other, and because they weren’t talking to you–so you didn’t feel sold–you felt it was genuine? How did you feel when you secretly followed up on it, perhaps knowing that the person you heard it from had no idea you were doing so? Were your expectations for the site lower? Were you more receptive?
Now think about Twitter. When was someone you were following in fact covertly marketing to you, under the guise of acting like a real person? Just by Following you on Twitter, they have a 30% chance that you will become a prospect by Following them in return. Then you get an automatic message that is really a pitch. It sounds really personal of course. It sounds like a real person. There’s a link and you follow it, just as you might an anonymous-looking link sent by a friend. You’re friends, and a budurl or tinyurl doesn’t look like an affiliate link, so you click on it…
Is this how people are fooled? No. You fool yourself. You knew all along, from the time the automated message reached you, that you were being sold, and you bought it hook, line, and sinker. You were already in a “buying” mode as soon as you added someone you didn’t know. You were hoping for a good tip, and when someone drops it “inadvertently”, you snap it up.
Phoney real people as marketing tools isn’t new. Way back there was a bit of hoopla over people paid to chat up people “casually” and talk about and show certain products. Now it’s a marketing strategy.
