Top Sales Speaker Says: After Social Networking Fails, Try Selling!
Top Sales Speaker Says: After Social Networking Fails
, Try Selling!
When I was in junior high, I had a leading role in the musical, "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Today, I embarrass myself singing in the shower, but then, at least the casting director thought I could hold my own as the romantic lead.
If you know the tale, you'll recall that weavers of a marvelous mystery material descended upon a remote locale and won a commission to outfit the emperor. Enamored with these self-important courtiers, the monarch paraded his new attire before an obsequious and admiring public.
Only a small child stepped forth to declare that the emperor had no clothes. He was naked and he had been conned. Apart from the child, no one else would tell it as it was.
At first, the boy's apparent impertinence irritated the regal, and this is where we stand today when it comes to honestly assessing the value of social networking.
Like that innocent, but not quite as doe eyed, I'm here to say that social networking as a business tool is useless, and it's possibly a scam.
I know, that's upsetting. It's disappointing, bad news, and if you've invested countless hours online making "contacts," you'll swear I'm wrong.
But the naked truth is what it is.
As I wrote in a recent article:
"Like any pendulum, there is the amplitude, a most distant point that it reaches before it swings the other way. We have reached that spot when it comes to wasting our time in fruitless marketing endeavors, such as social networking."
When was the last time you networked your way to a profit or to a new and better job? In theory, this is supposed to take place on a regular basis, but in my experience, it doesn't.
Before networking became a technology business, one's Rolodex was worth something, because it was built with well-known contacts. If you were handed a name, or better yet, if someone called a name on your behalf to introduce you, it meant a lot, it got you somewhere.
Straight out of my doctoral program I interviewed a powerful Los Angeles public relations consultant. He charged a minimum of $10,000 per month for access to him and to the people he knew, on a first-hand basis.
One call from his office could get you that coveted interview with the polished, top-rated law firm, or it could open a door for a serious reading of your new screenplay.
Compare this to the empty shell that is today's social networking scene.
Today, I'm connected to thousands of people at Linked-In who probably wouldn't give me the time of day. Our connectivity is about as tight as those invisible threads in the Emperor's new garments.
Yet the myth persists, that if you simply weave more phantom fibers, this will help to build your business.
Ever felt lonely in a crowd, utterly alienated, thinking everybody else has his or her act together, is making a great go of things, and here you are, clueless?
You have a network, everybody's credentials look tidy and tremendous, but you're not getting your In-Mails replied to, and after making overtures, instead of ringing a responsive tuning fork you're hearing a thud, or more commonly, NOTHING?
What happened?
This was a party thrown by a host, a company that decided it had a model for getting people to keep their eyes glued to their site. By selling upgraded memberships, and paid ads, they're creating paydays for themselves.
Besides the site's founders, who else is winning, making money by inviting all of those strangers to add their names to their lists of other nobodies?
It's time to turn our focus to what really works to put business on the books, and that's direct selling.
Unlike today's social networking, when we sell, there is no pretense to making friends, chatting for its own sake, or otherwise using what I call the Jane Goodall Method of Ingratiation. (Hanging out with baboons so openly and so long that they finally accept you as one of their own.)
When deliberately selling, you have a purpose and you're expected to express it in a way that it clearly answers this question for your prospect: "What's in it for me?"
The default answer is "profits" and "income."
This is simple, elegant, purifying. It guides us and provides us with clear feedback.
We earn the sale or not. We create a paying customer. Money changes hands. Results are obvious, and mutually desirable and enhancing.
Simply put, if you need business, social networking, an indirect marketing device that has the additional flaw of pretending it isn't marketing at all, isn't viable or sustainable.
Rather than wowing disingenuous crowds with invisible fibers, try weaving stronger bonds with a precious few.
Believe me, direct selling is better suited to the task.
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