Is Nice Guy Marketing an Act?

One of the problems that a lot of marketers have with social media marketing is that they’ve been told it’s a touchy feely process that requires a lot of listening and ego-patting.

Although there is some truth to that, I don’t believe that it’s the full picture.

Yeah, social media marketing requires a bit more tact than say, Direct Response Marketing, but I don’t see how that process differs from the process our fathers and grandfathers used to sell cash registers and copy machines.

The book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, written by Dale Carnegie, spends most of it’s volume talking about how to build rapport via listening and finding something in common with your audience.

Is this not the same process that we use with social media marketing?

What’s happened is that marketers had it easy for so long that they got spoiled. They had a product that people wanted, and as a result, it didn’t matter how well they treated the customer.

The Return of Customer Service

I mean really, where has customer service been in the past decade? From what I’ve seen, it has been nonexistent.

Enter social media, which changes the playing field and puts the ball back in the court of the consumer. This isn’t anything new, but it is a switch back to the way things were 15-20 years ago.

When I sold cutlery door to door, I had approximately 5 minutes from the moment I stepped into the door to build rapport. If I couldn’t, then the sale was lost. These days, a business has access to not only more customers, but more customer conversations than ever before. However, a business cannot just start selling online without stroking the customer’s ego a bit. These days, it is relationships that sell, not the product (in many cases).

Being Smart

So, do I see this new wave of nice guy marketing as an act? Sure, if you see the salesman as Sears an actor. But, if you simply view social media as an opportunity to build rapport with a customer so that you can find out how you can best meet their needs (and get the sale), then it’s nothing different than marketers have been doing for decades.

I don’t think you are giving in when you use social media…I think you are just being smart. There’s nothing wrong with using the available tools and technology to help your business. In fact, I think you’d be a fool not to.

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