In Blogging, Authority and Trust I talk about how in order to gain access to a prospective customer’s emotional triggers you have to engender a level of “trust” with a prospective customer or client. That level of trust begins as “trust” and can grow into “authority” with time.
In “Trusting your Gut“I shared the word picture which illustrates how the whole process of building trust with prospective customers and clients works.
Now I’d like to illustrate this complex process of how trust plays such an important role in social media marketing by sharing a recent person experience on how a blog post worked to build – and destroy – the most basic elements of trust needed to make a sale.
I was searching for software to automate a time consuming task in my business. This type of sale is an example of a major sale – as it’s one that is worthy of investing a significant amount of time into research. I entered the keywords to describe the software into Google and -not surprisingly – one of the first results returned was a WordPress blog post. In the post, the author asked his readers to share what software solutions they had used. The blog post had almost 60 comments by the time I arrived and I had high hopes that I would quickly and easily discover exactly the software solution what I was seeking.
At this point, while my trust account balance is low - I’m willing to give this blog author the opportunity to earn my trust. After all – his post is appearing first in Google, it appears he talks about issues affecting my business and he’s not featuring affiliate links to preferred products in this post so this is off to a promising start.
At this point, he has “earned” enough of a trust deposit for me to invest my time reading his blog post. The post itself held little information. It was basically fluff and the author intended on allowing his readers to provide the “meat” of the content though comments. I didn’t mind this – as a matter of fact, I was happy to see it. I started reading the comments with high hopes and a fairly high – but fragile – degree of trust.
The first few comments were apparently authentic- which were like making deposits into the newly opened trust account even though they weren’t encouraging. Most of the authentic comments on the blog post fell along the lines of “I still use pen and paper to perform this task.” UGH! That’s what I’m doing now.
Notice that these are what I call the authentic responses because it was obvious that these were real readers with real businesses. Unfortunately, there were only about a dozen “authentic” responses – followed by about four dozen “inauthentic” responses.
There were several comments which looked authentic at first glance. They included a photo gravatar combined with a first name – like “John” – followed by a comment which went along the lines of “we looked long and hard for an easy to use, intuitive software program to handle these tasks and were delighted to find [insert software name here].” The comment then went on to describe the software’s benefits in glowing terms.
The problem with “John’s” comment and many others began with a simple hyperlink. See, one way a reader “gauges” the authenticity of a comment is by following the hyperlinks in the comment. In the case of these inauthentic “shill” comments, when you clicked on the link to see if you could “trust” the glowing recommendation. – surprise surprise -you would find the hyper linked went directly to the website selling the software program described in the comment.
John and several others were obviously shill posting as a satisfied customers promoting their software solution via this blog post. Yeah – this is what some people call “social media marketing” which involves spamming the comments of blog posts by posing as a satisfied customer. It’s yet another example of a blunder in online reputation management – one that can’t be easily erased.
Only a few were as insipid as John and couldn’t resist trying to gain a little “link luv” by including a hyperlink from the comment to their software’s website. Unfortunately, there were others who were so blatantly hyping their product that even though they didn’t hyper link the comment – there was little doubt that the comment was not authentic.
Now – ask yourself where would YOUR level of trust for John’s software would be upon recognizing that his glowing customer review on this third party blog is actually a shill comment? Yeah – it was one of those moments where I started scrambling to find my tin foil hat and I quickly reverted into “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” mode.
The moral of this story is that several software developers who tried to promote their products via shill comments lost the valuable opportunity to be “authentic” and showcase their software product to a prospective customer who was actively researching a purchase.
Instead of leveraging the power of a blog post with a #1 SERP on a valuable – albeit long tail – keyword term to capture high quality sales leads by leaving an authentic blog comment – a surprising number of software developers settled for a link with very little SEO value and absolutely no potential for real customer engagement.
This experience illustrates a lot of “blogging truths”….
- Leaving thoughtful comments on other blogs which add value to the conversation are a great way to get new readers for your blog.
- Finding blog posts which use powerful keyword phrases and leaving authentic comments is a great way to promote your product or services.
- Trying to “game” social media is a waste of time and energy.
- Trust which is quickly earned is fragile – and must be earned over time to fully develop into authority.
The best social media marketing practices begin by recognizing that social media is transparent. Unfortunately it’s relatively easy to “stand out” from the crowd by simply being honest and telling the truth. In the blog post mentioned above, one software developer was “authentic” in his comment – sharing that he was the developer and asking for input about his software from readers. Too bad the software wasn’t even REMOTELY related to the title of the blog post.
The web is big – and often you’ve got a limited opportunity to engage with a prospective customer. If you’re lying in the comments section – why would I think you won’t lie to me as a customer later on?
Before social media, branding was the buzzword of the marketing and advertising industry. Like social media today – many in the “biz” were familiar with the term branding – but really didn’t “get” what it was really all about. As a result a lot of “noise” has been made about branding which focuses upon the choice of colors, logo or other visual elements used in marketing. But branding is so much more than just the visual packaging of your business or even your business name. While the name and the visual elements are a way to quickly communicate the “core” or DNA of your business to consumers who don’t know you yet – your true BRAND is built through interaction with your customers.
