Why Simpler Social Media Works For Network Marketers

Columnist David F. Carr writes on how representatives from a company called Juice Plus+ demonstrate how sophisticated strategies aren’t the best for all businesses, and that a bare-bones approach to the web can sometimes make more sense.  Carr traveled with his wife (who is an independent distributor for Juice Plus+) to the national sales conference for Juice Plus+ in Nashville, TN.  He said it was much less high tech-savvy than the two recent Web 2.0 conferences he attended in New York and San Francisco.

Neither the Juice Plus+ marketing organization nor the individual sales representatives dazzled him with the technical sophistication of their approach, but Carr came away impressed nonetheless.  He was particularly intrigued with the “Web walk” sales technique developed by the organization’s independent distributors.

Much of the article delves into the specifics of what Juice Plus+’s product is, so you may want to read a little bit about it provided in the link below.  If you’re familiar at all with the company Zija, it seems as though the two companies have the same goal in sight.  Juice Plus+ is basically offering products to better one’s health.

Carr says one reason that Juice Plus+ is sold more through a network of moms, doctors, nurses, rehabilitation specialists, and personal trainers—rather than in stores—is that it requires a long winded explanation (the same goes with Zija; I know this because I used to be an independent distributor of the product, and still use it personally). 

The main point here is that there are many companies like these two that require different marketing and sales techniques than others.  His wife wasn’t sold the first, second, or third time someone told her about Juice Plus+, so she spends a lot of time sending people links to the medical studies and videos that convinced her.  As a former independent distributor for Zija, we were instructed to try use the same techniques to reel in potential customers.

“Distributor Mary Koenig gained a reputation for doing the same sort of thing with educational DVDs, spending so much time dropping them off and retrieving them that her upstream sales director Renee O'Neill dubbed her the "Jersey Shore DVD stalker." Still, Koenig found showing the videos with their testimonials from doctors, athletes, and other experts effective--as long as people actually watched them. Each distributor also gets a personalized website that can be associated with a custom domain, but Koenig found that merely telling people to visit mary4prevention.com (her personal site through Juice Plus+) typically didn't work.  "If you tell people here's my website, check it out, but there's no follow up, it's just a waste," she said because most people won't click on the link or type in the URL on her business card--or if they do, that alone won't convince them” (Carr).

If you are confused as to what exactly a “Web walk” would consist of, I’ll try to explain it.  As an independent distributor attempting to sell the proposed product, you would preferably want to be on the phone with the potential customer as they navigate the web page you have asked them to visit.  While on the phone you may ask them to view a couple of your favorite or most relevant videos, all the while staying on the line with them and asking them what their thoughts are on what they just saw.  If they were to have any questions you would be right there to hopefully answer any of them, and this way you would have a much better chance of not losing them to confusion or indifference. 

“There's a fine line between building a relationship and using technology," O'Neill told me when I reached her later, by phone. "The main goal of the Web walk and what makes it so successful is you're building a relationship with the person, while still using the technology” (Carr).

This aforesaid combination of technology and relationship building is really what can make a sale for businesses like Juice Plus+ and Zija, as I have experienced first-hand.  I think that there is potential for more companies to adopt the Web walk strategy and use it successfully, rather than hoping for the best after asking a would-be customer to visit a vast sea of links and interfaces on a web page.

Simpler Social Media Can Work

Social Malice

According to social networking data gathered by Barracuda networks, one in 60 Facebook posts are of the malicious sort, and LinkedIn users feel the safest—but not for along apparently. If you aren’t yet aware, haven’t been affected by it, or simply do not have one of the three big social networking accounts, you should know that there is indeed a dark side to the booming online networking business today. Other than Facebook, it was reported that Twitter also had one in 100 tweets being malicious.

With 40% of users reporting that they feel unsafe on the service, Facebook leads the way with the least confident users on its site. 28% of Twitter’s users feel that way, and LinkedIn follows up with 14%. Just because the users feel safest on LinkedIn, it doesn’t translate to the safety being kept. It’s inevitable that the site will become a big target for cybercrime. The damage that could potentially be done to accounts on LinkedIn is high for employee misinformation and business disruption in general, according to Daniel Peck, who is a senior research scientist with Barracuda Labs. “I think there will be a lot of social attacks there” said Peck.

Some other relevant findings from Barracuda Labs that were included in the article are as follows: “Interestingly, most users say the important factors to consider when joining a social network are security (92%), that their friends use it (91%), privacy (90%), and ease of use (87%). More than 90% have received spam over a social network, and more than half have experienced phishing attacks. More than 20% have received malware, 16.6% have had their account used for spamming, and about 13% have had their account hijacked or their password stolen. More than half are unhappy with Facebook's privacy controls.
Meanwhile, Barracuda counted 43% of Twitter accounts as "true users" with real followers and regular tweets, and 57% as "not true users"--either spam bots or inactive accounts.
Attackers abuse Twitter in much the same way that they engage in search-engine poisoning, according to Peck, casting a wide net and hoping to get more eyeballs. "Facebook manipulates trust more--your friends are people you make eye contact with," he said” (BrainYard). 


Deb Donston-Miller, a contributing editor to the BrainYard (site at which this article can be read), commented below the article stating, “The big problem is that, if your public social network account gets hacked, there's nothing a person or company can do. You're kind of at the mercy of Facebook or Google or whatever. It's bad enough for an individual, but once organizations come to depend more and more on public social networks for marketing, help desk, etc., the threat will expand.” I couldn’t possibly agree anymore wholeheartedly with her comment so I had to quote her. Hackers today are better than ever, and if a company has put most of their marketing efforts into a social networking site such as LinkedIn, it makes them easy targets for experienced hackers, and could result in bad business for the proposed company if such an attack/hijack were to occur.  I don't believe that safety issues will get enough users to quit using Facebook or other sites, but from a company's standpoint I can certainly see reason for concern.

Social Malice

Google+, Facebook Duel On Social Media Models

Google+ is trying to stay updated with the social media movement, while Facebook still leads the way.  Vic Gundorta, the senior VP of engineering for Google+, has promised to address some sore points of production such as integration with Google Apps.  Facebook CTO Bret Taylor noted that Google's moves to integrate social features along its product line is essentially what Facebook has already been doing.  The two sides (Google/Facebook) sat down separately at the Web 2.0 Summitt with John Battelle and were both interviewed about their success.

With more than 40 million users now, Google+ is admittedly flabbergasted.  "We're surprised--that's above our internal projections, even our wildest projections," says Gundorta.  He acknowledged that the speed at which the service took off left them a little flat-footed.  As of now, you can sign up for Google+ using your personal Gmail login but not a Google Apps identity linked to the domain of a business or other organization. Because of this mishap, Google effectively snubbed some of its most loyal users, many of them paying customers.

Gundorta has issued a personal apology for the aforementioned, also saying that the integration with Google Apps wasn’t initially a high priority, but a solution is now “imminent, within days.”  In another Web 2.0 interview, former Facebook president Sean Parker said that Google+ would have a hard time overcoming the network effect achieved by Facebook.  In reply, Gundorta was quoted saying, “The point Sean made is right, that the incumbent has a huge advantage.  If you play the same game, that’s a hard game to win.  We’re going to play a different game.”  (Gundorta’s strategy will be to make Google+ a social layer on top of everything else Google already offers.)  “What we’ve seen so far is just the ‘plus’ part, but in the coming months the rest of Google will come to bear the product,” he said.

Obviously one thing Google has going in its direction would be the fact that they already have so many users of other Google services that can easily be targeted to hopefully attract them to a new social network.

Google will also stick to a more “deliberate” model for sharing, straying away from Facebook’s new Open Graph frictionless sharing (where some news and music apps now automatically share links through the content you access though them).  "We think there is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth.  I don't want the world to know that I'm embarrassed I like that one Britney Spears song. I want the world to know that I like U2," said Gundorta.

Even though Taylor thinks that Facebook is already way ahead of providing what Google is now trying to integrate, he did say that after listening to Vic and Sergey speak about the integration into a variety of Google properties, it sounded like a great strategy to him.  Taylor thinks that more and more services will have a social context, with Facebook being the frontrunner at the moment. 

Facebook has also been accused of violating user privacy, but Taylor points out that most avid Facebook users have changed their privacy settings, and that they are not hidden away from the user at all.  “Our policy is not to bury them (the privacy settings), but to put them in front of you as much as possible,” said Taylor.

I’m not sure what most people view Google+ as lately, but as a college student I rarely hear too much about it around campus or in discussions with friends nearly as much as I do Facebook.  That may be obviously because of how incredibly popular Facebook is, with college students especially, but it seems as though Google had quite a mishap when it was found by many paying members of services through them that they could be denied a Google+ account.  There’s no tip-toeing around the fact that if Google+ wants to be competitive with Facebook, they’re the ones next in line to have the best shot of doing so (after Twitter).

It will be interesting in the following days, months, years, to see how well they deal with this new service they’re attempting to provide.  After reading this article and others, it really just seems like a lot of it is Google controlling their own destiny, and most of the hypothetical success to be seen with Google+ is theirs to lose.

Google+, Facebook Duel On Social Media Models

Facebook, Feds Team To Help Job Seekers

I found it interesting that the U.S. government (more specifically the Department of Labor) has teamed up with Facebook in order to help people use social networks to find jobs.  The National Association of State Workforce Agencies, DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) are all involved with this collaboration as well. 

Facebook has created a new page entirely devoted to this task, called the Social Jobs Partnership, which provides resources on training programs, job searching, and educational opportunities. 

“Facebook also will post public service announcements online in targeted geographic areas experiencing high unemployment to drive traffic to the new page, according to the Department of Labor. Additionally, all of the Social Jobs Partnership's partners are providing information about the employment resources and other services they have available on the page.  Social media is becoming key to job searching and recruitment, a trend that spurred the creation of the initiative, officials said.

More than 70% of college career centers have a Facebook page, according to research by NACE, and 92% of respondents to a 2010 Jobvite poll said that they either have recruited employees or plan to do so through the social network, according to information about the initiative Facebook has posted online” (Montalbano).

Labor Secretary Linda L. Solis was quoted in a press statement saying, “Linking American job seekers with the resources they need to get back to work is a top priority of the Obama administration and my department.  By leveraging the power of the social Web, this initiative will provide immediate, meaningful, and ready-to-use information for job seekers and employers, and a modern platform to better connect them.”

The Obama administration also launched a broad initiative last month called the American Jobs Act, which aims to spend about $450 million in job creation measures.  Congress is still considering the bill.

“Partners also will research and create systems that can deliver job postings virally through Facebook free of charge, as well as promote existing public-sector employment programs and resources through social media.  Finally, the partnership will provide recruiters, government agencies, and job seekers with educational materials about how to use social media effectively” (Montalbano).

It may be insightful to take a look into how many Americans without jobs even have access to the internet, and if the American Jobs Act really needs to spend that much money on this movement, placing our nation even further into the trenches of debt if Congress decides to pass the bill.  Aside from that, I could definitely see how a movement like this could be useful to a certain point because so many Americans are currently unemployed.  Its clear that we need some sort of jumpstart to our economy, and it will be interesting to see if this could lend itself as a solution, or further the problem.

Facebook, Feds Team To Help Job Seekers

Facebook's Flaw Not Privacy, Sean Parker Says

Former Facebook president Sean Parker suggests that if Facebook has a weakness, its alienating power users with too much data, rather than what most think to be privacy issues. 

In a Web 2.0 Summit conference with co-chair Tom O’Reilly, Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) said, “We’re on the threshold of a new industry with data.  I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision and execution of the next generation consumer operating system.  Facebook shows where the industry is headed and sets the pace for what we should be doing in the enterprise world.”

Benioff is basing his admiration on the fact that enterprise users and customers are participating in Facebook.  He said it’s where people are going and learning how to share.

Parker thinks that Facebook’s biggest problem centers on the “glut of information that overwhelms power users.”  Parker said it could potentially lead said users to be pushed toward Google+ or Twitter.  He believes that Facebook should be more concentrated on how to “give its users better tools to control shared data more effectively” rather than to throw all the data at the power user at once.

“For John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay, Facebook is not a threat but an ally. Donahoe talked about eBay's strong relationship with Facebook and its exploration of ways to connect its PayPal payment system to Facebook Credits. "Shopping is very social,” he said.  eBay's challenge is to become an e-commerce platform system for retailers, a company offering not just a sales channel but computing infrastructure. Donahoe sees e-commerce and retail becoming one and the same. In over 50% of all retail transactions, consumers access the Web at some point in the shopping cycle, he said” (Claburn).

The aforementioned quote from Claburn’s article involving CEO of eBay John Donahoe really struck a chord with me.  Most of the time when I am thinking about a purchase, big or small, I generally attempt to research it online, and many times I will end up making the purchase online as well.

 

Former Facebook president and investor Sean Parker also had comments that rang true to my thoughts on the current state of Facebook.  There usually seems to be quite a bit of unwarranted information and data that I end up being subjected to when I log onto my account.  If Facebook could generate some way to alter or filter what (and how much) information and data is presented to the user, I could see that being extremely beneficial to many if not all users of the site. 

Facebook's Flaw

How Social Can Improve Customer Service: Expert Advice

 “Thanks to social media, customers have a voice like never before," said Laura Thomas, marketing communications senior consultant at Dell. "When customers wanted to discuss a product or service in the past, they'd dial a call center and their problem would be addressed behind closed doors. Only the customer and the company would hear the complaint or praise. Now, these issues are aired publicly to potentially huge audiences of potential buyers. At Dell, we still rely on a number of traditional channels for help desk services, but are increasingly looking to social networking to actively engage with our customers and ensure they have a good experience with us” (Donston-Miller).

It can be observed how social networking has clearly changed the face and ways of many organizational functions, but possibly none more so than the customer service and help desks, as mentioned in the quote from the article, above.  Both internal and external customers are subjected to new open platforms that “provide a forum for anyone with expertise to weigh in—and anyone with a similar issue to gain knowledge.”  Even so, more is required than to simply jump on Facebook and answer a couple questions every now and then.

If a particular company has established that Facebook—for instance—is the most appropriate way to interact with their customers, they’ll most likely need an entire department dedicated to reading, interpreting, and answering questions or comments that their clientele may have.

“Social networks can provide important data on the problems customers are having most often, as well as the products they would like to see changed (and how)--but only if you listen.  Dell's Thomas said that the company has found that listening and engaging with customers via social networking can directly result in improved customer satisfaction scores, customer loyalty, and brand metrics” (Donston-Miller).

That said, organizations that choose to employ Facebook or other sites as a medium between them and their customers need to take a dedicated approach and presence to such a thing.  Consistency and timing is a big deal, “After all, with social networking, it's not just one person who sees that a question has been left hanging; it's everyone who follows the page or is a fan of the company.”

This article reminded me a lot of what we spoke about in class with organizations that went about this process the right—and sometimes very wrong—way of dealing with the advent of using social media for open-forum marketing purposes.  It can easily impact an organization negatively if handled inappropriately, or at times not at all.

How Social Can Improve Customer Service