Do You Need the “Right” Personality for Social Marketing?

Seems “social etiquette” is a hot topic. Since joining Facebook, I’ve been listening and joining in the conversation about the most effective ways to use social networks to raise your profile and find customers for your business…

If you want to create marketing opportunities with social media here’s the golden rule:

“Network first”

There’s a bit more to it than that but if you remember this always you’ll find opportunities to market yourself, your products and services. You’ll also steer clear of the negativity my FB friend Kenny Barrow encountered when he tries to challenge an over aggressive marketer on Facebook…

Two Sets of Rules ?

Listen to this story I picked up from an email conversation…

It’s an example of how things can get nasty when people are operating with different rulebooks.

The gist of the story is about some guy who violated his “no spam” rules in his Millionaire Video Secrets group. I have my friend’s permission to share this so here’s some quotes from Kenny’s account…

“This individual attempted to circumvent my no spamming rule in the Millionaire Video Secrets group on Facebook and pasted a full page sales letter complete with an introductory paragraph asking everyone to come to his group to promote their videos.

In my eyes this was equivalent to the Burger King man walking into a MacDonald’s birthday party and waving a flag saying “come follow me” enticing everyone to follow him to the Burger King store.

I took this mans flag by deleting his sales letter and asked him not to do it again. I also gave him the party analogy to illustrate how his actions were not social actions.”

He replied with a message:

“Hey Kenneth, its called Marketing !

BTW if you have taken down my discussion you have done your members a great disservice…

We had a few more posts with him getting more personally abusive but before we could finish our conversation he was booted from the system.”

What’s interesting is this guy didn’t seem to think he was doing anything “wrong”. If you read Mari’s post on email etiquette, you’ll hear a similar story. The person who sent her unwanted promotional email didn’t seem to realize he was actually hurting himself rather than positively promoting his business.

It just seems so blatantly obvious that building relationships is a good thing that can only help your business in the short term and the long haul…

So why are people prepared to damage their own reputation and undermine the relationship and business building opportunities available ?

Could it be that just not all of us are cut out for this social marketing game?

“Natural Born Promoters”

We have a family friend…She doesn’t have her own business or any aspirations to start one…But geez, does that girl know how to get what she wants?…too right!

She’s a “natural born promoter”.

Whenever you meet her, before you know it, she’s enrolled you into her drama class, she’s “sold” you her unique ways of potty training, giving birth (no kidding), making pizza, packing a suitcase, whatever…she never stops…it’s just her way. Oh, and she does get on people’s nerves and offend people occasionally. She just doesn’t seem to notice..she just gets on with being herself.

I like her because there’s no fakeness, she makes no adjustment to her surroundings or social situation. You know what you’re going to get with her. And that makes her honest and transparent.

Now, if she ever did try to use social networking for business purposes, I think she’d be too impatient and too pushy to find Facebook useful. She can only be herself. For some people “promoting” and “cutting to the chase” is a natural part of the personality.

Natural born promoters want the quickest way from A to B, and that means getting their stuff “out there” as quickly and as often as possible. As Kenny discovered, try explaining the logic of NOT posting a link and you’ll come up against a brick wall. All they see is a wasted opportunity to “get clicks”.

So are there specific “personality types” that are more suited to traditional direct sales and marketing and others for social marketing ?

What Makes a Successful Social Marketer?

In traditional direct marketing, you target our audience according to niche interests and look for people with problems we can solve. Much of this work is about research, analysis, and metrics, which seems to be a different set of skills than those required for successful social marketing.

(I know, I know we still need to know all this stuff regardless of whether we’re using social networks or other means to get people moving through our sales funnel…but stay with me). The key point here is you have to do the social networking before you can implement a more direct marketing strategy.

Do you need to have additional skills and/or personality traits for social marketing? (a different skillset from traditional direct marketing)
Should we also focus our efforts on connecting with others who demonstrate the skills and personality best suited for social networking ? (remembering communication is most effective when there’s interaction or in marketing terms..”response”)

For our strategies to be effective, surely we have to be connecting with active social networkers. Those who are investing time on social networks. Those who are open to engaging.

Given the finite amount of time we have for say Facebook activity and the need to spend that time wisely it’s important for us to connect with people who are “connectable”…those with a “social networking personality” and generally speaking are those most likely to succeed the ones with most suited personality traits ?

Why bother with the “un-connectables” ?

Introducing “The Connectables” the New Super Heroes of Social Marketing…

Look at the successful social marketers…They are extremely “connectable” and seem to have some common personality traits making them ideally suited to social networking.

Take Twitter for instance…

You only have to read the tweets of Mari Smith, Deborah Micek, and many others to understand learned strategy and tactics are all part of the equation…

But there’s also a unique personality shining through all tweets.

Communication with just 140 characters of text providing bite sized tips, tricks and energetic interaction is an art form. This adds value for followers but also shows people what the “tweeter” is like as a person…people get hooked on the “personalities” behind the tweets.

Admittedly, there’s nothing new about personality driven marketing, but I’m not talking about Dan Kennedy style ads. I’m talking about authentic genuine personality coming through each day through the tweets, the posts, the videos…

And it’s those with personalities most suited to social marketing who win this game…

If you’re not sure, think about this…

Could anyone successfully use just the tactics regardless of their natural personality…OR is a certain “personality type” for effective social marketing almost a pre-requisite today?