‘Why Internet Marketers Don’t Have Friends When It Comes to Social Web 2.0 Platforms’ by Leo Dimilo

Leo Dimilo’s latest article is titled “Why Internet Marketers don’t have friends when it comes to social web 2.0 platforms”. [Article]

Leo Dimilo’s latest article:

You are hanging out with your family and friends on Christmas day about to have Christmas dinner. Your uncle pulls you aside and says he wants to speak with you.it will only take a second and it will be life changing.he takes you into the next room and starts off his spill.

I have this great opportunity that I think you need to check it out.it will only be $99 starting out but you will make millions from it if you work two hours a day, four days a week.

What is your response? Awkwardness? Do you have that “how do I get out of this situation” kind of feeling?.

Now imagine that you yourself are doing this. Are you finding your friends start to turn the other way when they see you coming? Are your calls not answered?

Now imagine, one more time. Same thing, different setting. You have read that great book on how marketing through a social media platform is going to earn you millions. Now you go out, create a myriad of accounts through facebook, myspace, digg, twitter, ect and proceed to spam market your products through them.

Have you tried this and are you not getting results? Congratulations. You aren’t alone. Monetizing social traffic has been an enigma for most online marketers. Many an online marketer has tried to monetize huge amounts of digg traffic only to realize that digg users don’t buy and don’t click advertisements.

So why are the social sites so hard to market to? Is the social traffic smarter than the average person who is just cruising along the internet not being social?

The main reason is (and pardon me for sounding like a smart alec) that social traffic is well, it is social. And let’s face it, most people whether online or off, simply don’t like to mix their socializing with buying stuff. In a nut shell, people are turned off and want to tune out whenever their bullshit radar goes off.

And in the case of the hordes and hordes of marketers following each other and marketing to each other over and over, I would have to say that your B.S. radar would be going off the charts.

So, if the social media isn’t so responsive to most marketers efforts, does that make social media totally ineffective? No. But online marketers need to find a more effective pre-sell than simply lambasting their “tweets” with ad after ad.

Just like email marketing, there has to be a grooming process.

How to Market to the Social Web 2.0 Readers.

The main difference between getting traffic from web2.0 sites like twitter, face book and myspace or getting it organically is that organic traffic almost always is either looking for information or searching for a solution to a problem.

The social traffic is there for different reasons. They are there in most cases because they want to be social. You know, catch up with friends, check their emails, see what is going on. And no, your special report on how to {insert your niche problem here} is not what a regular person using twitter is going to care to look at.

And that is the catch. Sure, you can receive huge amounts of traffic from the curious social types, but if you are running adsense or some other contextual ad network, you can expect for your CTR to drop. If you are running affiliate programs, then you can expect the same.

Blogs and Social Media Marketing aren’t that much of a match either

Oh, and by the way, blogs that primarily use social marketing are kind of in the same boat (hence why so many bloggers who focus on social traffic as a marketing plan are ultimately setting themselves up for failure, usually).

This bunch are the readers that pad a blogger’s RSS feed giving them the false hope that they are actually doing something. In actuality, readers don’t tend to spend their money and resent being marketed to. Why?

Because social media and web2.0 traffic is there to be entertained more than informed.
So how do you market to the web2.0 social platforms?

A guy sees a girl at the bar. She is in the distance and smiling at him.

He approaches her and proceeds to tell her all the great things he has done in his life.

He tells her about how he was top of his class in school.

He mentions that he is in a 6 figure job.

He brags about his highest golf score.

He talks about his last time in Maui.

30 minutes go by.

He asks for her phone number and wants to know if she would like to go out with him sometime.

She hands him a fake number. He never sees her again. Where did he go wrong?

As online marketers most of us are that guy who feels like he needs to prove something before he can gain trust.

We are so busy trying to get our message out to visitors that we forget that we are trying to connect to another human. Instead, just like the guy in the bar, we wind up talking at the person, and not connecting with them.

But with social media, it is different and this is what confounds most internet marketers. If you hard sell your marketing message, then chances are you are going to lose. What works when someone has googled a keyword to get a solution to their answers comes across to a social visitor like a used car salesman in a cheap suit.

The best way to market to the social web2.0 scene is to NOT market to them.

Yeah. I said it. And I am sure that most of you who are trying to “twitter” your way to success by waylaying your “twitter friends” with garbage self serving links are actually just wasting your time.

The social web could be a great way for a marketer to humanize himself.

In other words, your myspace page is just that.not some master plan to game those on myspace. But a page where you are you, showing what you do.and no, I am not talking about what you are doing or selling in marketing.

Your twitter page actually has tweets that aren’t market focused and driven. Instead they are about YOU, the non marketer. Like cooking? talk about a recipe you found. Like Sports? Give your picks for next weeks game. Saw a movie that you hate? Tweet it, warning the world. Got a book you couldn’t put down from start to finish? Put it on your facebook page proclaiming it as a must read.

What good would that do though, right? After all, if you don’t have a marketing message, then where is the money?

The money isn’t in the marketing. Better marketers than yourself are still scratching their head trying to figure out how to market to social traffic. The money is in the social connections that you make.

Connections = Money

And this is where most marketers fail to understand the importance of social media and how to market to the social masses.

People like to feel like they know someone. Most online marketers come across as unreachable and with an agenda that can be seen from miles away.

Alternatively, you can use social media to soften up your Web 2.0 traffic as well.

Let’s say that you are blogging. A social presence can actually soften up your persona online. It can change the way a person is viewed. I am sure that you have read that a photo of yourself on a sales page will increase sales, right?

Well, what happens when the person comes to your site, and then realizes that you live in Tennessee and bleed orange (for those of you who don’t know what bleeding orange means, it means you are a Tennessee Vols fan)? What happens when they realize that you share an infinitity with collecting post-it notes (I know-weird but there is actually a forum online that connects post-it note fans)?

The answer is instant connection. And connecting is the secret sauce of working social web2.0 platform. Hell, it is the secret sauce of becoming a successful internet marketer too.

Anyway, this is just a rant. The next time you decide that you are going to tweet about the 15th latest greatest

It actually works in the supposed web1.0 version because of the ways that potential customers and visitors are actually landing on our page.

As a marketer, going organic makes more sense. And organic marketing makes for bigger and better conversions in most cases than any social traffic that you can hope to garnish.

*This news post was submitted by Leo Dimilo.