Please Stop “Robo” Marketing from Coming to Social Media.

Sameer Patel recently wrote a useful post, Marketing your Marketing, on the shallow nature of enticing people to like you on social media with coupons or other giveaways. I could not agree more with his thoughts and suggest that you read his original. Basically he was arguing against the rising practice of enticing your visitors to ‘Like’ your Facebook business page by throwing them a discount coupon.

Sameer makes the excellent point: “This looks like a knock off of trade show marketing where we are duped into believing that 1000 interested prospects came to our booth where in reality 700 just wanted to drop their business card in the till for a chance to win an iPad2.”

Then the marketing department wastes their time following up with the 700, including me. It is especially annoying when you get a follow up phone call. There needs to be a do not call option on these giveaways.

I hesitate to download white papers for the same reason, even when they look like they might be useful. I do a lot of interviews of software firms. Occasionally they send me to their web site to get a paper expanding on our conversation. Then I get a call from a marketing person who had no idea about why I got the paper or that I had been speaking to his boss for an interview. I suspect in some cases these calls are from outsourced services. While they are not technically robo calls they have the same nuisance factor and the speaker often sounds like a recorded message as they read their scripts. In fact, they are worse because you actually have to respond to them long enough to say no thanks.

While I am on it, auto-generated messages thanking you for following someone on Twitter is enough to make you want to immediately unfollow them. To paraphrase Sameer, what were they thinking?  Social media is about engagement and we need to keep this robo behavior out. 

 

Comments

[Brian Driggs]

Preach it.

There were two times in my life where white papers seemed like something of potential value. Once, for 15 minutes before I leaned they were little more than a lead-gen tool for a former employer, and today, where I'm planning to use them to deliver on the promise of relevant, meaningful information and insight.

If you have to hype a product with marketing, the product's not good enough.
If you have to bribe people to give you feedback, your organization isn't important.

Deliver the best products. Deliver the best service. Make a positive difference in the world.

[bill Ives]

Brian - Thanks. We are aligned on this.