People will know when you ‘truly care’.

They’ll see it in the fact that you spent that little extra time on designing your website.

They’ll see it in the little extra thought you put into making a remarkable product.

They’ll see it in the minutiae of their everyday interactions with you or your organization.

Conversely your customers can easily tell if they are ‘just a number’.

They’ll spot the fact that you are just trying to monetize their attention.

They’ll call an instant BS on your rhetoric or finely tuned ‘key messaging’.

If you’re internally saying to yourself, ‘aww you mean I have to care about my customers’ you should definitely stay away from social media. It’s not the place for you.

If you want your customers to love you, you need to start by loving them.

The purpose of social media is to increase your level of engagement with your audience. It’s to move people from some state of general unawareness to another state of admiration, loyalty and advocacy.

You do this so you can achieve some higher level business goal. Such as selling goods, hiring staff, increasing student enrollment, building goodwill etc.

But before you can achieve that goal you need to remember that the first step in social media (I would argue anywhere)  is getting people to like you.

Rock stars and politicians understand this.

A politician without a following is just a guy standing alone at the podium talking. A rockstar without fans is just singing to an empty stadium.

It’s a popularity contest. And, the one who has the most engaged friends/fans/followers wins.

Notice I said engaged fans.

A politician with many followers doesn’t matter if the followers don’t vote. A rock star who has fans that won’t pay for mp3s or go to concerts can’t make a living.

So, if you need a check on whether your social media plans are on the right track I would offer these two questions (the answers will guide your actions):

1. Will my actions make people like me? If not, I would reconsider your plans/posts/tweets etc
2. Will my actions make the people who already like me, like me more?

What are your thoughts? Do you agree/disagree? What is the key to getting people to like you?

Everyone wants to know: Is there a secret marketing formula? Where is the location of the money tree? Is there a holy ‘get rich’ marketing grail or silver bullet solution?

I wish there was.

But, the reality is that there is no silver bullet solution. And, your existing bullets are turning to rubber as we speak.

E-mail campaigns have an ‘open rate’ of less than 20%. Staggering. Only a small fraction of the people who you send email to (even from a permission-based list) even bother to open your message. The click through rates are even more depressing: 1-4%.

Typical webpages are never viewed more than a handful of times, by a handful of people. Most sites see 20% of their content get 80% of the traffic, often leaving hundreds of pages untouched and unread (despite the fact that you spent all of that precious time creating those pages).

Each new piece of content added to the web decreases everyone else’s (including radio, television, magazines and newspapers)  odds of being noticed. Attention is a finite resource and our ability to capture it is fading fast.

So if our tactics aren’t working anymore, what can we do? (Please leave your comments below)