What email marketing’s popular younger brother, social media marketing, can learn from its elder.
In email marketing, we know our sender reputation is our currency; our invitation to the game. Without a positive reputation, we lose our access to the playing field. A bad reputation means bad deliverability which means a smaller audience and fewer sales.
Email marketers also know our reputation is in the hands of our audience. If readers mark us as spam or an ISP like Google or Hotmail thinks our content looks fishy or we blast out our message to a bunch of people who either don’t exist or don’t listen… Whether we’re legit marketers or not, we end up in the dreaded spam bucket. Valid marketers can end up on blacklists or get blocked from Yahoo! just for looking like a spammer. (Read more in this DM News post by emfluence CEO Dave Cacioppo on how to not look like a spammer)
It may not be quite the same punishment, but spammy behavior in social media can hurt your brand, too. One of the many things marketers have learned from social media is that it pays to be genuine and to be nice. Both things are important to your brand’s reputation online. Lately though, it seems like social media marketers are hitting the Terrible 2’s and starting to test their boundaries. Recently, a brand hijacked a trending political conversation to sell a clothing line, for example. Another blasted out, one-by-one, LinkedIn messages to members of an Email Marketers Group, with a brief invite to connect… and a P.S. that reads:
P.S. Also the training that Mike did on dominating PPC (pay per click) in this industry to generate massive leads was Awesome!! I am so glad he posted the replay of that so I can truely study it thoroughly. Copy and paste this link for that replay if you would like to see it as well.
That, my social marketing friends, is what a trained email marketer would call spammy. Not because it breaks the CAN-SPAM law but because it is unsolicited, undesired and unrelated content from a stranger. Better than that even, there’s a spelling error in it. It’s spammy without actually being spam.
What do you do when you see that someone you’re connected to is spammy (or straight up spam)? You stop listening. In email marketing, you unsubscribe, or worse, you can complain, i.e. “Mark this as Junk”. If you get enough complaints, your reputation suffers and you can actually lose the right to talk to even those who want your email messages.
In social media, you can complain, too, but more likely your audience just tunes you out or turns you off. The wider effect in social media is that your brand can take some serious heat – in a very viral platform – for not playing by the code of ethics set out by social media marketers before you. Remember what it was like to get picked last for kickball? Now you’ll actually be kicked off the field. And all the players will talk about you, right in front of your face.
So, as marketers become more savvy and more brave in the field of social media marketing, remember the lessons we learned as email marketers and keep that reputation in pristine condition. Tactless, offensive, fraudulent (or just plain boring) content will get your pass to the playing field revoked. You may even think you’re still playing the game, but if you tweet in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it…
For more on how email and social can work together check out email marketing and social media: better together
