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How Relationship Marketing Trumps Traditional Direct Marketing (and Why the Social Media Craze Is Mostly Hype)

March 31st, 2009 by Vishen Lakhiani Read more about Social Media

Jack Can­field asked to inter­view me recently on the topic of social media. I did the inter­view but stressed that I really DISLIKE being asked to talk about social media mar­ket­ing. I con­sider the whole social media mar­ket­ing indus­try over-hyped.

jack_canfield

I’m one of the most-in-demand speak­ers in this space (as I write this I’ll be in Vegas on stage in a few days with Tony Rob­bins to talk about social media mar­ket­ing). But I want to empha­size the PSYCHOLOGY over the TECHNOLOGY.

Too many peo­ple fall into the trap of get­ting overly enam­ored with Face­book, Twit­ter and the rest of the social media to-do list, that they end up neglect­ing the impor­tance of apply­ing per­sua­sion psy­chol­ogy to actu­ally make the traf­fic deliver. I’m inter­ested in response rates first — traf­fic second.

Picture of Vishen Lakhiani

So, in this inter­view I reveal how I apply spe­cific pat­terns of influ­ence (psy­chol­ogy) within a frame­work of social media like blogs, Face­book and YouTube, (tech­nol­ogy), to help many of the celebri­ties and best-selling authors I work with build a closer rela­tion­ship with their audi­ence and get far bet­ter responses.

Lis­ten on!

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About the Author

Vishen Lakhiani Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

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4 Responses to “How Relationship Marketing Trumps Traditional Direct Marketing (and Why the Social Media Craze Is Mostly Hype)”

  1. John Kunkle

    Hi Vishen,

    I lis­tened to your broad­cast with Jack Can­field above. I can’t tell you what an epiphany it was. Thanks ever so much for your insight. I will begin imple­ment­ing your strate­gies imme­di­ately. Where do you find out about the appli­ca­tions for Facebook.

    Thanks,

    John

  2. Mark McClure

    Vishen,
    This was a great call — a full hour of value. Guess I’ll just have to rec­i­p­ro­cate some­how in the future ;-)

    Here’s what I found par­tic­u­larly valuable:

    1– The med­i­ta­tion prod­uct and the author’s use of rela­tion­ship mar­ket­ing. While I agree with you that the sign-up page isn’t 25 pages of hard-core direct response copy for his prod­uct, the OTO on the sign up thank you page has all those ‘clos­ing’ good­ies we copy­writ­ers like to see…

    2– The Ken­neth Yu Twit­ter exam­ple. Mooo! Yes, it worked for him. Good one.

    3– Your company’s use of YouTube for recruit­ing pur­poses. Very sub­tle indeed.

    4– The Frank K phe­nom­e­non. Hmm, I’m almost afraid to sign up for his list again with­out freez­ing my CC, but how else are email copy­writ­ers sup­posed to learn from the best?

    Two things:

    1– Is Gary V now out­sourc­ing those 2000+ daily email replies…or using voice dic­ta­tion soft­ware? He’ll be a clas­sic Carpal Tun­nel Syn­drome patient at that rate…

    2– The url you gave for the ear­lier ver­sion of the med­i­ta­tion prod­uct is now redi­rect­ing to the new ver­sion. (unless I heard wrongly.) I’d like to add both to a swipe file study.

    Thanks and Regards.

  3. Patrice

    I also pre­fer to have more response first then later traf­fic con­cerns from engag­ing online mar­ket­ing through social media like face­book and tweeter.

  4. Kristin

    I’ve been hear­ing so much about social media mar­ket­ing. I was really over­whelmed and con­fused by the con­cept. This call was a real eye-opener for me! I appre­ci­ate your can­did com­ments about what works and what doesn’t. The exam­ples are key, as I am a hands-on learner.

    One ques­tion: I know this call was recorded in March. Twit­ter has taken off with a vengeance since that time. You really empha­sized use of Face­book on this call. Do you think Twit­ter has become more impor­tant, or equiv­a­lent to Face­book for rela­tion­ship marketing?

    Lastly, I’m glad direct mar­ket­ing is being replaced by shorter text! I always won­dered why it worked so well, as I would often get too bored to con­tinue read­ing most direct mar­ket­ing ads!!

    Thank you!

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