I love social media. And I love try­ing and test­ing new stuff. If there’s some new social media tool, web­site, or com­mu­nity, I’ll be one of the first ones to try it out.

But there is a limit. And I think we need to be care­ful. Because social media is like a drug. It can become dan­ger­ously addic­tive. It can even kill your business.

Social media seems to be the cur­rent fad. Everybody’s in on it like it’s one big cock­tail party you just don’t want to leave.

But the way social media is cur­rently being touted, hyped up, and used (or should I say, abused), is rem­i­nis­cent of some­thing that hap­pened way back in the 90s.

(I’ll come back to this in a moment.)

Yes­ter­day, I watched a bril­liant video by Loren Feld­man. Feld­man has a tell-​​it-​​like-​​it-​​is style. While he may be blunt and use strong lan­guage to voice his opin­ion, he is never afraid to voice it. Regard­less of what I think of his style, his video res­onated with me.

In it, he drove home an impor­tant point. I believe what he talked about is not only right, but also some­thing we need to real­ize and become wise about before we need­lessly kill our busi­nesses. And that’s ignor­ing the most impor­tant place on the web…

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“If you like to gam­ble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, you lose some, it’s all the same to me.” — Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”

I’m get­ting fed up.

It seems to me that prod­uct launches of late have less to do with sub­stance and strat­egy, and more to do with tricks and tac­tics. Blame it on the econ­omy. But I think we need to blame it on some­thing else. Some­thing more sinister.

In fact, have you not noticed that a grow­ing num­ber of mar­keters are urg­ing you to join their “club,” as if it’s some secret, back-​​of-​​the-​​room, clan­des­tine poker game?

Speak­ing of poker, busi­ness is some­what of a gam­ble. And admit­tedly, gam­bling can be prof­itable. Very prof­itable. After all, the more you gam­ble, the greater you win, right?

But do we really need to gam­ble with our customers?

What about the long-​​term? What about build­ing busi­nesses rather than just mak­ing money? What about invest­ing instead? What about invest­ing in your cus­tomers that can pay some­times 10 to 100 times more over the long run?

For exam­ple, some­one men­tioned a new pay-​​per-​​follower pro­gram on Twit­ter. (Ugh. How is that any dif­fer­ent than from spam­mers buy­ing bulk email lists?) I responded, and this pretty much sums up my phi­los­o­phy — it should be yours, too — with:

“I’d hate to treat my cus­tomers like pris­on­ers or prostitutes.”

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A recent coach­ing ses­sion touched upon the grow­ing trend that some mar­keters have adopted to squeeze out sales from exit­ing traffic.

In other words, you visit a web­site and read the saleslet­ter. You decide it’s not for you, so you leave. But when you try leave (either as you close your browser or sim­ply hover your mouse out­side of it), the web­site attempts to make a last-​​ditch offer.

The com­mon prac­tice is to offer a dis­count, and a recent trend is to make it through vir­tual sales assis­tant just before the prospect clicks away from the screen.

(Vir­tual assis­tant or not, it is no dif­fer­ent than a one-​​time offer appear­ing in an exit pop-​​up or spawned browser win­dow once the vis­i­tor leaves.)

Not only is the prac­tice annoy­ing, it can be detri­men­tal to your sales efforts.

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Michel Fortin: Well, it’s the same idea. Jim Rohn said, “Don’t become wealthy at the expense of oth­ers. Become wealthy in the ser­vice of oth­ers.” Every per­son who is hap­pi­est in this world serves others.

Whether you’ve built wealth because you pro­duce a prod­uct or pro­vided a ser­vice that was at the ser­vice of oth­ers or you gave value to other people’s lives or you gave your life to char­ity serv­ing oth­ers, to me that is so important.

By doing that it is like for­give­ness in a sense, where you can get out of that this huge feel­ing in your­self that you’ve accom­plished some­thing that is true to you, not some­thing that is going to be a goal that you reach in the future, not some­thing that is going to be true to the other peo­ple around you who you’re serv­ing and you’re think­ing that you’re just doing this for other people.

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“Suc­cess is sim­ply a mat­ter of luck. Ask any fail­ure.“
– Earl Wilson

Goals prop­erly aligned will give you an impelling momen­tum that, like a snow­ball rolling down a snow cov­ered hill, increases in size and speed along the way. The more you work on your pri­or­i­ties, the more moti­vated you will become and the more timely the results you will pro­duce. They will increase and keep on increasing.

Pam Lon­tos once wrote, “Momen­tum cre­ates more momen­tum as moti­va­tion actu­ally feeds on itself.” Each lit­tle suc­cess achieved will increase your self-​​esteem, your effec­tive­ness, and of course, your efficiency.

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My 50-​​page report last week cre­ated quite a stir. Some peo­ple who did not read it may have mis­un­der­stood my point. How­ever, I’m not going to make another blog post ded­i­cated to the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of online audio or video. (I prob­a­bly will, but I’ll save it for another time.)

But to sum­ma­rize, while saleslet­ters in prin­ci­ple are not dying — I’ve cho­sen “Death of the Saleslet­ter” as a title to get peo­ple to read the report, among other things — and long copy is here to stay, the deliv­ery mech­a­nism is indeed slowly being replaced. (Granted, we still have a way to go, yet.)

By the same token, a cer­tain type of saleslet­ter is indeed dying.

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