Category: Topics

Gen Y is already in the workplace and making life decisions. How will your company attract, motivate and keep them?

Google has announced another foray into social networking (Google+), and so far, reports are surprisingly good. No doubt it will not unseat the behemoth that is Facebook, but it is interesting in that Google seems to have thought out some of the most frustrating and time-wasting things about Facebook in order to solve them.

Here's a revolutionary thought: the direct selling industry invented social marketing. Even so, here are the top 10 social media mistakes made by direct sellers.

So, you've spent a good hour perfecting a funny post that may just go viral. You polish it up one last time, hit "share" and then ... nothing. No comments or shares or even likes. Don't worry, it's not you (well, not all you.) Posting something to your peeps doesn’t guarantee they'll ever see it, even if they would have loved it. This is because Facebook's software establishes relevancy, person by person, to each and everything you do.

Smart companies know the future of marketing includes "social selling", tapping individual social networks with a great product and story. Direct selling is an optimal way to do this, only most companies who see promise in the model do not necessarily need the infrastructure of a full-fledged direct selling company. Recently, demand for a deeper social selling has attracted to our industry a new kind of company, the "Tweener."

With all the upline and downline messages, event flyers, congrats, alerts, news and promotions your distributors receive, it's a wonder there's time for anyone to sell. Most email gets scanned and trashed, with only a few select messages worthy of reading. Your email needs to be one that shines through the clutter.

Last week. a friend's Facebook account was hijacked. While he was traveling, the criminals who overtook his account immediately launched a well-known money scam in an attempt to extract money from his friends. Fortunately, his friends alerted him, and it was quickly reported it to Facebook, who disabled his account the next day.

Any direct selling executive knows that one of the greatest ongoing threats to their company is an action by a governmental regulator based on overblown income or product claims made by distributors.

I added my first edit ever in Wikipedia today. I love Wikipedia for a quick summary of any subject, and was surprised when I visited the Online Reputation Management entry today and found what was basically an ad. So, I got an account and went to work. It was fun.

I sat in recently on a client's annual convention and it was a blast. Lots of energy and fun for this company that does a large amount of its business in places like China, Korea and Mexico. Which got me thinking, how can we capture all this excitement in far-flung countries via the social web, as we do in the US? Believe it or not, millions of people outside the US are using social media, and a large number of them aren't using it the same way we are.