Ethics and Social Marketing

A post in Michael Fleischner's blog about the value of referrals ("Referral Marketing Can Push You Over") got me to thinking about the value of referrals in social marketing.

Word-of-mouth referrals have a great deal of influence in our buying decisions. I'd posit that this is because the recommendation, or even a positive mention, of a product by someone we know, respect, and trust carries far more weight than a promotional message from the seller or even an independent review by someone we don't recognize.

In recognition of that, companies are increasingly turning to social marketing as a way of drumming up sales - if you can get a customer to refer friends, you stand a better chance of those friends becoming customers, and can then get them to refer their friends, and so on, which will result in exponential growth.

The problem I see with having an interest merely in "getting referrals" is that marketers are attracted to short-cuts. If you have to hound your customers, or bribe them, to incent them to refer your product to others, the value of the referral is diminished. And this damages not merely your marketing effort, and not merely your company's reputation, but the trust and respect among your customers.

Said another way, if you have a trusted friend who makes a product recommendation, and you later discover that this recommendation was prompted by the seller, it diminishes the trust you place in that friend. And if product referrals become commonplace, we begin to see "friends" as mouthpieces, which has the potential to undermine the trust we place in every person we know. This does far more harm than good, in the long run.

I realize this may come across as exaggeration - the notion that society will ever devolve to the point where you're constantly being bombarded with commercial messages and can't trust in the motives of anyone around you belongs in a dystopic novel. But then, it probably would have seemed equally absurd, twenty years ago, to suggest that people would be reluctant to answer their telephones because 90% of inbound calls were salesmen.

For what it's worth, Fleischner gets it right in the original article. He notes that people who make recommendations generally do so because they have had an excellent customer experience, one that they wish to share with their acquaintances. This implies that a company that wants referrals should be highly attentive to their customers, to create the kind of experience that people will want to talk about, without prompting or bribery.

But again, businesses love to take short-cuts, and if they can figure out a way to "get referrals" without having to undertake the (considerable) work and expense of creating a customer experience that's required to delight their customers, they'll certainly do so - and, just as they have done with telephone calls and e-mail messages - their attempts will be so clumsy and so frequent that they poison the well. And when "the well" is the relationships among people in a society, the potential damage is far more pervasive.

So in the end, what I take from this is a great deal of caution and suspicion about social media marketing. In particular, I wonder whether it should be a priority for a business, or if t is a potential hazard and a distraction from the thing that's most important of all: providing excellent customer service.