With everyone and their dog out writing “revolutionary” manifestos, I thought I would throw something together for the social media crowd.  It is my hope that social media addicts will save some cash on those spendy membership sites that teach you how to turn twitter into some sort of money tree and instead read my manifesto (also I have oceanfront property in the Mojave desert for sale).  Seeing as I’m currently tripping on Percocet as a result of my wisdom teeth getting yanked out,  this post could be divinely inspired and I could be enlightened. Or something.

There Are Marketing Models For a Reason

The social media marketer is a strange breed.  Unlike most entrepreneurs, they build their business in the reverse order than just about every other entrepreneur on the planet.  The proven business process is as follows: 1. find a need out in your society that someone requires filling. 2. Develop a product, service or something else that fulfills this need.  3. Find a way to connect to people in the world that have the need you’ve discovered. 4. Sell your thing to them. 5. Build infrastructure to continually support this need.  This is a process that tends to work and often makes businesses money.

The social media marketer does this roughly in the reverse order: first they build up an infrastructure.  They build a blog, follow spam thousands of people on twitter, desperately seek out well-known blogs to write guest posts for, network with people who are in the same social media strata that they are and so on.  They do this because in social media, being “internet famous” always comes first.  Next, they build a product as fast as they can.  There is little research done on finding legitimate social needs, they just build a product that is usually about 98% redundant with their peers’ products. Since everyone else with 20,000 mutual close-knit followers is building products with minimal market research, so why shouldn’t they?

Third, the social media marketer decides that while 20,000 followers is cool, there isn’t  really a strong connection with any of them, so they will pick a few token followers of theirs to “authentically” mentor.  All in the name of marketing of course. Step four is when they finally discover that it might be worthwhile to build products that people actually need, but by this point they are so hooked on selling $150+ per hour coaching services, that actually writing a full non-fiction length ebook sounds downright tedious.  Instead they write revolutionary manifestos to push their half-baked coaching and membership site services. And so it goes.

The Social Media Marketing Manifesto:

(written under the influence)

1. Get a bunch of people to look like they are following you on a popular but overrated social media website.
2. Use this inflated fame to recruit followers who actually have pulses.
3. Create a “free product” and only let your followers download it under the condition that they submit themselves to your “absolutely free” email list.
4. Create an information product, membership site, or start calling yourself a “life coach” (sorry Duff).
5. Use your “absolutely free” email list to remind your followers with great regularity that you are in fact selling something that they need.
6. Direct them to a persuasive form letter that reminds them of how enlightened your lifestyle is.
7. Profit?

Is this really a great business model people?  I’m on an opiate right now and I can tell you that its bullshit!