So, I received a message from a contact on a social media site with the title: “This is worth checking out”. Normally, I would have clicked the website address he sent without a second thought, but then, I froze.
“Is it really worth checking out?”
Am I even sure my contact actually sent me the message? The app could have auto sent the (lame) message to everybody on his contact list. What if the website is even a malware that will just infect my device and open me up to hackers (yeah, I have been watching Mr Robot too).
After all these analysis, I ignored the message and moved on. I came here to write this post!
Is this the end of relationship marketing?
Relationship marketing is the idea of getting people you know and trust to market products and services to you rather than a strange, cold company that you have never heard about. Relationship marketing eventually gave a strong base and footing to multi-level marketing where you make money by recommending products and services you ought to have tried and found working to others.
Sadly, both relationship marketing and multi-level marketing seems to have broken down in terms of the original idea of simply trying to be useful. What everyone is interested in now is the number of points they will accrue to their account when you buy or click or whatever and not the value the product ought to add.
When the rush to promote our business services leads us to erode and pollute these marketing channels, it reduces the potency of the campaign and we would then need to start looking for alternatives.
It does not have to be like that.
A single heart-felt referral is usually more useful to business in the longer run than a dozen scammy or semi-scammy referrals. But as always, if all we are counting is how much and not how well, we may as well send out a million automated messages like the one I received and get ignored like I did.
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Watching The World
- Google Nigeria country manager says 250,000 roads and 200,000 places of public interest have been mapped in Nigeria so far.
- Shoprite to Open 14 New Stores in Nigeria.
