I finally figured it out. After much curiosity and study. And yes after wasting nearly twenty thousand dollars of my own hard-earned money. I finally figured out why social media works for some and does not work for others. I have proven it in my own life and anecdotally in my clients’ lives.

If you would like to prove it with me, I will need about ten-ish thousand of your dollars and about two months of playing with your product on the internet. (And that $ figure does not include my time. It only includes the programs we’ll use and the funds we’ll burn through to get you the definitive answer you seek.) Not interested in burning through more cash? Here is my working synopsis.

Ask any damn good sales person the secret to sales, and he/she will tell you ‘listen’. Maybe they will tell you to ‘solve the customer’s problem’. Maybe they will tell you, get the client to ‘know, like and trust you’. A handful will tell you to ‘hear why they want to buy’. A few might even say ‘feel the customer’s emotion’.

And everyone will be right. Because the truth is the truly excellent, award-winning, mighty fine, exceptional salespeople use ALL five senses to sell. They use emotion. Because they know and understand that human beings (you and I) are emotional beings. We use all five of our senses – seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling when we buy. And we DO want to buy. We only need two things: 1. The right sequence of events to show us why we need to buy and 2. ALL of those five senses lined up correctly to get us in the right mood.

Social media has been sold to us as a simple way to sell our products and services. No work, no guilt, no extra effort. Wild West. Make lots of money. It is super easy. All we need to do is build it right, and the customers will come. And then — they will naturally buy. And we bought all the lies because we were lazy, or greedy, or introverted, or could not speak or were glued to our computers, or paralysed with fear or numb with a myriad of other excuses.

So how come today, nearly twenty years later, so many folks are frustrated and sad because customers have NOT bought? And the pressure from Social Media has been ‘Try this, here is a new app. Try this new gizmo. You just need to fix this, tweak that, experiment here.’ And every damn thing has cost us more money. Sometimes it worked. Most times it did not. More frustration. Why? WHY? WTF?

Because. Here is the big secret.

There is Very Little Real Emotion In Social Media

First, they told us to put up a website! Okay, that was nothing more than putting up a glossy brochure. Then they said start writing. Writing only required one sense…Reading or Seeing. Then it was all about content creation and management. But really? That just meant we wrote even more. Which meant we still offered a one-sense experience. One sense. Mix it up a bit. Use pictures. Still using that one damn sense — seeing.

Then they told us we needed to generate engagement in the form of conversations. So use Facebook. Now we did more conversing with more people. Which meant we did way more typing and way more reading. Which meant we simply did more seeing. Still communicating with one sense.

Let’s try videos! Which is nothing more than TV on shrunken steroids. Which uses two senses. Seeing and Hearing. Terrific! Progress is being made! Those sales should be streaming through the door NOW. Right?

Ummm not so fast. Two senses are better than one sense. Music is always cool. BUT. People got tired of reading, analysing and watching pictures. It all kinda blurred. The quality fell off. There weren’t a lot of good writers around, nor a lot of original thinkers to pay attention to. Pretty soon everything sounded very, very similar. Boring. Bland. Mundane. And besides. We still can’t feel, taste or smell it.

Social Media does not work for most businesses because it only engages two of the five senses we have. Seeing or visual and hearing or audio. That is it. So if you sell stuff that does not require feeling, tasting or smelling, you are a perfect candidate for social media. Go to town, find your groove and sell it on the Internet. Use all the videos, pics and words you want, because here’s the thing. Social Media is only just another damn tool. And the experience of thousands of businesses who have wasted money there proves that it is not for everybody.

Social Media Is NOT A Digital Sales Force

Social Media can be a good alternative advertising campaign. But it is only one way to get boring information out to potential and existing customers in an entertaining manner. It is unequivocally NOT an alternative sales force. NOT. In the Least. Because it does not convey the emotion, the passion and the great end-result you know your product or service can make to the lives of those human beings you ultimately want to call customers.

Think about that. Really think about that!

Face to Face Is Hands Down Your Best Option

If you do really well in person with emotion-vision, which is the space, most small businesses play in, here is what you need to be doing.

-Take a good look through all the direct mail flyers, magazines, newspaper, radio and old-school paper stuff as well as all the online tools available to invest your meagre advertising budget dollars in. And learn the basic sales story building techniques that real advertising people still use today to sell goods and services.

-Ponder how you can really maximise your marketing and advertising strategies and investments in all avenues using ALL the tools available, to build awareness for your brand.

-Understand that the prime directive in selling is human beings are emotional and DO want to buy. Therefore, we humans need only two key things: 1. The right sequence of events to show us why we need to buy and 2. ALL of those five senses lined up correctly to get us in the right mood. (Listen, I am not saying the prime directive is straightforward; I am trying to show you it cannot be met entirely on social media.)

-Know this: At the end of the day FACE to FACE is your best option for closing sales. Because NOTHING beats a damn good sales person.

-If you are wary about your own selling abilities, investigate and interview distributors and sales agents and then implement sterling practices and processes that will help propel them upwards to enable you to reach all your revenue goals.

And by the way, nothing beats an entrepreneur with average sales skills who loves his or her product or service so much that he or she can’t imagine how the target customer can live without their it. NOTHING.

If you would like to learn more ideas, sign up for our monthly thinking email series here. Email

To your success.