Long before anyone was ‘influencing’ on Facebook, reviewing Amazon products or dropping recommendations on LinkedIn, Philip Kotler – one of the early giants of marketing theory – said that ‘The best advertising is done by satisfied customers.”
That is more true than ever in the heady modern era of social media and web marketing. One recent survey found that a huge 92% of respondents stated that positive recommendations from friends, family members and other trusted connections were the biggest influence on whether they bought a product or service. Frankly, that’s an amazing majority.
How social proof conquered advertising
There’s good reason to believe that the superiority of recommendations and social influences is more powerful today than it ever has been before. Anyone who has looked back on the dominant advertising of the mid-20th century, from a historian to a Mad Men lover, can see why. Back then, consumers were naïve. Often, they bought what adverts told them to buy and drove what salespeople told them to drive.
“People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone.” – Don Draper, Mad Men
Today, the effect of advertising and marketing has been dulled by 70 years of overexposure. Consumers are bored of being told what to buy from whom and they are experienced enough to see through the façade to the people who are pulling the levers. Often, they don’t want these people making their financial decisions for them, or even influencing them.
Instead, people are looking again to those they trust to help them make decisions. Now it isn’t a matter of a gossip over the hedge with next-door on the way to the shops though. With a huge amount of shopping and financial decision-making being done online, people are looking for trusted opinions in a wider world.
Modern social proof – beyond referrals and recommendations
The problem with depending on the web for social recommendations is that it is not a tight-nit community of dependable friends. We often connect with information from thousands of people in just a few hours online through search engines, social media and ads. Any of these people can be someone other than who they say they are, saying things for a reason other than what you believe. It’s easy enough to put up a false testimonial or even claim a piece of work that isn’t yours.
This problem, and the solutions to it, are what make modern social proof so much more complicated than old recommendations and reviews.
Influencers, fakes and catfish – the problems of social proof
Type ‘fake testimonials’ into Google and you will get around 37,500,000 results. These mainly consist of examples that fakers can use and advice on how to spot these misleading bits of fools gold.
Fake testimonials are illegal as well as controversial, and they should be reported to trading standards here. They worsen the business environment for everyone and cause people to waste their money on substandard products. The problem is that they are easy to get away with online. When consumer opinions are so valuable and easy to fake, false ones are dangerous.
Talk of opinions brings us to the rising star of social proof; the influencer. Put simply, the influencer is a person with many online followers who takes money to promote a product by claiming to be personally impressed by it as a consumer. This is a new and ill-regulated practice that gives rise to a host of legal and moral controversies.
The most serious and widespread effect of all of these problems is to devalue the real social proof that honest businesses and entrepreneurs earn. This is the ultimate problem.
The solutions and how they can make your business stand out
The powers that be on the internet are coming up with more and more ways to separate the honest business from the faker.
There are many websites where testimonials can be linked to the online profile of the giver as a proof that they are real people with real opinions. These include LinkedIn, which is really useful for business-to-business sellers, Google My Business – good for getting found online – and Trust Pilot, which is designed as a trustworthy place to find reviews.
Aside from that, you can make your testimonials trustworthy by presenting them with the work you did in a portfolio, linking to the sites of the organisations involved and even giving contact details for a select few customers as references. Asking for a credit in any creative or constructive work done is also useful.
Aside from that, try to make your experience of the web one of trust and positivity by cultivating a web of reliable online business connections who will provide you with good referrals and references.