Skip to main content

Internet Marketing Must Die: Real Life Lessons In Getting Out From Behind Your Desk

By May 28, 2014February 1st, 2018Marketing Insights & Strategy
Internet Marketing Must Die: Real Life Lessons In Getting Out From Behind Your Desk

My business depends on helping other businesses market themselves online.

So I should be falling all over myself convincing people why internet marketing is the best thing since Oreos (which are way better than sliced bread, by the way).

And yet that’s not what I’m about to say.

What I’m about to say is: step away from the keyboard. Close Facebook. Get off Twitter. Stop working on your next marketing email. Ditch Skype.

Put on some pants and go meet someone for breakfast right now.

Even if it’s 6PM, someone, somewhere, will make you pancakes. Go.

Still here? Ok, then read on to find out why it’s absolutely necessary to leave technology behind and go out and meet people face-to-face.

The Shiny Days Of The Internet Are Over

You know how when you got a new bike for your birthday it was all shiny and new and brilliant and you couldn’t wait to get out and ride it?

But eventually you got used to it. You scuffed it up a bit. Riding it became more utilitarian than anything else, a way to go buy yourself some bubblegum when your mom wouldn’t drive you to the store.

Maybe you fell off a few times and that made you mad so you kicked it. And stubbed your toe, which made you madder so you shoved your bike into the shed and walked to the store instead.

That’s kind of like the internet.

Ten or fifteen years ago when it was still pretty shiny and new, we all ran around building shiny, new websites and using impressive technology like Flash to make our sites do cool things.

We discovered email, and sometime later, social media. We blew horns and threw glitter.

And then it became utilitarian.

To matter even a little bit, we all need websites now. And a social presence. And a blossoming email list. Nobody pats you on the back for using Flash or says, “Good job!” when you nail your call to action.

Our businesses are easily lost in the noise. We may shout louder, with cheaper prices or better deals. We may tweet ten times a day and pour dollars into Facebook ads in hopes that someone, most likely a stranger, will notice and hand over their money.

But mostly we wait. And we blog and we email and we advertise and we email some more. If we’re very good and very patient, we see results from our efforts. In the meantime our bubblegum gets really stale.

So if we’re smart on top of being good and patient… we start walking.

Business Is People

Don’t get me wrong – the internet is a great venue for marketing and advertising. It can help you build your brand and authority and reach people you couldn’t have otherwise, even with a full tank of gas.

But it still doesn’t substitute for being in a room with an actual human being.

I imagine most of you reading this run a business – a real-world business that provides a product or service to your customers. You’re not just running an “internet business” where you hawk some webinar or email course or entry into the MLM plan du jour as your sole source of revenue.

And if you run a business, whether you sell green plants or car washes, massages or design services, your business is not about the thing you sell but about the people you sell it to.

It’s about learning what they want and need and figuring out how to give it to them. It’s about connections, relationships and conversations. I don’t care how many analytics you have or what type of amazing stalker-ish behavioral tracking software you use, there is nothing as powerful as sitting across a table from someone and looking into their eyes as you conduct business.

Don’t believe me? Or maybe you just like your pajamas too much and think Skype will do nicely? Here’s why you’re wrong.

I Have Caller ID. I Bet You Do, Too.

I also know how to pretend to be “invisible” online. Think you’re going to catch me to talk? Think again.

And forget email. “It went into my spam folder.” “Oh, I must have missed that.” “Really? You sent that six weeks ago? Nope, didn’t get it.” Or the ever more likely {  }.

That’s an empty set for those less mathematically inclined.

I’ve generated tons of leads online. People who read my blogs, get my emails, even chat with me on Twitter or Skype. Sometimes they pan out. Sometimes they disappear into the ether.

A statistically significant percentage of people will literally never return a call or email again. Since I’m so charming and lovely, I can only imagine the reason is because they opted not to work with me but are too embarrassed to say so.

But I can tell you one thing that has never happened when I’ve met someone in person: being ignored.

Never. Not once. In fifteen years in business, I have never sat across a table from someone and then walked out of the room only to never hear from them again. Even if they decide not to work with me, there is, at a minimum, a returned call or an email saying so.

It’s a lot harder to pretend someone doesn’t exist when you had physical proof of their presence in your conference room just last week.

The problem with connecting with people on the internet is that it’s impersonal and all too easy to disappear. You don’t really have to see someone online as a person at all. They are just an avatar, a nicely Photoshopped headshot and a few carefully crafted characters in a status update.

Making a face-to-face connection changes the relationship from the very moment your eyes meet. You may not particularly like the person or want to work with them, but your humanness comes out and you’ll at least have the courtesy to say so.

There’s No Photoshopping In Real Life

I’ve been slow to adopt video chat. Mostly because the people I chat with are internet people and they have only ever seen me in my cute pink shirt with my hair done and a little Photoshop going on to get rid of a couple of baggy eyeballs.

But hop onto video chat and now suddenly I have to think about whether or not I’ve brushed my hair or put on eyeliner. Once I finally did get the hang of video chat, I spent many months getting my hair cut in different configurations just so my forehead wouldn’t look so big or my cheeks too round.

Don’t laugh, you’re just as neurotic.

In real life you don’t get to fix that with a skillful swish of the paint tool or tilt of the camera.

You’re forced to be yourself, whether you have bulging eyeballs or crooked teeth. You’re forced to view other people as themselves and not as their own nicely retouched photo.

It goes beyond photos, too. Be honest: how long does it take you to write a blog post or put together that “personal” email? Me? I can spend anywhere from 2-4 hours on a single one. Not because I’m doing some profound research but because I’m debating whether I should use the word “debating” or “evaluating”.  Because once these words reach your eyes I want them to be as perfect as possible.

I don’t get to do that in a conversation. Heck, I don’t get to think at all. I don’t get to formulate a smart response or choose the best words. I just have to go.

The internet has, in some ways, made us louder and meaner and more likely to say things that we would never say out loud to a “real” person.

It has, in other ways, made us censor ourselves, saying only those things we carefully craft with the right message and the proper adjectives.

Try doing that when you’re having a cup of coffee with a prospect or customer. Connecting with people in person removes the character limits, eliminates the editing tools and requires that we respond truthfully.

Sure, there are some very good liars out there who will “network” and “sell” you just about anything using just about any ploy or promise. But most of us? We just hope we got the eyeliner on straight and then we talk – human-to-human.

Attention Can Be Your Biggest Failure Point

I recently scheduled a demo with a sales rep for a product I was interested in purchasing. It went on the calendar in between a prospecting phone call and a project deadline.

At the designated time I dialed into the Webex meeting and a very nice, very polite sales rep launched into his pitch.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it was a full fifteen minutes before I heard a word he said. At some point, realizing he had asked me a question, I hedged by redirecting the conversation.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear his pitch – I had asked for the demo, after all. But someone had asked me a question on Skype, a client emailed with a problem, the project deadline was looming and my computer desktop was a mess, so why not just delete a few of these old files? Wait, is that Word document my new blog post? Oh, never mind, that was from last week. This week I have to write about networking…

What?

I’d say it’s easy to get distracted but it would be more accurate to say it’s impossible not to be.

Can you imagine inviting a client or prospect to your office and then checking your text messages under the table or getting up to bring in the mail? How about in the middle of a conversation, rearranging your desk?

Half the battle for business is the battle for attention. Will I buy that software? I have no idea. I still don’t know what it does. It’s not the sales rep’s fault. If you’re desperately vying for someone’s attention via email, chat or even phone, you know how difficult it can be.

Person-to-person meetings force you to pay attention. They remove the distractions and unless you’re really rude, it would never occur to you to do anything but focus on your guest.

Build Trust Faster, Earn Deeper Loyalty

We started this blog four years ago. Until then, our business had been strictly referral-based. Our happy clients referred us to their friends and colleagues who then became happy clients and so our net widened.

Almost every relationship we built was done over breakfast or beer or a baseball game.

When we expanded our business to include “online prospects” – people we only met and communicated with via our blog, email and sometimes phone – we learned a few things.

One, it takes a long time to build trust. It doesn’t happen in a few tweets or a hundred blogs. In fact, we only began to see real turnover in terms of generating business from our online relationships nearly two years after we set out to do it.

That’s a long time if you’re waiting for a paycheck!

We also learned that trust doesn’t necessarily translate to loyalty. Someone may trust us enough to hand over the cash, maybe even to do it again and best yet, to refer us to friends. But when Joe Cheap comes along with a deal they can’t refuse? Joe Cheap gets the job.

“I know you provide great value,” they say. “But this is a lot cheaper.”

I have rarely built a relationship with someone offline who says the same thing. I wouldn’t say “never” but it’s a lot less prevalent.

In fact, I’ve had clients defer the thing they want to do until such time as they could work with us rather than hire Joe Cheap.

That comes, in part, from building a solid relationship. Knowing someone is a whole lot different than simply “knowing they provide value”.

It also comes out of loyalty. I have relationships with vendors who I stick with because I know and trust them – and because even if they’re too expensive for me right now, it would just feel wrong to go elsewhere.

That’s the magic of personal relationships. It’s not always about the bottom line. Heck, it’s not always about the value! I’ve known people to stick with subpar vendors out of personal loyalty, even if they knew they could get a better deal and better service somewhere else.

We humans are not always rational. We make emotional buying decisions. We base our business loyalties on personal factors that sometimes have nothing to do with business. And I don’t care how many video Skype chats you do or how many emails you send, you will never make that kind of connection online.

Internet Marketing Must Die, Reprised

Four years later, we still use our blog and email and Facebook ads to generate leads and business. It’s worked.

But what we have also done is stopped doing so much internet marketing and refocused our energies on – guess what – “real life” people.

They listen better.

They trust easier.

They convert faster.

They stay longer.

They don’t disappear never to be heard from again or leave after one job for the next best price in the neighborhood. They may say no, but at least they say something. And we learn, we practice listening, we practice educating, we practice negotiating.

Mostly we practice being human.

We are more than the sum of our avatars and gravatars and status updates and social bios. We are both smarter than our thesaurus-worthy blog posts and more awkward than our edited paragraphs would attest. We stutter, we say “um” a lot and if I’m really nervous, I will revert to the height of Valley Girl days and use the word “like” as a noun, verb, adjective and filler. Sometimes in the same sentence.

Ultimately it’s those things, good and bad, brushed hair or wrinkled shirt, loud laugh or weird tic, that connect us with others as human beings and build the type of relationships that matter.

So if you really want your business to succeed, go ahead and blog your heart out. Build your online authority and widen your net. Post ads and send emails. Connect with your “list”.

Then shut down your computer, put away your smart phone and connect with your human. I guarantee you those connections will take you a lot farther in business and in life.

This post is part of the monthly Word Carnival series of posts. This month, our carnies talk about ditching tech and getting out into the real world to meet people. Whether it’s networking, learning, prospecting or just getting together and hanging out, this month it’s all about making real connections. Read the rest of the Word Carnival posts here for more great advice and insight from some of the smartest business owners and entrepreneurs you’ll meet.

Join the discussion 23 Comments

  • I want to start a movement. I need a good hashtag. I want to remind people, like you did, that life comes first – even in business. That’s why the standard work week is 40 hours. Because we should always spend more time living than we spend working. Social really DOES NOT need to be 24-7-365. Set social hours and then enjoy life unplugged. It makes us better people and it makes us better business owners, bosses and managers!

    • Now that’s a topic for discussion! There is certainly a time to unplug for the sake of unplugging. It’s amazing what a different mindset you have when you spend a few minutes in “the real world”.

    • Not that you’re wrong – but, I’d just like to point out, the “standard” work week is 40 hours because the military demands a GDP comprised of AT LEAST that much. National Security Council Document 68.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SftL2UAaVmY

      In my opinion, it really could, and ought to be, much shorter. Maybe 30 hours, even. But then again, there’s a lot of inefficiency in the system of knowledge work that becoming burnt out is a natural result of the process of working.

      Contrast this to blue-collar work and inefficiencies are directly tied to performance metrics; your capability to perform an 8 hour workday is dictated by the safety of your workplace, the efficiency of the inputs feeding you work, and your ability to focus on completing the proper steps/diagnosing the problem correctly with a minimum of wasteful testing.

      If you want to build a better knowledge worker, you have to teach them how to work with their hands effectively, first.

  • AlisaMeredith says:

    Even as my introverted self was saying, “No! No! No!” to this, I knew you were exactly dead-on as usual, Carol Lynn! The part that really struck me was about the attention problem. So true – I know it to be the case for myself, which is why I really love an in-person conference and get 100x more out of them than something online, even though I would rather stay in my office in my gym clothes than actually speak to real human beings.

    As much as it take a lot out of me, I get more in return. Such a great read – sharing!

    • We seem to be a big bunch of introverts! I am too, and yet there is something energizing about actually engaging people face to face. You don’t get that same thing online. As for attention, sadly you don’t even get it in person all the time, which I why I pull out Trick #2 which is meet OUT OF THE OFFICE! You have to get people out of their comfort zone and then they can focus.

  • Another masterpiece, Carol Lynn. 🙂

    “We are more than the sum of our avatars and gravatars and status updates and social bios.” I’m shouting the biggest “Amen” to that!

    Don’t get me wrong.

    If it wasn’t for the ever lovin’ internet, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting you and Ralph … and many other true professionals. But you know what I’d really be jazzed about?! Meeting you in person. That would be a joy!

    Everything you’ve so eloquently brought to the forefront in this post is not only worthy of praise, but it’s the truth in blatant black and white. I’m an introvert (like Alisa) but I place a high value on human contact and interaction. I’ve oftentimes remarked I can’t, in fact, genuinely get to “know” someone unless I can establish eye to eye contact. And video conferencing really doesn’t count. Know why? I place my hands on people while I’m talking with them. I need them to “feel” my thoughts and emotions. Try doing THAT online! Just can’t happen.

    Thank you for reminding us we’re humans, first and foremost.

    • Same for me – I have met some fantastic people online (don’t tell anyone but I like some of them better than people I know “for real”) but I, too, would love to meet them in person. If I had lottery amounts of money I would travel all over the world meeting people! Funny coming from a fellow introvert, and yet that is the best way to connect. You know what else is interesting, coming from an Italian family I grew up with a lot of hand gestures and touching. And I think the internet has wiped it out of me. Now I am like… STAY IN YOUR OWN SPACE!! lol

      I do like eating with people. I think that’s a good indicator of whether or not you will get along 🙂 (Must be the Italian again). Pass the meatballs and meet me in Chicago!

  • As an introvert, I’d love to deny the power of face to face meetings, but I can’t – and you’re right. Thinking about it, some of my most enduring business relationships are with people I’ve met face to face. One client once said to me: “When I meet you face to face, I can tell what kind of person you are and whether we can work together.” That’s the magic of it.

    • Let me tell you, I thought Skype was the best thing since sliced cheese AND sliced bread because that meant I never had to see another person again as long as I lived. But the truth is that you can’t live that way for real. You need the human connection!

  • Molly McCowan says:

    “The problem with connecting with people on the internet is that it’s impersonal and all too easy to disappear.”

    Yes, yes, and yes. This has happened to me countless times!

    “Person-to-person meetings force you to pay attention. They remove the
    distractions and unless you’re really rude, it would never occur to you
    to do anything but focus on your guest.”

    I think this is really a big part of why face-to-face interactions just “stick” better in our minds. I love meeting with potential clients: learning more about what makes them tick, what they need, and how I can help them. Since I approach these meetings with a “How can I help you?” approach—and I genuinely mean it—they resonate with that. In four years of running my freelance business, I’ve never *not* been hired by someone who met with me in person. I’m sure the day will come, but up until this point I’ve been lucky. Making that first impression really does count, and an in-person impression is so much more memorable than an online one.

    • Well I can’t say I’ve never “not” been hired by someone I met in person. I’ve not been hired a lot 🙂 But I’ve been hired more times than not, and more times than by anyone I’ve only met online. Phew, that was a tongue twister.

      You do get a totally different impression meeting someone – tone of voice, body language, expressions, all sorts of things you can’t convey in a text or lots of times not even via phone. It takes extra effort but it pays off in return.

  • The only thing better than Oreos are Oreos dunked in chocolate. Yum.

    Now where was I? I’m so happy that someone else thinks the shiny days of the internet (and social media) are over. I thought I was projecting because I know my bike had definitely lost the dazzle. It’s a great tool, but it’s only a tool.

    And attention as the failure point? Yes! Fortunately we have not devolved to a point where someone will whip out their phone in the middle of a discussion with you and start texting, tweeting, etc. I confess when I’m on a boring conference call it’s so easy to get distracted. You describe it perfectly as the one thing which sucks you away in no time flat.

    I have discovered a way to get over the bad hair, bad eyeliner, photoshop addiction that can keep people from doing things in person. Do video. Do lots of video. Having done an online TV show for two years, and ooh boy were there some bad everything days, I’m over it. Yes I try to present myself well, however I realized that my right people don’t care if my hair is winging up, or the long winter added a few extra pounds to my derriere. As long as my laugh comes along it’s all good.

    • I spent my entire college career with a box – and by box I mean big plastic crate – of chocolate covered Oreos under my bed. Perhaps it all began there…

      I’m over the internet. I’m over it sucking up my time and energy. It’s definitely a tool but if you had a hammer you wouldn’t pound yourself over the head with it all day. So there has to be a balance between that and real life. We still feel guilty enough to avoid texting and checking Facebook while in a personal meeting but on the phone it’s a whole different story!

      Honestly I think video is worse than real life! It’s so unforgiving. Plus in real life only other people have to look at me. I don’t have to start at myself 🙂

  • Building deeper loyalty truly is faster face to face. You actually reminded me of my days working at the phone company and how cool it was to answer the phone all day and talk to live people…caller id..oh my how I remember when that first came out and the reactions to it…something we take for granted now. Just like we take the internet for granted thinking I have a website so money will come or I am socially active a new client is gonna blow my phone up…NOT…some do appear, but so much better to solidify new business in person. I loved this post….as always!

    • Thanks Michelle! It’s true, we start out starry-eyed and then we get used to the changes so they become quite common and we forget they even exist. That’s why sometimes it’s good just to get back to basics… like meeting people!

  • Michelle Nickolaisen says:

    “I don’t care how many analytics you have or what type of amazing stalker-ish behavioral tracking software you use, there is nothing as powerful as sitting across a table from someone and looking into their eyes as you conduct business.” Definitely! I think it works on both sides – it’s a lot easier to reassure clients that you aren’t just a crazy/shady internet person, AND it’s really easy to get a good (or better, at least) gauge of whether the client is going to be a high maintenance PITA, as opposed to email or even Skype chats. Better for business all around.

  • Love, love, love this post! And I’ll make you pancakes anytime…Finn ones at that:) Cheers! Kaarina

  • BusySuperVA says:

    Great article! It really hit home especially since I tend to avoid meeting in person as much as possible. I moved to a new state and since moving here I have really hid behind my desk thinking that going out there will just be a waste of time. It’s true, though, there are benefits to meeting in person especially to build a reputation in a new town. Some of the best business relationships I have are those that I took the time to have a cup of coffee with them or spend a few minutes during a phone call checking in on our personal lives.