Marketing Message Versus Conversation: Which One Should Prevail?

Lately I’ve been noticing a pretty disturbing trend on social networks - people are losing their names and are somehow renamed after their businesses and products they sell online. So instead of real people on Twitter I am followed by all the types of real estate everywhere in the US but have no idea if the people behind the accounts are male or female - or if they exist at all.

Of course internet has always had this wonderful phenomenon of nicknames where everyone can hide under a nick instead of telling something using one’s own name - after all, when no one knows who you are, it is much easier to be rude or just be anything you want without thinking of any responsible behavior. I personally have never understood this trend of hiding under a nick as it always makes me suspect the person behind such an account of being dishonest or something.

To tell you the truth, I am partly guilty myself as I use “profy” everywhere for my login or account name (as I think that Profy is just easier to remember than if I used my whole name everywhere) but at the same time everywhere it is possible I try to add my real name to my bio or my profile. In fact, this is exactly how wise community managers and startup founders I’ve seen do - they promote their companies by choosing their brands as their nicks but invariably use their names whenever it is possible to still act like a human being, not just a public face of a company.

But unfortunately many people seem to overdo online branding: trying to make more and more people know their brand’s name, they keep using their brands everywhere and forget to mention their real names or act like a human either. But the problem is that this approach may be what you need for brand visibility (though I personally have my doubts about that) but it totally kills conversation and you will hardly manage to engage in a discussion with your customers on various social media sites - even though this was most certainly the initial plan when you created accounts on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and everywhere else.

The reason for this post is that I’ve noticed this trend making it to the comments here on Profy with people calling themselves with all types of brand names and avoiding their real names. The thing is that I prefer to answer comments from my readers whenever they are willing to engage in a conversation around the content of one of my posts - no matter if they agree with me or strongly disagree as I believe every opinion matters and the conversations make a blog what it is.

Yet recently I’ve noticed that people now choose some strange things to type in the ‘Name’ field when leaving a comment for me. For example, I’ve had people named FreeGamesForPC, Small Business Help, and Serviced Offices London leaving comments for me in only the last few days.

The most disappointing example was someone who presented himself as “Debt Consolidation” leaving 8 comments on different posts after spending probably an hour here and all the comments were actually thoughtful enough to make me want to answer them.

But unfortunately I have chosen not to reply because it really looked awkward to me to reply with @DebtConsolidation as a name was a necessity where there were other comments that needed to be answered at the same time. Honestly, it is much easier to begin a reply with “@John” than it is with “@FreeGamesForPC” or whatever it is that these people name themselves with.

The worst part is that I do realize that many of us are engaged online in selling something to each other but I don’t think that we should not at least try to stay human here and avoid talking to people without knowing their real names and only knowing what it is that they sell to you. So while I do understand that you have your job to do and your deal to close, I really think that engaging in a real conversation could be a better approach than doing something that many bloggers (as far as I know) consider to be pure spam.

Of course chances are you leave a better marketing message to anyone who reads your comments on my blog and they will figure out instantly that if they click your name they will be taken to a site about real estate or whatever it is that you are advertising. But the problem is that people rarely click such links at all and most of the time they want to buy a house they will do a search on Google for real estate and will browse the resulting links - hardly ever reaching my blog in the process.

I do realize that in some cases such comments may be submitted for search engine optimization purposes in hopes that the right anchor text combined with a link under that text will make sure the site in question will get a good backlink but since the vast majority of blogs have no-follow links only in their comments sections, chances are this purpose won’t be achieved either.

At the same time, for everyone who is actually willing to engage in a conversation with me by subscribing to the blog and leaving a comment for me now and then, I will be sure to click their links even if the name is simply John and in many cases I will even search for these people on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to be able to have them in my network as mutual interest in each other will frequently pay better than one party trying to sell something to the other party. And I will know that I have a person selling real estate in California in my network and will know who to talk to should I want to buy a house in San Francisco.

Of course we all know that everyone has some hidden motivation and many of us are selling something to each other with all our online activities but social media tools were invented with conversation in mind and they have proven already that a conversation can sell as good (or even better) than the traditional (and pushy) marketing techniques do. So why not tell me your real name, dear DebtConsolidation?