Trust Comes Before Sales

What Is Social Selling?

To know you’re doing social selling ethically, you first need to understand what the term means.
Social selling, or social commerce, is using online social networks and tools to reach customers and engage them in a sale.
It’s a bit of a balancing act: Get it right and you’ve earned yourself a pleased customer who is likely to share his positive experience. Get it wrong and you’ve invaded someone’s personal network and abused his or her trust in a way they are not likely to forget.

How Not to Do Social Selling

Before we get into how to start social selling ethically, let’s take a look at what an unethical approach might involve.
Sales is and always has been, social – it’s about who you know after all – and web 2.0 means we have dragged the social side of selling back to the forefront of business. However, many companies end up breaking these new rules of engagement. Here are three trademark behaviors of an unethical social seller:

• They lie about their true intentions in order to get inside its customers’ online circles.
• They spam customers with unwanted fake offers.
• They embarrass users by tricking them into condoning their products online.

How to Ethically Reach Your Followers and Drive Sales

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using online social networks to sell to customers. There’s just one golden rule: Do it on their terms.

(Please click on the keywords "Social Selling" to read the full article)

   Is social selling, or selling using social media, ethical? I found that an intriguing question answered succinctly in the above article in this quotation,"Sales is and always has been, social". No one desires after accepting your "friend request" to be immediately spammed by Biz-Op promotions that make it obvious you only wanted to just sell something. That's an example of unethical social selling. Ethical social selling is finding value in you and your social brand, leading to a desire to do business with you and the business you represent. A good social brand sells and a bad one does not. It's that simple. Ethical social selling is being someone with "know how" and possessing something of value to share. Trust comes before sales.