The Blog Of Greg Rollett

This is part 2 in my week long look and study into social proof. In part 1, we discussed the concept of social proof and why it works. Today I am going to dig into 2 types of social proof that you see everyday, all around you.

The 2 types of social proof are:

• Borrowed social proof and
• Actual, transparent social proof.

Edit: As I began writing, this thing took on a life of it’s own, so this post will just focus on borrowed social proof. 1,000 words and going strong at this point!

It seems obvious which one “should be” more successful in helping to generate goodwill and sales, but it’s not so simple. You see, our mind subconsciously plays tricks on us constantly, providing what it sees as shortcuts to making decisions.

Yes, shortcuts. Your mind is always taking shortcuts. Imagine if every time you needed to make a decision in life you brain went and said, “hold on, let me think about this” and went into processing everything that goes into a decision.

Say you want to go out to eat. Does your mind take the time to go through:

• I want a sandwich.
• On a sandwich is bread.
• That bread is whole wheat. I like whole wheat, so good.
• The meat is turkey, I wonder where the turkey came from. Did it come from a local farm? Or is it processed?
• How far is the restaurant? There are 16 traffic lights between here and the sub shop.
• And so on.

Hell no. Your brain goes, I like turkey subs and that sub shop I like is 10 minutes away. Boom, done, shortcut.

Your brain plays thousands of these shortcuts everyday, hell every minute. The mental conditioning we do is almost sickening and extremely tough to break out of.

Social proof is just another shortcut our brains take in the decision making process.

That is why borrowed social proof is so damn effective.

Borrowed Social Proof

When you are first starting out, whether it is launching a product, or trying to get a job or whatever, it is always easy to get your foot in the door by name dropping or showing off how cool something you did was.

But not everyone has this at the start. If you drank your way through college instead of blogging, interning, getting street cred in your field and working your balls off, then all you have to show are your grades. That’s not enough.

When you are launching a product, all you have is your product.

So, in this situation some have come to “borrow” their social proof that their stuff is good and others like it. Used ethically and tastefully, this can be a great way to show your potential customers the power of your product. Used unethically and we have another Acai Berry FTC attack again and we all get screwed.

Let’s take some examples. Below is a landing page from a network that we run some traffic to via our niche fitness domains. On all of their landing pages, they use “borrowed social proof” that their product and industry has been featured in big media. Check out the 2 screen shots below:

In the 2 examples above, you should be able to see the role that social proof plays in the buying cycle of someone that comes onto that page. In the case of this product, Creatine, there is no doubt that at some time this product has been mentioned in major media outlets like the ones listed:  MSN, CNN.com, MSNBS and USA Today.com. The thing here is that these media sources have not necessarily mentioned “this product” but have mentioned creatine products in general.

Same goes for the 2nd screenshot, where you can really see how apparent this is. They use WebMD and BBC to bring in direct quotes as to how good creatine is and how it improves athletic performance, etc.

This borrowed social proof triggers you mind into thinking,

“well, I’ve heard of creatine and was thinking about buying it, oh wait, this product has been seen on MSN and WebMD, it must be good, they do thorough research therefore I don’t have to and my mind will take a shortcut and say that this product will do.”

That’s how I hear it in my head at least.

The next example I have is an actual product that we brought to market a few months ago called On Call Nurse. When we first launched it we had no press and a small budget, so we went grassroots. This meant we didn’t have much to work with except a few free accounts we had given out to get some testimonials.

Right before the product hit the market though, the New York Time, USA Today and Wall Street Journal all launched articles and studies on how people were using these companies where you could call a nurse. How sweet that was. These news outlets were telling people how cool our service was without mentioning us, because we didn’t exist yet.

So, we borrowed the social proof. Check the screen shot from our sales page below:

We took quotes from the paper, mentioned the dates that the articles ran and used some big, familiar images so everyone that looked at the page could see them.

In the first example, the social proof elements were pretty blind, just images with nothing backing them. In the On Call Nurse example, we did our best to show our visitors what these outlets had to say.

Screwing Up Borrowed Social Proof

In the 2 examples above, the borrowed social proof is on the better side of ethical. They help to create shortcuts in people’s minds about a product being good.

Where borrowed social proof really went wrong was with the Acai Berry CPA offer craze of 2008 and 2009. It went something like this. In conversation Oprah just mentioned the word Acai Berry. Next thing you know every shady marketer in the world has landing pages, videos and products saying that Oprah endorses and recommends Acai Berry for anything and everything.

• Want to loose weight. Oprah says to use Acai.
• Want to have better sex. Oprah uses Acai.
• Want to have a billion times more energy in the morning. Oprah drinks Acai shakes.

That is taking the idea of borrowed social proof to the extreme.  It really was the root cause of many merchant account, Google AdWords Accounts and affiliate networks getting shut down. It is part of the new disclosure rules for bloggers and affiliates and the reason it is really, really hard to run a free + shipping offer today.

The Affiliate Promotion Example

Another example of how borrowed social proof can go bad is through affiliate promotions, aka promoting someone else’s stuff. Let’s be honest and say that the majority of affiliates never go through, use or have bought the product they are trying to sell. Even when the product is released by a friend, most of the time you just skim through it and make an assessment.

We all do it. I don’t have the time, nor do many other big affiliates, to read a 200 page PDF and watch 10 videos, then create some kind of promo run for it.

This isn’t the post to discuss ethics on affiliate marketing, there will be a time for that, but it is a post on how affiliates promote these products using social proof.

Some affiliates will straight up steal testimonials and throw them up on their site. They may even claim they have gotten real results from the product, when in fact, they never went through it. Perhaps the biggest way affiliates use social proof is when they open a blog post or an email with…

My buddy so and so just launched a new product and when we talked about it, it was awesome and blah, blah, blah.

90% of the time they have never met and only talk through bulk affiliate promotion emails.

I am guilty of this. But for the most part, I do my best to prove my social affiliation with a product I am promoting. Case in point. Last week I was talking about making money and wealth and I mentioned some free training of a product launch for Eben Pagan (the program is closed now). I have gone through 1/2 the training so far. It’s good. I was given a copy.

Then at Affiliate Summit, I met with Megan, Eben’s affiliate manager and we got to chat in person and talk about the launch and about Eben. That is true social proof.

The point here, is that in borrowing social proof there is a fine line. We don’t always have all the proof in house and we want to make sales. The key is to do the research in your niche and look inside to see what is ethical to you when borrowing the social proof you think is necessary to help get people to buy your stuff (people that want it, can afford it and can derive value from it only!!).

3 Tips To Using Borrowed Social Proof

In the next part in this series I am going to be talking about natural social proof, and wherever possible use that over borrowed anyday of the week. But sometime you just need to get jump started. Here are 3 tips to stay ethical and do the right thing for your business while you build your own social cases for your products.

1. Do extensive market research. Don’t just look for crap blogs, or big names that mention a competitor. For On Call Nurse we set up Google Alerts for search terms that were important to us and building the brand. We found 10 or so articles that mentioned a call a nurse situation and went through them all diligently. We then chose the 3 that best represented our product and what we knew our product could do. The articles were also recent and we were very transparent about when they were run.

2. Ask permission. When working as an affiliate, or selling your own products, ask to use things like logos, quotes, testimonials. It takes 2 minutes and can save you headaches, cease and desist letters and people saying that you are making false claims.

3. Make sure people know it’s not you! Your product didn’t get the review, the industry did. You didn’t lose 100 lbs in 5 days, someone that used the product did. Don’t fool people. It may work for a quick buck, but we are in this for the long term - a business we can be proud of 20 years down the line.

Ok, so what do you think about borrowed social proof? Really? Is it unethical? Is it ok? Have you been persuaded to buy something due to social influences? Let’s talk in the comments below.

Part 3 will focus on real social proof and some amazing examples (and not so amazing) of how people are showing it off.

Holla back.

Greg