Blog

What could be more discouraging than working all day to build trust and excitement about your company, then seeing your company bashed and its execs persecuted online? You will hear me say again and again that in our business, trust is everything, and in many cases that trust can be severed in an instant by internet “commenters” or online complainers with too much time on their hands.

To click or not to click, that is the question. Mainstream social web consultants often advise clients to "NOT click or respond" to negative online comments or forum posts for fear of doing so will drive up search relevance of offending links. This is not accurate.

It seems natural that companies whose primary driver is person-to-person relationships would have jumped on the social media bandwagon early on and embraced it, singing "hallelujah!" the whole way. You would think. Network marketing companies have been too slow to adopt social and have been left behind by many other more progressive consumer industries.

Momentum Factor's first client has me deep diving into what it is that keeps a customer happy and on board. The network marketing business is world-class at adding customers and distributors - we build a base faster and more profitably than most consumer businesses. However, we are just as good at losing them, with an average churn of 75% in 90 days.

Like it or not, today's corporations - especially in network marketing - are in demand to serve as providers of information and entertainment as much as they are a product or service.

Momentum Factor Founder & CEO Jonathan Gilliam recently spent a few days at the 2010 Social Commerce Summit in Austin when he was the CMO of Evolv Health. The summit included lots of sharing, thinking and learning about the future of social media and its application to business and marketing.

Well, I'll spare you the entertaining, quippy post (that will come later, of course) and just say thank you to those of you who have supported me this year and especially as I launched Momentum Factor.