I remember an email once in which marketer Ben Settle wrote,
“Ignore social proof when buying.”
I reckon that was a sweetly pointless message, since in his very next email, Ben sent a testimonial to convince people to buy his offer.
Yesterday, I sent out an email with a job posting for a content writer. I got lots of responses, and witnessed lots of selling strategies and offers.
As I read through these applications, I floated up and above my own body, and observed my own reactions. Here’s one surprising revelation from that out-of-body experience:
A few people sent me testimonials for themselves or their work, or fancier still, they included a link to testimonials on their site.
I just frowned at this. “What good are testimonials to me?” I said. “I know exactly what I’m looking for, and either I see it here in the application, or I don’t.”
I thought about this afterwards.
It’s a rare situation when we know exactly what we want.
Most of the time, we are vague on what we want, how that should look, and even why we want it. So we ping the environment for clues. That’s why social proof is so good in so many situations.
Yes, like my job listing yesterday shows, there are situations when it makes no sense to provide social proof, and where it might even work against you. But such situations are vanishingly rare.
It probably doesn’t make much sense to worry about it, not unless you’re applying for a job where the customer or client hyper-clearly spells out what he is looking for.
So my only advice today is to flip the above story inside out, and to repeat what Ben Settle said:
Ignore social proof when buying.
Instead, make up your own mind.
And if you do ever read a testimonial or endorsement, treat it for what it is — somebody leaning over to you at the roulette table and whispering in your ear, “I suggest betting on red. It worked for me last week and I won a bunch o’ boodle.”
It might be sound advice… but only if you’re playing with money you can afford to lose.
That’s my public service announcement for today. Tomorrow, like Ben did a while back, I’ll probably send you a testimonial, one to sell my Copy Riddles course.
But that’s tomorrow. Today, I’ll just point out that there are lots of very clear and very good reasons you might want to join Copy Riddles even if this were the first time I were offering this training, even if it had zero social proof, and in fact even if you knew little to nothing about me personally.
All those reasons are spelled out on the first two and a half pages of the Copy Riddles sales letter. If you’d like to read that so you can make up your own mind, here’s the link: