I have a coupe of clients who sell products for moms. These clients are trying to get into social media. Specifically, they are trying to get mom bloggers to notice them and follow them, and boy is it hard.

The thing is, both of these clients are VERY legitimate businesses. They are legit and interesting and want to contribute – but the people on social media in general, and mom bloggers in particular, are suspicious.

There are two issues here – one issue is that people who use social media have a pretty accurate “selldar” (I think I just invented a word, which means a “sell radar”) – when they sense that someone wants to sell something, and obviously these clients of mine do, they immediately balk. Even though, if they were honest, they would have admitted that they are using social media to sell something too – their content.

The second issue is the rampant spam in social media that companies such as Twitter and Facebook are simply unable to stop. I specifically refer to businesses who use twitter as a marketing blasting tool, clogging our inboxes with their direct messages and with their follow requests:

The unfortunate result is lack of trust. It’s difficult to get followers, and it’s also difficult to start discussions. People are suspicious.

I’m not sure what the solution is. If social media providers were able to stop spam and scams, that would have solved part of the problem. As for the selldar, legit companies need to accept that not all social media users will agree to trust them and let them join their community. You just need to keep producing quality content, offer incentives for people to follow you (as a company that sells consumer products you are in a great position to do that), and hope that overtime more and more “pure” users will agree to accept you into their community, while realizing that some of them never will.