If you’ve been in the business of social media for any length of time, whether you have been selling it, marketing it, or implementing it, you will have heard one of the 45 objections below. What really makes this list though, is that the majority of it came from you and your clients and your experiences. It was crowdsourced from Twitter!
However, There’s a larger and more important issue here though, and it’s one in which you can and should, use this list as your cheat sheet. YOU need to be able to answer all of these objections. Or at least anticipate that your clients and prospects will be voicing these concerns and more.
Feel free to add to this list.
1) Why should I? I don’t need to. Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean I have to.
2) It’s a fad, I’m going to stick to what works for our business
3) It costs too much
4) I’m in no hurry
5) I have no desire
6) It will require too many resources within our company
7) I’m worried about the legal ramifications
8) We’re better off by doing nothing
9) To risky
10) You can’t measure it
11) We give up too much to the customer
12) We won’t make any money
13) We can’t control the message
14) We don’t know the first thing about social media
15) It will take too long to pay off
16) It will take too long to implement
17) It’s just a blog, twitter and Facebook- What’s that going to do?
18) I can do it/we can do it ourselves
19) It’s not worth it
20) Our customers are not on social networks
21) It’s too complicated
22) We can’t control our employees using it
23) I can’t it’s a legal issue
24) We want to control the message
25) We can’t support with our current management/management doesn’t support
26) We’re B2B so there is no reason for us to engage consumers
27) It’s a regulatory issue. So no guidelines in place.
28) No trust
29) Don’t want to acknowledge negatives
30) Not our customers
31) Don’t have time to adapt to the technology
32) Social Media results are not easily visible to non-users
33) Fear of change and the unknown
34) Not our target market
35) Our customers don’t use social media
36) Our deadlines are more important than your Tweet goofs.
37) Privacy issues
38) No ROI potential
39) Lack of expertise
40) Lack of a market
41) We already do social networking, we have a facebook fan page.
42) Too complicated & therefore, we’ll look for alternative options
43) We’ve been fine without it
44) We’re waiting for it to mature
45) We tried it, it didn’t work.
46) ?
What are we missing?
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Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but how about
“we just don’t understand how social media works”
@Nick Good one…
What about these:
* It doesn’t fit our image/brand
* The board would never go for it
* We couldn’t sell that in upstairs
* We don’t have that much to say
Fun challenge! Let’s see what we can do to overcome the objections.
@heatherrast
@heather That makes 50, but you bring up the larger and better pt. We need to address each and look at how one answers the objection and overcomes it.
I’ve just been reading Ken Burbary’s blog and came across an excellent story from Scott Monty. I think it’s a beauty in itself and doesn’t need any additional commentary:
“A friend sent me a PDF of an article from a business journal in which a company expressed reservations about this new technology over which everyone seemed to be abuzz. They decided that they would restrict employees’ use of it, because of the fear of corporate secrets getting out, of insider information making its way to Wall Street, and of employees wasting their time on it. For that reason, they set up the hardware on a single station in the middle of everyone’s desks so that everyone could see how people were using it.
That PDF was an article from a 1930s business journal and the technology was the telephone.”
@Timo, I had seen that before and Ken and I have actually talked about that. Ironic isn’t it?
Marc,
I created a post on my blog that includes responses to each objection. I used your list, revised it, added a few more, and a response on how to overcome these objections. Wouldn’t mind getting your thoughts as well.
http://www.marketingshindig.com/2010/02/04/how-to-respond-to-the-most-overused-objections-in-using-social-media/
Nick (@shinng)