Twice in two days, I’ve had the same conversation with marketers suffering from the same confusion. Both are organizations that rely on lead generation as the first step in their sales processes. That is to say, they expose prospects to their marketing message in an effort to move them to contact the company, learn more, and finalize a sale.

The problem both companies had (and I see this all the time) is they were falling into the trap of over-communicating in their marketing materials… telling their whole stories… every detail… forgetting that the goal of their marketing is not to close the sale on the spot. Rather, the goal is to motivate a prospect to call and engage in the sales process.

I find this happens most often when companies write their own marketing copy. They are so close to what they’re doing, they lose their ability to trim down their story. They can no longer write copy that engages prospects quickly, established the firm’s credibility, yet leaves enough to talk about that it makes sense for the prospect to call.

This problem is VERY easy to stumble into. I struggle with it myself when I’m writing about products or services that I’ve been part of creating.

Here’s what seems to happen…
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I got my 5th invitation today to join the 6 Degrees of Separation group on Facebook.

I decided to investigate it. I’m seriously intrigued (as we all should be) by the social networking phenomenon and how it will impact the marketing world in the months and years ahead. Clearly there’s a viral potential for ideas and applications within social networks that is unprecedented.

Yet, I’m still waiting and watching for case studies that demonstrate the marketing ROI on these initiatives. There is no doubt these concepts draw eyeballs… and can be sticky (at least for short bursts of time). But is anyone other that the app developers making money?
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I’m a big fan of user reviews.

As a consumer, I refer to them whenever they’re available, and I find that they influence my purchase decisions. Short of a product demonstration, as an instrument of persuasion, the user review has to be among the most effective tools we have at our disposal.

Consider for a moment the difference in your own mind between a user review and its big brother, the testimonial.

As similar as I suppose they are in theory, I regard the two very differently.

To me the very designation – testimonial – suggests that the message will be positive… one notch down from its slippery sibling, the endorsement.

Particularly online, testimonials have been so abused, bastardized and corrupted that unless they are particularly well presented, I find that I view them all as counterfeit… sales copy from deceptive marketers.

User reviews on the other hand, at least for now, remain relatively pure in my mind.

For some reason, I feel like the user review is a more authentic, unscripted expression of a real person’s real-life experience with a product or service. Probably naively, I expect to hear both the good and the bad.

I trust them more.

So what do if you’re a testimonial junkie and don’t yet have the facilities to cultivate and display user reviews?

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