October 9th, 2009 | No Comments
I recently met with a prospective client who was interested in Social Media.
They have always used more traditional advertising methods such as CraigsList and other yellow pages based methods, and wanted Social Media to accomplish the same thing. They wanted us to create a series of social networking pages (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) that would just attract business.
Unfortunately, it was not going work the way they wanted.
Social Media is a dynamic exchange of information with the rest of the online world that increases your visibility and network of available resources. Social Media is NOT a passive form of advertising.
The success of Social Media is directly tied with the activity of the user. If you want Social Media to not require work, then it won’t work for you or your business.
Does that mean that Social Media has no value in business? Of course not! It has tremendous value, some of which has yet to be figured out! But it does require a commitment to make it work. It requires a particular business to decide to make Social Media work for them, and to dedicate the necessary resources needed to make it successful. That said, there are ways to reduce your workload, and find easy things to tweet, update or blog about. Much like optimizing a process within your business, there are ways to optimize your Social Media time to much less than it may originally seem.
Commit to making it work, and it will. If not, don’t bother.
This particular client seemed to understand what I was explaining, and has decided to make Social Media work for them. They recognize that it is not passive, and while it will require additional effort, they see the value and future value and want to grow. Good for them.
