Brian Basilico: FEELING IGNORED? – 10 Confusing Clichés with Social Media (Part II)

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Last week Brian introduced you to some tips designed to help you get it right in the social media world. The remaining clichés are found here.

Advertising Trumps Social Media – Sometimes this is true. Advertising is just that, it creates awareness. It takes just as much time and commitment (and often much or money) to see results. Social media can either be an alternative or an augmentation to your advertising. Social media is NEVER going to be a replacement for advertising. Advertising is about creating awareness and ultimately relationships. Social media is about nurturing relationships and occasionally advertising.

Followers = Business – Some people treat adding friends, email addresses or connections like collecting lives in a video game. The more lives you collect the longer you can play the game. There are ways to do this effectively in other cases, but not always in social media. Then BOOM, they unleash the sales pitch to the whole audience hoping that the numbers game will pay off. Reality is that 10% or less will react (often 1-2%) and you may lose and alienate many who view the message as spam. I have seen this time and again in LinkedIn where people reward your connection request with a sales pitch diatribe. That PLEASE-BUY communication turns into a… BUH-BY. Treat followers like friends. When they need what you offer, some will contact you and respond only then. Give them great content and information, and wait for them to respond to it. The harder the push – the harder the pushback.

It’s Free – How do you define free time in business? If you are employee, you are getting paid for that time. If you are an entrepreneur, you NOT getting paid for that time. No matter how you slice and dice it, it costs money to do social media and social networking. Sales and marketing is a cost of doing business and ultimately costs you time AND money! Social networking is an activity that is about creating, nurturing, and enhancing relationships. Do you treat spending time with your spouse, friends, or family like a free time exercise, or a quality time investment?

Time Consuming – Social media can be time consuming if all you do is like pictures of kittens and play games. If you look at it as part of your sales and marketing mix, it’s no different than answering emails, phone calls, or letters in the mail (anybody still get those?). Some people view it as a waste of time because they often don’t get the purpose, process or payback. Social media and networking is an investment, and just like a stock, it’s not always an overnight success. Give it time, measure the returns and you will see why it’s so important to your ongoing business.

ROI (COI) – In management school, most people are trained to focus on cost of doing business or ROI (return on investment). What is often ignored is COI (cost of inaction). Are your clients (the gruntled) singing your praises to their friends or coworkers? Can you reward those who love you and your stuff for their loyalty and kudos? Also can you harvest their followers to jump on the success train? Are some of your customers (the disgruntled) kvetching, or even worse, slamming you and your products or services online. There is a reason why large corporations like Comcast and others have teams of people monitoring social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and more. Reputation management is part of the new social media process and programs.

Bonus…

We Are Not On Social Media – What are you waiting for? Your friends, clients and competitors are there. Do yourself a favor and Google yourself, your business, and your competitors. Go to www.google.com, and start searching everything. Pay close attention to what shows up and don’t stop at the top of the first page. Dig deeper and look at least the next 5 pages or more. You may be amazed at what you can learn and what you might see. It might be nothing, or it could be eye opening.