All I know?
This blog post is a distillation of my knowledge about social media marketing. MY knowledge – not the information I have gleaned from other social media sources but rather the information I have collected in the real world through personal experience as a social media consultant and teacher.
1. The most surprising people know next to nothing about social media marketing and are stuck in old ways.
Artists, actors, designers and publishers – people whose activities are generally supposed to be synonymous with ideas of forward thinking, the unconventional, the novel, the new – can be very conservative thinkers when it comes to marketing.
Few publishers or artists dream of starting up in business without a business card. Similarly most put a certain amount of valuable resources, both time and money – into brochures and entries in the yellow pages despite their expense and apparent ineffectiveness. When did you last look in the yellow pages, and brochures?
Many artists however are without a blog and have only a passing acquaintance with twitter despite the fact that both things are increasingly important tools for reaching and communicating with new audiences.
2. For many social media marketing is an added burden to an already busy day that can not be accommodated
This kind of thinking is typical of those unable to know a paradigm shift when they see it.
Social media marketing is, as I have explained before, not free. It takes time – but not extra time. Time for social media marketing can be made by discarding conventional types of marketing.
e.g. Mailshots? Forget it. No more filling envelopes. Use that time more gainfully optimising your blog!
3. You can lead a horse to water but…
You can not force people to get their blogs up and running before they are ready. it takes time for them to buy into how easy setting up a WordPress blog can be.
A certain amount of spoon-feeding is required to really get new social media marketers going.
Encouragement is important. If they can believe it works then they might just get blogging and tweeting.
4. There’s way too much information out there…
…and not enough hard advice. My social media marketing workshops fill a spot in the market. People like to have the whole business reduced to a manageable model – blog in the middle, Twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn on the side.
They know they can refine and embellish their social media strategy as they go along because I tell them so. The important thing in the short term is that they get going!
5. There are too few case studies of successful social media marketing initiatives for small companies.
I need say no more. If you have any, then alert me to them.
6. Six is not a common number of important points. Most bloggers like the five points or ten points plans, so I’ll stop here.
