A small business that I know pretty well made a big mistake last week.
Here’s what they did: they hired a person to do their social media marketing.
Not a mistake on its face, right? Right. Having someone in a full time position to manage social media at this point should be obvious. And if it’s not, you’re reading the wrong blogs.
It’s so obvious, in fact, that for most small businesses, the marketing department and the social media manager should be the same person. The ubiquity (one of my favorite words, and a good name for a band BTW) of social media is such that to separate it from the rest of your marketing strategy is, well, dumb.
Back to our business at hand: they hired a person to manage their social media marketing. Nice. Good job, small business that I know pretty well. Way to go.
Until I found out why they hired her. She’s gen Y. That’s it. No experience other than having gone through high school with an ever-present facebook chat window open and an unlimited texting plan.
How bad a decision is this? Catastrophic. It’s like hiring your high school newspaper editor to design all of your print ads (no offense to the high school newspaper editors, current or former, but c’mon- that piece you did on how the fruit cup didn’t contain cherries last week wasn’t exactly the NYT).
Or hiring someone to run your shoe store because they’re bipedal. The point is that an internet age does not an internet marketer make.
Here’s how to switch:
-Embrace Social Realize that marketing socially is better than marketing traditionally. For small businesses, this is an absolute open-and-shut case. Over the long term, the ROI is better, the research is better, the metrics are better. At its core, it’s a better model for your business, because small businesses are about connections, and so is social media.
-Get Familiar Do some research on the space before you make any decisions. It’s said that the internet is an echo chamber, so maybe it’s ironic that the loudest echo is this: listen. Listen to what marketers are saying about the direction that social media is taking. Get familiar with the strategies and tactics. Once you understand a bit about how the gears turn, you can make decisions based on information vs. what’s all this hubub about the Twitter.
-Be True To Yourself Just because marketing is going digital doesn’t mean you have to all of a sudden become a geek. Your company has a personality. Lucky for us, that’s social media marketing’s strong suit. Copywriting isn’t dead, but it’s looking a whole lot more like the text you sent your sales team. Transparency is a bitch for most older businesses, especially the levels of transparency needed for good social media marketing. Anyone that tells you any different isn’t looking hard enough.
-Continuing Ed The big problem with most small businesses is that they’re static. Marketing may get a new look each season, but the tactics are exactly the same. Social media marketing is different. It’s a space that changes fast, and your HPIC (Head Poster In Charge) should be changing with it. And so should you. The cool part is that, digitally, this can happen with amazing ease and grace if you let it. It’s a matter of recognizing change and preparing for it, not just reacting to it.
Put another way: Everyone is aware of social media. Not many people understand it.
When you make the switch, be positive that you’re on the right side of that fence.
Tags: blogs, content, Digital Marketing, getting started in social media, relatonships