Abe Lincoln’s Opinion On Social Media
Everyone has goals and objectives. Some of our goals are big (like successfully combining the channel operations of our latest acquisition) and some are small (like getting 50 people to register for our product release webinar), but they are all important to someone. In those rare situations when all the goals in an organization line up, then you have a successful enterprise.
Judging from conversations with clients and resellers, one big goal everyone has right now is to improve their ROI on marketing investments. Resellers want more leads, channel marketing executives want more product exposure, and corporations want to improve their market share. Increasingly, achievement of these kinds of goals means understanding and using new technologies like marketing content syndication, video, online communities, and social media to increase communication velocity and impact.
Unfortunately, mastering these new social computing capabilities is not effortless. It takes time, energy, discipline, and education to understand how to connect with customers through innovative social conduits. Many smart people, however, are lulled into a false sense of social computing competence by their experience with an iPhone and a microwave. They want easy. They expect easy. They think they have easy. Therefore, they jump right in and consider themselves social computing competents. It’s fun, but it’s misguided. And it also might be destructive.
There is a huge difference between Twittering and improving your business performance with social computing. The first is easy. The second is very hard – and therefore not very common.
A focused effort to understand social computing as a strategic tool is an important objective. Is there anyone who doesn’t agree? If not, then there can be very few smart people who think they have the time, resources, and peer support to develop and execute a social media plan on their own? They can only be successful with education, experience, and interaction with other people who have gone before them down the social computing path?
You can’t improve your skills without working on them. Abraham Lincoln said that if he only had six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four sharpening his axe. If you want to achieve your big goals, spend time sharpening your skills in the areas that matter. And social computing matters.
There is a Social Media Master’s Class beginning next week (October 12). It’s not about Twittering. The class is about building skills in social media strategy development to achieve your business objectives.
Everyone is busy. Everyone is distracted. But everyone needs to occasionally sharpen their axe.
