Collaboratus: Joined up Social Media

With so many stories and links being posted on Twitter and various Blogs, this particular blog from Econsultancy caught my eye enough for me to read the whole blog.

Have a read here if you haven’t already done so from previous link and tell us what you think?

Sound familiar? Have you come across some people like this?

Social Media to a lot of people and organisations is still very new territory. So if you know nothing about it, as point 3 in this link shows, anyone who is confident and good at self promotion can come across as good Social Media specialist.

At times, you wonder how a Blogger or Video producer, as two examples, can convince someone they can do all the Social Media for them, when all they really know is how to create accounts and fill them with….er…Blogs and Videos!

If you have a water leak in your house do you call a Plumber or Plumbers Merchant? The Plumber of course!

With this analogy, sadly, when it comes to Social Media, many organisations still employ the Plumbers Merchant and wonder why they get no results. If you don’t fix your leak in a timely manner, it will cost you more in damage repair and fixing the actual leak, than the initial cost of a Plumber.

As point 2 in this link shows, for Social Media, you can’t learn by watching or managing. You have to be a doer.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, has a section about successful people and the 10,000 hours rule. If you want to hire a successful Social Media specialist, you might want to check how many years they have producing strategies and marketing their own products and services with Social Media.

One PR company i came across, claimed to be doing Social Media now after “immersing themselves in Social Media for 3 months”. Clearly they are not doing it well based on the 10,000 hour rule, because if you manage to squeeze in 20 hours work per day, it would take about 2 years to get there!

As good a relationship you may have with your Marketing, PR or Digital Agency for the past 20 years, are they the real experts to conduct your Social Media?

Only you know your business and what you want to achieve.

Do you know what kind of value you want to achieve with Social Media?