Social Networking isn’t a Strategy

Enough using the Hype

When you are surely aware right now, I am an enormous fan of social networking, new media, social media, discussing/bookmarking, and almost every other awesome social offering available. I spend numerous hrs having fun with different services, sites, and methods every week. Heck, I have met good quality buddies and amazing colleagues through many forms of social media.

Let us acquire one factor straight though…most of what’s being tossed around as proper advice is certainly not however, many good ol’ fashioned hype. Yes, there’s a place and time for social media and social networking. Yes, there seems to become a listing of actual money-making techniques that may be used to derive financial value from all of these services. But a lot of this yammering about Return on investment is simply that…talk.

I have seen a couple of select types of how social networking can be used as Business to business inside a measurable fashion, but I have also seen a lot more types of futile attempts at replicating these successes. And that is not really to say the prevalent listing of social networking “gurus” and “experts” who throw around cake-in-the-sky assistance with how you ought to be using social networking. My message for them: Show me real life examples.

Social Networking isn’t a Strategy

From the earlier within my career once the Internet and e-mail marketing were the new trends. We’d lengthy conversations about our “e-mail marketing strategy”, immediately after we finished speaking about our “trade event strategy”, “site strategy”, and “junk mail strategy.” We thought i was leading edge, until somebody that really understood the things they were speaking about chimed in.

“Would you comprehend the web site tactic along with a strategy?”

Nobody within the room could provide a reasonable response to that question. Fortunately, I had been just a few years from school, and so i could chalk up my “deer within the headlights” reaction to inexperience. However nowadays I am seeing exactly the same trend. I see many of these people speaking about social networking strategy, content strategy, even Twitter strategy!