How many times have you heard this advice for having a great blog or social media presence?
‘Be Awesome!’
‘You have to join the conversation!’
Or my favorite advice, on how to get more Twitter followers, ‘Be worth following!’
The bottom line is that social media isn’t quick and easy. If you want to REALLY have a successful social media program, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to track, measure, tweak, compare, experiment, and break stuff. I’ve been blogging here for two years, and still can’t tell you what the exact ROI of my efforts here are. But during those 2 years I have been constantly searching for the answer, and my efforts here have improved dramatically.
Of course, if I’d listened to the ‘rockstars’ in this space, I would have known exactly what I had to do:
1 – Write great stuff
2 – Write every day
3 – Write short posts 300-500 words
That’s all there is to it, if you listen to some people. The business reality is that every company is going to have to invest time and energy into a successful social media program. It won’t be easy, but as Ian added, most important things are hard.
And if anyone tells you that all you have to do is ‘Be Amazing!’, then they aren’t trying to help you, they are trying to get retweets.
We live in a “get rich quick”, “I want the easy way”, “what’s the best short cut” society that is based on quick gratification.
I can’t make up my mind whether that’s a good or bad thing – the part of me that seeks a spiritual life and spirituality worries about this human condition.
The part of me that loves social media, SEO and coaching is glad – not many people stick around for long which makes durability an asset. I’m old enough to have been online in the era of geocities and compuserve, and the “in crowd” loved soundbites then!
And although it is a soundbite of sorts, I think Gary V has it right when he describes social media as a marathon, not a sprint.
Geocities and CompuServe! Now that brings back memories!
I don’t have a problem with soundbytes, lord knows I have used them. But if you are going to use social media, and try to educate companies on how to be social using these tools, shouldn’t you be social with them as well? Is it more about using the tools to draw attention to yourself, or as a channel to help others?
Both!
I use social media tools to help with marketing and as a channel for helping others.
Have a great weekend
Nic
Amen! I’ve been thinking about this for a while and recently blogged about what I consider to be three “anti-strategies” – serendipity, irreverence and passion (http://georgycohen.com/2011/01/11/three-anti-strategies-to-avoid/). You could easily add “awesomeness” to the list.
Mack,
The “be awesome” advice is one of the reasons social media is considered a fad. People who are serious about business and growing their company know that long-term success is more than winning a popularity contest. When they hear that all you have to do is be awesome and the gold ring is yours, their eyes glaze over and they shut the door to the possibility.
It is also extremely passive aggressive. When you tell people all they have to do to succeed is to “be awesome”, “be worth following”, and “join the conversation”, you are setting them up to fail. And, their failure translates into “you’re not awesome”, “you’re not worth following”, and “who wants to talk to YOU?”
If people would spend a little time comparing what the “awesome” crowd does with what they tell others to do, they’d learn a lot. Starting with whose advice NOT to follow.
You’re right. Social media is not quick or easy. It is a great way to improve relationships and increase web traffic, if you are willing to do the hard work of creating and implementing a marketing strategy.
Debra I think you are right. Execs are struggling to see the value anyway, and when we say that all it takes is to ‘be interesting!’, we are making ourselves look clueless.
It does take a lot of hard work to see results from social media. The problem is that a lot of people are lazy, or they aren’t sure how to get started.
Mack,
Nice post and it got a smile out of me so thanks for that.
Folks are always looking for the quick fix or easy way to do things. Social media like anything else to be conducted for business takes hard work.
Although we’d all like to work “smarter, not harder” as the saying goes, sometimes that is used as an excuse for doing real work, being willing to stumble, get up, stumble, get up, and like you said, Mack, “get your hands dirty”.
I think it takes “being awesome”, but “being faithful, diligent, hardworking, wise, consistent etc…” Help post, thks.
That short and simple advice only makes sense to the people saying it because they already “get it”. Hopefully more social media power users and marketing leaders will learn how to concisely explain their techniques in layman’s terms. Right now, this vague advice seems to be characteristic of an evolving industry lacking best practices.
Having thought further about this, what does “be awesome” mean? Or more specifically, what is the intention behind the advice to “be awesome”?
If it means be authentic, be excited about what you do, be clear in your communication, be compassionate with others etc., then the only problem I have with the advice is that it’s not something I set out to be. It’s more a label bestowed by others.
For me it comes under the same heading as “Social Media Expert” or even worse, “social media guru”. I get scared when people award themselves those titles in their profiles – these should be titles others give us, not ones we give ourselves.
Have a great weekend
Nic
Mack, I love posts like this that ignore the cued applause in the echo chamber. Thank you for keeping it fresh!
Thanks Jacob, my clients wouldn’t stay my clients very long if I gave them such bogus advice. It might work well for getting you RTs, but RTs don’t pay the bills and build successful social media efforts for companies.
Mack, I’ve seen you make this point on #BlogChat and I’m glad to see you reinforce it here. I think the problem is that its easier to emphasize “theater” and shock-value rather than real sound and practical, advice.
I would go one step further by saying that “Be Awesome” is a gross, and perhaps lazy oversimplification. But I guess it is easier to get the applause line with the soundbite or the gratituous use of the f-bomb.
Hey Stanford, nice comment, seems like we are on the same wavelength here. A few weeks ago I was talking to someone in #Blogchat, a small business owner that had just started blogging. We had been chatting for about 10 mins on how she could build out her specific content marketing strategy and exactly what her blogging strategy should be. Then suddenly someone tweets her ‘Forget trying to plan out your posts, just BE AWESOME!’
To me, giving someone an actionable plan they can use to improve their blogging efforts is awesome. Not trying to build a better soundbyte to get more RTs.
Hi Mack,
Be awesome, write great contents, etc.. the problem with those advice they can’t be objectively measured. What’s awesome is determined by the reader and at what level they’re at. What one group of readers will think as awesome someone else may think as rubbish.
I’ll try your advice of writing for often and shorter post.
Ben Wan