November 10th, 2009
Do you need a Ferrari or a freight train?
Just this week we’ve talked to about a half a dozen people who are in the midst of opening a Twitter account or Facebook page for their business.
Being the kind of folks that we are, we ask what motivated them to do that. To a one, they had no particular plan driving this behavior. They had no plan for getting people to the new content that they were going to create, no idea of what they were going to say or what they wanted to get from the people who contacted these touchpoints, and no idea of how much time the effort might take from them.
These were all good people looking to create additional value for their organizations. They have been exposed to the same buzz that the rest of us have, and have decided that they need to take the plunge because other companies are doing it successfully. The problem is that they’ve become enamored of a tactic without stopping to relate that tactic to their broader strategy (or not having a strategy to begin with).
Engaging in social media (or any other tactic) without understanding why you are doing it is like getting into a Ferrari without knowing where you are going, what the purpose of going there is, and potentially never having driven a car before. You have a certain kind of power available to you assuming that you can figure out how to get it started, and it can be really great if your needs align with what it’s good at, but it can be useless at best if it doesn’t (and lethal at worst if you slam the gas before learning to steer).
Are you trying to make it around a speedway as fast as possible, or do you need to get tons of goods from Portland to LA as cheaply as possible? Knowing what you are actually trying to do, and how it furthers your business, will help you choose what tactics to engage in.