I was having a conversation the other day with a prospective client. He owns a small software business and he is just getting ready to ramp up. He has a good business background and a good development background. Sales, Marketing and PR, not so much. So, we talked at length about those three. We talked about how those worlds have changed in relation to the software business since the late 80s.
He had been immersed in developing and polishing his product, and while he had read some things about social media in the mainstream press, he really had no idea whether he should pay any attention to it. He had asked me in to educate him as best I could about social media. And, he had the usual questions I hear quite a bit from small and mid-sized businesses. And, while a number of large businesses have developed a social media strategy and integrated it with their overall goals, I’m sure there are a number of them who have not done so and are asking the same things. Is it a fad? Won’t it just disappear in a few years to be replaced by the next great whatever? What’s involved? How much time do I have to invest? How do I go about implementing it? How much will it cost? The questions went on and on. And that’s a good thing. Smart people ask a lot of questions. They aren’t afraid to admit when they don’t know things. And, they do what it takes to remedy that. He was no exception.
After he had exhausted his questions, and me with trying to answer, we talked some more about a few of the things that came up during his questions. I tried to get him to see something that I think is crucial to understanding where social media sits in the scheme of things and that “something” is that we are in the middle of the biggest societal change since the days of Gutenberg. Along with a number of other things, the printing press took the control of information away from the church. We can talk a lot about what happened along the way to today’s times, but for brevity’s sake, let’s say that personal publishing tools and broadband have done the same thing to the large institutions of today that the printing press did to the church. It has taken away our reliance on them for our informational needs.
Once we got through that discussion, he had a pretty clear idea of why social media was not just a fad and why it wasn’t going away any time soon. From there we moved on to why he would be well advised to integrate social media into his business and how he could go about that. And from there we moved on to the part that led to this post. He wondered whether this was something he could do on his own, without the help of an agency or someone like me. Like many small businesses, his budget was limited and if he could save money on something like this, that was an appealing scenario. He had, after all, taught himself how to program and run several successful businesses as a result. Given that, how difficult could social media be? And, that got me to thinking about the feasibility of such an undertaking. Is it possible? As a small business on a limited budget, how would you go about it? What would it entail? Was it a suicide mission?
So, I’m going to explore this in a series of posts, look at it from as many different angles as I am able. I have no idea at this stage where we’ll end up but I’m hopeful we’ll have an answer by the end of it. The long time teacher in me thinks that it ought to be possible. The long time sales and marketing guy in me isn’t so sure. Do you have any thoughts about this that you’d be willing to share?
