Social Media for Skeptics

Mary Schmidt

Jan 25, 2012

Regular readers know that I’m - at best - skeptical about, for example, Facebook’s long-term viability as a business.  As for Twitter, and all the rest?  Use for business?  Maybe. Maybe not.  (This summer, I’ll be doing a seminar, Social Media for Skeptics. Success Fundamentals for Service Pros. More about that in a sec.) 

My skepticism is well-founded. (Do a quick google search re social media skeptics and you’ll see a lot about how to sell SM to skeptics.  Not much on how to make social media actually work.)

Even those companies that have leaped in with both feet (and likely BIG budgets) are finding social media problematic.  For example, Dell.  They’ve got several Facebook pages.  However, I have to wonder if anyone at Dell ever reads the comments.  Ouch.  I get spammed regularly on Twitter (Arby’s???)  Got a spam email from Cisco (“Dear Mary R”) after I signed up to follow the company on Twitter (They’re very-high profile in social media and have been written up all over the place re their efforts.)  Just recently, McDonald’s stubbed their twitter toes. (Seriously? Someone at the company couldn’t have anticipated this?) 

So, am I saying NEVER use social media?  No, of course not.  Properly used, it can be a great tool set.  Key words are “properly” and “used.”  Of course that’s common sense, and common sense often isn’t much fun…or sexy…or buzzy. 

I got to talking about all this (live and in person) with a former colleague, Al Hahn, over a re-connect lunch a few months ago.  Like me, he’s skeptical about social media.  He’s also one of the smartest people I know and one of the straightest shooters.  You bring in Al for his services marketing and sales expertise and you get no-bs advice you can really use. (I met Al when a company for which I worked was one of his clients. What a wonder! A consultant who didn’t bloviate, pontificate or otherwise insult my intelligence. I was his east coast principal for a while in his consulting practice.  We worked with companies such as HP, Nortel, Ascend, and others.) 

We left lunch vowing we’d find a way to work together again.  And we have.  We’re taking all our experience in IT services marketing, sales, and delivery, combining it with our skepticism, adding a healthy dose of common sense and reality…and offering a two-day workshop for social media skeptics.  We’ll be talking about how technology support/service pros can use social media for results.  However, we won’t be doing all the talking.  This is planned to be a workshop after all.  That means we intend for participants to go away with knowledge they can use back at work.  I’ll be posting more details as we develop them.  However, it’ll be in Chicago in June and we’ll be offering special early sign-up rates. (We’re also limiting the number of attendees so we can ensure everyone can truly participate, not get lost in the crowd.)

In the meantime, I’ll give you a preview from our introductory/get started presentation:

The First Three Takeaways

- Social media isn’t for everyone, in every business, in every company
- Social media won’t magically solve your problems or generate money
- You don’t have to do everything, all the time

We’re not pitching that we’re “social media experts.”  (Way too many of those already out there. Self-anointed. Pitching magic and boilerplate, one-size-fits all advice.)  We’ve vowed we’ll not overload people with theory or data (Both Al and I LOVE data.).  What we WILL do is work with the attendees to come up with ideas that suit their particular company, industry sector and customers.  (We’re also committed to having some fun along the way.  Really.)

In Social Media For Skeptics