Sitting down with a client, my marketing firm brandstorming was asking questions about where the client stood on a new marketing plan for a new product.
Of interest was the messaging they were going to use, and in the discussion, it became clear that their marketing messaging in their main business was very strong personally, but was not clear online. Like many businesses, the quality of their work was much better than their online presence.
They didn't need me to create a new way to market, they needed me to pull the right answers out of their heads and put them online. We reached a point where we all started nodding, and realized that what we really needed was to give the owners the time to think about how good they really were.
I got the idea from blogging. It's always been my idea that blogging is good for introspection. It forces you to write more than you know off the top of your head, which forces you to think about what you do and why. Many qualified people don't think about what they're good at, and instead look for slogans to short-cut their way to explanations. That's the whole point of a job title. Job titles are marketing of people.
Why does this matter to you, especially for social media? One, you need more introspection about what you really do. Two, you need to slow down with the promises and instead figure out what you've done in the past that would be useful to a client or employer. And three, you need to do a better job of finding people who need your particular skills. If you don't know what those skills are, how can you figure out how to apply them to clients?
I beat the drums quite a bit about experience being more important than social media skills, but that's just word play. Social media is something that lets you do what you've done in the past, better. If you can discover what you did, and why that might be of interest to a prospect or prospective boss, social media is easy.
It's when you try to make social media the destination that you fail, and sound like a fraud. Is there a social media future where "social media" changes everything? Yes. But you have to get there first, and if you're broke and unemployed, you won't be the one they trust.
It looks like this. $$$ now ='s success later.
Or maybe look at it on this timeline.
