How to Sound Like a Social Media Genius

First, this article may help you SOUND like a social media genius, but it won’t make you an ACTUAL social media genius.  Seem fair?  Good, then let’s proceed.

If someone asks you something like, “What do you make of this whole social media thing?” Say one or all of the following:

1.  It’s all about creating conversations in the marketplace.  In an attention-based economy, if people aren’t talking about you, something’s wrong.

2.  Social media is both as old as sharing gossip around a campfire and as new as the latest version of the Ruby on Rails programming framework.  The key difference now compared to the early days of the Web is that the tools for communicating are just much, much better.

3.  Yes, social media is very exciting, but you’ll know it hasn’t fully arrived until people STOP talking about it.  It’s at that point that it will be so embedded in our way of life that no one notices it anymore, like plumbing or electricity.

Of course, you can mix and match those answers too.  I know because I have been for the last 11 or 12 years.  Don’t get me wrong: they’re all good answers, and they’re all true.

But the real answer is even simpler.

Participating in social media is like a piglet being tossed into a juicy mud puddle for organizations that actually like to talk to the outside world.

Some organizations really just see the outside world as a source of money or mysterious place where customers come from.

Some know that the outside world is full of actual people and want to talk to them.  It’s good business, but even more importantly, it meets a need that organization has to connect with the people who are or might be their supporters.

Yes, it is important what an organization (or really, the people in an organization) WANT to do.  People can do something they have to do but don’t want to do for a while, but not forever.  If you were an introvert, but had to answer inbound phone calls for a week while your co-worker was on vacation, you could do it.

But you’d be glad when that week was over.

Which is why companies who like to talk to the outside world will KNOW what to do with social media, and those who don’t will struggle.

The tools themselves have never been that complicated, but getting good results is tricky.  Mostly, it takes patience and persistence.

But if you don’t actually WANT to talk to the outside world, there’s no formula for success for your organization.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but the answer’s not what many would like to hear.  Social media’s not a trick; it’s not technical.

Success in social media comes, as W.B. Yeats would say, from “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Does your organization have the heart for social media?