I’m currently reading “UnMarketing”, the brilliant book written by Scott Stratten (@unmarketing). To condense the focus of the book in to a few short words would be a fools errand. Nevertheless, I’ll try: I’d summarize it as “a combination of a triple-espresso, a cold shower, a smack upside the head, and a motivational speaker for businesses trying to understand Social Media”. What it does, and does well, is help you to realize that Social Media isn’t just a fad or a buzzword, but a fundamental shift in the way companies talk to their communities. It’s no longer a one-way, or even two-way communication between you and your customer. Now, it’s ∞-way communication. Anyone can talk to anyone, and everyone is talking to everyone. This turns the entire advertising world upside down, and means that you can’t talk to your customers in the same language of ‘ad-speak’ that was the default dialect of the marketing world for so very, very long. Too long. It just doesn’t work anymore, and everyone is tired of it.

While there are many out in the world who are fighting it and can’t seem to adapt to this shift, there are also many who have embraced this new method of communication as a welcome change, myself included. Fortunately I also find myself in an environment that consists of individuals who also are looking towards the future, and strive for growth. We’ve recognized that this means in order to be successful, companies need to abandon the old ‘BS’ ways of trying to push themselves and rely on the merits of their product/service itself, as well as the quality of the knowledge contained in their organization in order to pull people towards them. If you sell a good product, and know what you’re talking about, you’ve already got the basis for a successful Social Media presence. If you’re ‘faking it’, you’re already doomed before you begin, BUT if you’re legitimately knowledgeable, have a quality product, and care about your community, then customers will be drawn to you naturally. There’s no need to force yourself on anyone in these new channels. In fact, forcing yourself on your desired audience can (and often will) have the exact opposite result and drive them away. The quality of your content is what will attract people to you.

You might be thinking to yourself “Wow, what a breath of fresh air for businesses!”, and if you are then you can count yourself among those like myself and Stratten. However, you’ll also find yourself intensely frustrated by the need to sell Social Media to those who either don’t understand this shift and can’t adapt to it, or who simply haven’t looked closely enough at it yet to realize what’s really happening. Stratten summarizes this frustration in this one magnificent passage from his book:

“The thing that really gets me riled up about people questioning the ROI of Social Media is: If I offered you a tool 10 years ago that allowed you to listen in and respond to the casual conversations of your potential, current, and past customers, you would have paid me $20,000 a month for this 8th wonder of the world. But now, that it’s here, and it’s free, you question its value?”

Read that several times. Then read it again. Then read it aloud to everyone around you. It’s astounding, isn’t it? And it’s the root of why small-medium businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs are proving to be so much more effective at Social Media than large corporations. SMB’s are conditioned to seek out low-cost alternatives to gaining exposure, generating brand awareness, and creating buzz about themselves. They don’t have the resources to invest in the types of million-dollar ad campaigns that big corporations just love to use. But the thing is, because of Social Media, even big companies no longer NEED to spend ridiculous dollars on traditional marketing efforts. They can benefit just as much from Social Media as the SMB’s if they simply wake up and realize what this whole Social Media thing is really all about. Just because it doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Quite the contrary, in this case. It doesn’t cost anything; but it is priceless.

But we always come back around to the need to justify Social Media efforts. We still need to ‘sell’ people on it. Why? Aren’t the benefits pretty clear? Isn’t the activity there measurable? Doesn’t it give you a clear correlation between investment (time) and return (information/communication/feedback) that you can’t get through ‘traditional’ marketing?

How do you really compare a successful social media activity versus a successful advertising activity? Well, on the one hand, you spend hours of time developing a creative ad, cough up $5000 for space in an issue of a magazine, and then what? How do you measure if it worked? Well, first you wait. Then after a while you try desperately to correlate any increase in sales to the timing of the ad issue, hoping that the increase isn’t due to some other unforeseen factor, and then you say ‘Well, we think it worked’.

On the other hand, you have Social Media. You spend hours writing a blog post, and then what? You see if it was viewed, how much time they spent, did they share it, where did they share it, did the share bring others to your post, did they comment, was it a positive or negative comment, did they include a link to some other material, and on, and on, and on. Seems to me like the ‘return’ you get from Social Media efforts is more measurable than anything that traditional media can offer. Not only that, but it can give you a very clear idea as to what you should do next. Social Media is self-propagating like that. The more you contribute, the greater the amount of new ideas you can obtain for what you should do next.

If you ever need to ‘sell’ Social Media to someone, why don’t you ask them to ‘sell’ you on traditional media first, just to compare who’s got more good things to say. I have the distinct feeling that they’ll run out of words long before you do.

What do you think? Let’s hear your stories about your frustrations and instances where you’ve needed to ‘sell’ Social Media, and how you went about it!