By Alexandra Reid
Update, May 24:
As you can see from the comments at the end of this post, people have suggested that the comments in this post attributed to Gary Vaynerchuk are not representative. In a Twitter conversation I had with Gary, he told me that the blog post on which I relied for this post misrepresented his presentation and certainly misrepresents his social media philosophy. I’ve invited Gary to weigh in here, and we certainly hope does. Please read this post in this context.
I read a blog post today that annoyed me, the content for which came from a presentation Gary Vaynerchuk gave to more than 600 small businesses and local chamber and association leaders at America’s Small Business Summit on Monday in Washington D.C. His said that small business owners must get on social media right away or else risk getting run over by the “wave” of innovation. It wasn’t his call to small business owners to get started on social media that raised my red flag. It was his sense of urgency, that small business owners should get on social media immediately without asking the right questions and laying out a sound strategy first. This is the ill-advised leap-before-you-look mentality that saps budgets and kills new marketing initiatives before they have had the chance to properly develop.
His advice?
- Don’t worry about what you’re going to say; just get started and build from there.
- Don’t focus on trying to win new customers, but instead on treating your existing customers well so you can keep them and inspire them to endorse your business.
- Don’t obsess about ROI. There’s a certain amount of serendipity in word-of-mouth marketing, and the numbers don’t always tell the full story.
I thought we had finally moved past this trial-and-error approach to social media, that all the content written on the importance of having a strategy and proving ROI had finally ushered in at least somewhat of a standard for social media operations among marketers.
Clearly, I was mistaken.
Flip this backwards advice 180 degrees and you’ll be heading in the right direction towards a successful social media marketing program. Care deeply about what you are going to say on social media and have a plan, focus your energies on winning new customers, and obsess over return on investment. Without a sound plan and proof that your activities are working and generating revenue, you could be throwing your money into a wasted effort with potentially damaging consequences to your brand.
To be fair, I understand that social media is still a relatively new area for marketers and while we have established best practices for our activities, many could still use improvement, especially in the ROI department. But I think we know enough by now by way of measurement to determine if a plan (if there is one that outlines clear goals) is on course for success. Small businesses don’t have large marketing budgets to waste and marketing, especially social media marketing which requires a long-term strategy, ain’t cheap. Every dollar must count. It is destructive to tell them that they shouldn’t worry about a content marketing strategy. It is unreasonable to tell them not to obsess over ROI. This is their livelihood we are talking about here. Social media is an investment. If they don’t hold their marketers accountable and see return for their dollars, which comes from attracting leads through their channels and converting them into new customers, they are going to be the ones who will have to suffer the consequences.
I want to think that Vaynerchuk, who is a high-profile social media marketer, was advising small business owners to relax and have fun with social media. If that is the case, I couldn’t agree more – social media is fun and marketing too heavily will push people away. But there is such a thing as too relaxed, especially when we are dealing with small budgets. Retaining existing customers and turning them into brand champions is also great advice, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of losing the focus of attracting new customers. It should also be noted that Vaynerchuk did have a fourth point, which was completely inarguable: Don’t ignore what people are saying on Twitter. It’s a great source of information about what consumers like, think and do.
As a brief disclaimer, I didn’t attend the summit and pulled this content from SmartBlog on Social Media, so if there are any clarifications, please do share them in the comment section below. I look forward to starting a discussion.
/// COMMENTS
7 Comments »Jeff Campbell
May 23, 2012 3:02 pmAlex,
I couldn’t agree more. A little bit of a vision, a strategy and a plan go along way to avoiding wasted effort (or worse – embarrassment) and to achieving real business benefits. The issue for small business as I see it is the ability to make the commitment to a regular social media engagement, management and analysis plan. They are already spread quite thin with the core business.
My friends at Maximum Business Intelligence understand this issue and are offering a well thought out social media service tailored to SMB. They are running webinars on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4PM to discuss the service and invite business owners who understand the benefits but have difficulty with the commitment of time and resources.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am involved with Maximum Business Intelligence. This said, I encourage business owners to invest 30 to 60 minutes to understand the offering and make their own decision. The website is at http://www.maximumbusinessintelligence.com.
Alexandra Reid
May 23, 2012 3:09 pmThanks for the comment, Jeff, and the recommendation. I think small businesses should take advantage of all the guidance available to them. I would actually like to sit in on one or two of those webinars and will certainly check them out.
I agree that one of the biggest challenges small businesses face is lack of internal resources to properly manage social media accounts. It’s in recognition of this challenge that we offer community management services as well as strategic guidance for our clients.
DC Cahalane
May 23, 2012 3:28 pmAlexandra,
I do think that you maybe have taken the wrong side out of what Gary had to say. From reading Gary’s books and watching many, many presentations of his, the clear point that seems to come across consistently is to be genuine and to build relationships with your customers instead of treating social media simply as a cheap way to deliver direct mail style marketing messages. His success as a marketeer and a businessman (check out winelibrary.com) comes from this core. He’s famous for the chapter on marketing in his first book Crush It, which simply contains one message “Care”. In terms of ROI on social media, he’s written a whole book on the topic “The Thank You Economy”.
All of your points are completely valid regarding the need for business not to have a cavalier or lazy attitude towards social media, I think if you look into Gary’s background, his style of work at Vaynermedia and watch some of his other presentations, you’ll see that you’re both actually working off the exact same hymn sheet. I’d recommend both his books too as essential handbooks for businesses confused about where to start with social media
Love the blog, always very insightful.
DC
pikesan
May 23, 2012 4:19 pmAlexandra,
I recommend you spend some more time with Gary Vee or read his first book. To say he’s 180 degrees wrong after the success he’s demonstrated should cause you to pause. Gary doesn’t say ROI is not important, he says not to obsess over it. You’ll spend valuable time (money) trying to measure something often times nearly unmeasurable. Plus by the time you figured it out, the pertinent measure may have changed!
He also says to jump in and get started. In other words, start small and scale. Start by drowning existing customers in appreciation. What planning is required to call and say, “Thanks for your order!” or finding your customers on Twitter and FB and listening to them? That is getting started, isn’t it?
Aren’t you saying to pay for yours and Jeff’s (self admitted expensive) services, THEN start? As fast as the rules and even the playing field are changing, by the time you found your plan isn’t working (missed ROI) the test, evaluate, change, test, evaluate method would have already found the right track.
“Thanks for the comment Jeff”? It’s a half step short of spam.
Alexandra Reid
May 23, 2012 4:45 pmHi DC.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I can tell that Gary cares deeply about social media. He addressed me immediately and carefully via Twitter and I was eager to listen to his comments. As I said, I did not attend the conference. I wrote this piece based on a blog post that covered his presentation. I’m happy that in writing this piece I at least drew attention to the potential inaccuracies of that post. That being said, we’ve also raised an important discussion, which was, of course, my intention. Thank you also for pointing me to his books. I did some brief research on him before writing this piece, and he is most definitely regarded as a thought leader in the space. This is why I was so shocked to see such bad advice from his presentation on the blog post this morning. If you have any more resources to share with our audience here to bring clarity to this situation, I encourage you to share them. It’s important that we get the message right so more people like me, who didn’t have the privilege of seeing Gary in action, aren’t misdirected.
Alexandra Reid
May 23, 2012 9:05 pmHi Pikesan.
You’ve raised some great points. Social media is changing all the time and the processes required to measure ROI could still use improvement. There are also potential pitfalls in awarding too much consideration to the planning side of things and not putting enough energy into implementation.
That being said, having a well thought out strategy before starting on social media is absolutely necessary. Training is also helpful, especially for small businesses new to the space, and Gary said he was speaking to small business owners who are completely new to social media. If that’s the case, they may not even know that saying “thanks for your order” is necessary, how they should uncover these connections and mentions in the first place, and how they should communicate with their audiences. So for them to simply jump in and get started, even if it is only small scale, might actually be a very large undertaking.
I’ve seen too many businesses simply set up accounts and then abandon them because they run out of things to say. I’ve also seen the reverse, where a small business didn’t set themselves up properly internally before starting on social media and were completely washed away, bombarded with messages that they didn’t have time to address. They didn’t know to which department comments needed to be sent nor how to handle negative comments. This is why taking the time to learn the tools and processes, research your space online and lay out a content marketing strategy before jumping in is so important. When it comes down to measuring ROI, small businesses must be vigilant. They should get obsessed about it and learn all they can to arm themselves with information with which they can hold marketers accountable for their actions. Even if all their questions can’t be answered with pinpoint accuracy, they need to know what they should expect from their investment.
In my experience, small businesses that are just starting to get their feet wet in social media don’t know the processes required to effectively monitor social media, manage communities and measure success. Of course, trying things out for yourself is a great way to learn new things. But that’s how resources are wasted, and small businesses often don’t have the budgets to waste on a trial-and-error approach. This is where hiring an agency can help. While social media marketing services aren’t cheap, they are affordable when you consider the time that can be wasted learning how to do it effectively.
I’d love to have the privilege of meeting Gary and discussing social media with him. I’ve also been advised to read his books and can’t wait to crack open my own copies. My points were based entirely on the blog post I read this morning. Gary said he will comment here as soon as he can to clarify some of its inaccuracies. On first glance, however, it was the worst small business social media marketing advice I’d ever heard. Unfortunatley, it has been brought to my attention that Gary may have been misrepresented. I look forward to hearing his points.
As for Jeff’s comment, he is an associate and regular contributor to this blog. His comment was genuine and his resource for small businesses helpful. I have no reason to regard such a comment as spam.
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