Craig: is it safe to say that social media works all the time, it just may not be working right for you?
Les: I never thought of it that way. Yeah, I would say social media works, either negatively for you or positively for you. It depends on how you go about using it. One of the things that we talk about is, now I’ve seen literally just in the last year and a half, is something that I’ve been talking about for the last five years, is people are using social media without a strategy. They’re using it in ways to promote one thing as opposed to promoting their entire business. They’re using it to go out and hire a few people as opposed to helping it reorganize your entire workforce. I think that, exactly what you said, I think social media works. Whether it works negatively or positively for you, as a business, depends on how your strategy is set up to then go and implement a social or digital strategy.
Craig: Okay, what are the top key factors that make social media work for companies, or individuals, for that matter?
Les: I think the top key factors … One of the biggest ones, is transparency. That’s a word that’s been thrown around, in our politics, been thrown around a lot lately, from a perspective of how transparent someone is, whether they are, whether they aren’t. I think transparency is a big one. I just had a conversation, today, with someone who said, “You know, I just want to pay a college kid to do my Tweets for me and blog.” In my world, okay, yeah, you can pay someone, there have been a lot of companies who made a ton of money by doing social media for other businesses and charging them a fee.
My whole thought process on that is, okay, that’s great to get you started, but you have to be working really closely with them to form your message in a way that you want to make sure that you are creating a environment, or a perception, of who you want to be, because if you just let someone do it for you, then they control your content, they control your image, they control the person that you become. Let’s say you have a really bad month, or bad quarter, you fire them, then all of a sudden your message changes and these loyal customers go, “Hey, what happened?” Because they were doing it as you, as opposed to on your behalf.
I think transparency … A lot of these companies are failing now, because businesses are starting to see, “Hey, we need to do some of this for ourselves, we need to make sure that we’re more involved in the messaging that’s getting out.” It’s no longer, we pay somebody a fee and they create this wonderful marketing plan for us and they go away, in social media they have to be involved. Transparency is one of the key factors. I think another key factor is consistency. A lot of companies start doing social media, and blogging, and doing the right things, then all of a sudden they just quit.
I’ve been guilty of that, myself. The problem with social media is that, you don’t get to start from where you left off in social media. If you build up a following, and then all of a sudden you just stop, once you start again, you have to rebuild that following. It’s a matter of being consistent in what you’re doing, on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. I hear all the time, “Well, no one has time. I don’t have time.” Especially the last three years, there are so many tools out there that automate messages. You can spend fifteen, twenty minutes, an hour a day putting a bunch of messages in a scheduled, automated system that will push out to the right platforms that you want them to push out to, in a manner that you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it.
I always tell them, also, “Well, either you have time now, or you’ll have a lot of time later.” People that are not taking the time to build up their digital strategy are going to be part of this forty percent of the Fortune 500 that’s no longer going to be around. If you imaging forty percent of the force, [inaudible 00:16:02] will no longer be around in ten years, think about all the smaller businesses that may go by the wayside, because they’re not changing, they’re not being, as Cisco said, “They’re not being disruptive.”
Disruptive is not necessarily a bad term, it’s changing the way things are being done. That’s consistency, transparency, and, I think, the last one would be honesty. Corporate America has had a hard time in being honest with the people about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think the companies that are truly now being honest with the people about where they are, what they’re doing, where their goals are, their vision, are being the ones that are succeeding. I think the three big key, there a lot of key factors, but the big three key factors are transparency, consistency, and honesty.
Craig: It sounds like that’s the formula to why some companies succeed and others fail. Are there any other reasons why you’d think outside of those key factors, just in general? Because it sounds like social media is just revealing, pretty much, what we have been as a society. Whether it be relational, professional, because you said earlier, “If you’re not consistent in your engagement in transparency,” that’s just like a relationship. If you have a spouse, or a friend, or a partner, or what have you, and you don’t keep a consistent communication or dialogue with them, and then two weeks go by and you want to … You can’t start where you left off. You have to almost start over, because they’re like, “Where have you been?” and the trust has gone down, if there is any trust. You know?
