And here comes Internet Week with all its attendant happenings, conferences, panels and of course, parties. My good friend Michelle at SpaWeek took the opportunity of Internet Week to figure out now how to do more internety things, but in fact, how to do less. It’s something I think, and write!, about a lot as my life and my business become more and more entwined with all things social and online. Because working in social media, much like banking (my previous gig) is pretty much a 24-hour job.

Work doesn’t end at 6pm in social media. We go out, we tweet, we checkin, we respond to emails. We run out of bars and clubs to take important calls. Mostly we stare into our phones, alighted by those pretty glowing screens, and annoy our friends and family to no end. The frenetic pace of social media lends itself to easy burnout.

#SIGNOFF?

When do we get the time to sign off? People ask me all the time where I get my energy, how I am able to do so many things at once. Now of course, I have my secrets, but I think in the interest of being humble (a guy can try right?) I will first say, that I can’t do everything, I don’t perform magic, and I am most certainly not everywhere all at once. Most of the time I am home writing and thinking about my clients and my business and the world of technology.

One of my secrets, which OK, isn’t THAT much of a secret, is Yoga. I do a lot of Yoga, and for the past year, Yoga has become my sustenance, both physically and mentally. I usually sneak in Yoga during the day. It’s a welcome break from hours of sitting, of writing, of phone calls and client meetings. But to many people, taking a break in the middle of the day just sounds downright unproductive. I mean, why stop working and then come back to it, when you can just work straight through the day and do Yoga or hit the gym after. Or why not before work?

Those are really good questions but I have even better answers. Thinking about my own productivity and about how we, as a culture, have decided upon what is best for productivity, it seems pretty clear to me that we’ve sacrificed our own well being and happiness for some abstract measurement of production. Sure, working 10 straight hours, or 16 for that matter, seems really productive. But when you ask a human being to work for that amount of time without a break, and lunch and coffee breaks most definitely do not count, then you really aren’t taking into consideration most of the factors that lead us to be happy. No one I know, and no one I want to know, can be productive at a steady sustainable pace for 10 hours. Force someone to work that way and most of the time they’ll be cruising the internet and making long phone calls. They’ll be wasting your money.

Personally, I work best when I have a big break in the day. I love the flow of working for a few hours and then taking a break. It clears my mind. I have to switch gears. And frankly, I am not so good at switching gears. I need a prompt. And most of the time that prompt is Bikram Yoga, a 90 minute, intense physical and emotional experience that challenges both my body and my brain. And afterwards, I am clear, I am energized, I’ve got the cobwebs and the detritus of life out. And I can come back to work, or meet with a client, knowing everything is OK. I’ve done what I needed to, and now I can do even better work for another stretch of time. The bottom line is I serve my clients better with Yoga in my life. End of story.

Gassing Up

I’ve learned so much about myself doing Bikram Yoga. I’ve learned what I can and cannot put up with. I’ve learned how to center my mind and free it of independent thoughts. Because Bikram Yoga has a 20 second resting posture, known as Savasana or corpse pose, where you literally do nothing. It is your resting point, your gas station to refill your energy before getting up and doing another challenging posture. But in those 20 seconds, those precious 20 seconds, you have to catch your breath, the only way to do so is empty your mind. And focus on one thing. You can’t worry about the email you sent, or the call you forgot to send. You can’t worry about the money your owed, or the blog you wanted to write.

Because if you do worry about that stuff, you can’t refill your energy quotient. Which you definitely need for the next set of postures. And if you don’t relax, you are basically screwed until the next Savasana. And then you get to try it allllll over again.

So, anyway, why am I telling you this? Because I want the social media world to be healthy and hearty. I want my friends and colleagues, my readers and tweeters to know that you’ve absolutely got to find ways to disconnect. To restore some peace into your life. It is THAT important. Do it during the day. Find the way, find the time.

And if you need even a bit more help, you can come watch me and many others talk about how they sign off and SpaWeek’s Internet Week Event. Here is who I am speaking with, pretty fancy company if you ask me. And if you can’t attend, you can watch us here http://www.spaweekblog.com/2010/06/04/the-signoff-movement live streamed for your viewing pleasure

Brett Petersel (@brett) Business Development and Events at Mashable

Topic: Mashable Unplugged! #SIGNOFF advice from the most plugged in of them all.

Julia Roy (@juliaroy) Senior Manager of New Media, Coach Inc., Digital Influencer

Topic: The Rules of Disengagement, by Julia Roy

Zachary Adam Cohen (@zacharycohen) Social Media Consultant, Blogger, Local Foods Advocate, Yogi

Topic: Tweet. Eat. Yoga. Repeat. Learn Zach’s most successful moves—online and on the yoga mat.

Keri Glassman (@keriglassman) Author of The O2 Diet, owner of Nutritious Life, Women’s Health Magazine & CBS Early Show contributor.

Topic: How to Be Healthy, Thin And Beautiful (and not just in your avatar)

Oz Sultan (@ozsultan) Social Media Specialist at Irisnation, world’s largest private agency.

Topic: Ayurveda and Unani: Growing up with Ancient Cold Remedies in a 2.0 World

Andrea Syrtash (@andreasyrtash) Dating and relationship expert, author of ‘He’s Just Not Your Type (And That’s a Good Thing)’

Topic: Your love life—Online and Off.

PJ Gach (@bettybuzz) Senior Style & Beauty Editor at Betty Confidential

Topic: Offline Excellence, as told by a member of the team that won Min’s 2010 Best of the WebEditorial Excellence Award

Damien Basile (@db) Communications Strategist and Entrepreneur, Simplifier

Topic: Running without a Cell, and Other Brilliant Ways to Separate Work and Life

Image Courtesy of lululemon athletica on Flickr

Hear Ye Hear Ye!

Henceforth, all social media gurus and wizards and mavens and experts shall be referred to as fortune tellers! Yesterday I wrote a post about feeling a bit bored with all the activities involved in keeping up to date as a social media strategist. Because I am not simply a user of social media, but actually make a living at it (still shocks me to say that really) the way in which I interact with the tools, and networks, and applications of social media is a bit different. Sure I am using them but I am also analyzing them.

When Foursquare is down, I have to notice it. If a certain app keeps crashing, I need to know if this is a chronic or acute condition. If the dominant conversations are occurring on a new network, the way for instance, Google Buzz quickly became a back channel to Twitter and user’s blog posts, and then receded, I need to know about it. I need to know these things because I am advising clients on the best way to use and employ social media in their businesses, in their marketing strategies.

What Facebook’s Demise Could Mean For Businesses

Over the past month, I’ve noticed the severe blow back received by Facebook over their new privacy rules. Over some of that time it looked as if Facebook might have finally stepped over the line. Leading technology people were threatening to quit. Facebook finally relented with an apology by Mark Zuckerberg and a pledge to do better, published as an Op-Ed in the Washington Post. Interesting choice there! (wondering if they were preempting any governmental inquiries)

From my perspective, I didn’t really care. I live an open book kind of life sharing most of my information, my data, my writing, my location and a bevy of other things with the world. But, I do have an obligation to my clients to make sure that they weren’t abusing their fans’ data. And furthermore, I had to take very seriously the possibility that Facebook might have been fatally weakened.

To be fair, that looks a bit premature now and the crisis seems to be fading. But the point is that telling the future, predicting out scenarios is a big part of what I do. If Facebook were to rapidly lose followers, I would have to be prepared with alternate strategies. I would need to find a way for my clients to reorient their strategy.

The Speed of Social Media

One of the things that I have learned and always try to keep a handle on, is how quickly things change in social media. There are new apps and websites launching every day. Existing ones constantly add new features, and old networks quickly lose their efficacy. I once had clients set up FriendFeed accounts to utilize that services streaming and centralizing capabilities. Of course, FriendFeed is still around, but since being bought by Facebook it has lost a good deal of its momentum. I don’t use the service anymore except to feed my Google Reader account into Twitter.

Social media strategists then become something like fortune tellers. We need to hone a pretty good guess as to what we should be advising our clients to do. And the fact that one of the hallmarks of social media is the speed with which things move, it can be a particularly hairy task to take on. But take it on we must.

Because we are fortune tellers after all, aren’t we?

Image Source: benleto on Flickr

[fblike layout_style='button_count' show_faces='false' verb='like' font='segoe ui' color_scheme='light']Ah with fond (and hazy) memories do I recall freshman year at college. A whole new city to explore, hundreds if not thousands of new people to meet, class schedules to manipulate in order to sleep as late as possible. It occurred to me recently that Twitter is actually a lot like your freshman year in college. One of the great things about heading off to college is the opportunity to meet so many new people. And the thing is you don’t meet everyone all at once. In fact, I continued to meet people throughout my freshman and even sophomore years.

Constantly Meeting Your NEW Best Friends

Interacting on Twitter is basically the exact equivalent of Freshman year. Think about it: you are constantly meeting new people, finding the communities you are interested in being a part of, introducing yourself to any number of people. One of the things I remember most clearly about freshman year was how often I had to introduce myself. Even towards the end of the year, having been at school for 8 or 9 months, I’d still come across someone that I had yet to meet. This is one of the pleasures of being in a place with so many people around you.

How many introductions did you make freshman year? How many times did you deliver your life story?

By then end of freshman year I had my schtick down cold. Going to a school in the heart of the Deep South, people would find out I was from New York and instantly be mesmerized. They wanted to know! Everything. What’s it like in New York? Was growing up their fun? Was it dangerous? What about the museums and the Broadway shows? The restaurants and the shopping?

Don’t you have the same experience on Twitter? Someone finds your tweets or your blog posts and introduces themselves, wanting to find out more. Maybe something you wrote, or a link you sent out, or a conversation you were involved with registered with them. Struck the appropriate chord and BAM, just like that, you’ve made a new worthwhile connection.

Figuring Out The Clans and Tribes

Twitter is a big beast of a service. Over a billion tweets sent, 50 million users, and 5 million active users. What this means is that you could spend inordinate amount of times on Twitter and never discover everyone you needed or wanted to, no matter your purpose. It is obvious but its important to remember that Twitter is a social network, and if you look at it this way, you can easily see how college itself is a bit like a social network. A bunch of people of varied backgrounds and interests all dropped into a pool together.

And just like in college, tribes and clans soon form. Human beings are immensely tribal. There are the frat guys and sorority girls who immediately cling to one another and begin to form social hierarchies. The studio artists and theater majors go in one direction, the history nerds join up, the poets head off to the English department and the hippies organize extensive drug trafficking and tape trading syndicates.

Just like with Twitter we only follow so many people. And they follow others. So occasionally we see people we don’t quite know or follow in our streams as someone we DO know interacts with them. Although its a futile task, we tend to construct maps or architectural diagrams of all our connections. Is this any different than how we behaved in college? As we continued to meet people, we placed them in our brackets and connected them to others we knew. Did we meet them at a party off campus, or in a live chat on Twitter? Were we following the same hashtag?

College Is Where We Go To Discover Ourselves

It may be a cliche, and it may not even be true, but for better or worse, college is for many people the place they first begin to discover who they really are, who they spend their time with, how they spend it. Before college, we are too busy dealing with teenage angst, hormones, and the limited size of our high schools to actually discover what we expect out of life, and how we are planning on going about getting it.

Twitter is similarly a place where we discover ourselves, where our real interests lie, who our friends and connections are, what we share, what we keep private. There is something so simple and elegant about Twitter, the limited bursts of thought, the opportunities to both mask and fully expose yourself.

In the end, Twitter forces the real person to emerge. I think that is the great and often overlooked power of Twitter. We celebrate its ability to precipitate conversation and interaction. We find the information we want and need. We find audiences for our products or content. But what about what Twitter does to the self?

Well…thats a topic for another post, but for know, go do a keg stand or something.

Image courtesy of Kenneth Hynek on Flickr

So now that you are properly focused on social media and are retreading your business’ tires to operate in the powder-fresh snows of social media, what other work do you have before you? I mean isn’t that enough? You’ve been reading all the best marketing blogs, set-up listening stations to monitor your corner of the world and you’ve even taken steps to do some website redesign to incorporate your social networking profiles. And your developing content for the blog and locating the people within your organization who can handle these new responsibilities. You may feel like you’ve done enough.

I am going to be the messenger of ill tidings then when I tell you all those good intentions and hard work are not enough. Shoot me if you must. But I speaketh the truth, because for all the good that adopting social media into your business or brand operations will get you, the more important wook is in the philosophy behind this switch.

Is Social Media the Tools or the Philosophy?

Social media is more than just a shiny new toolkit. Social media represents a whole new way of thinking about business, about communication, about sales and marketing, about customer service, about technology about human resources. The tools of social media surely touches all of these silos. But what binds them together is the underlying philosophy that vivifies, that gives life, to social media.

1. What good is Twitter to you if you haven’t learned how to have authentic, real-time and highly personal conversations with your customers?
2. What benefit does Foursquare have for your business if you’ve simply slapped on some mundane mayor offering, but don’t really care about location-based marketing?
3. What’s the point of loading Google Analytics into your websites if you aren’t sitting down with them once a week and listening to what your traffic is telling you?

The point is that adopting the tools of social media doesn’t make your business ready to succeed in a world of social media. You are going to have to dig deeper and make the particular connections between the philosophy behind things to the tools that make them work. For instance:

What is your policy on public complaints or queries about your new service or product? Who is going to handle those mentions? When and where will you compromise and admit when you are wrong? Similarly, at what point along this continuum will you hold the line? How committed are you to your blog features when the metrics are telling you they aren’t hitting your goals?

The Philosophy Behind Social Media

The philosophical underpinnings of social media do not have anything to do with the tools or networks that animate social media. The posture and stance that animates this ethic is perhaps the biggest shift that brands and businesses are going to have to make. Which is why social media has been so quickly and more productively employed by individuals. Individuals have the flexibility to change on a dime. We can rebrand in an hour. Trust me. I’e done so about 25 times in the past 6 months. I can be anything I want to be.

Businesses though? Not so much. You can’t change the direction of a big fat oil tanker around in five minutes. It takes an hour. Or the better part of a day. How are you supposed to shift the entire philosophy of your business around while at the same time negotiating a recessionary environment, the fact that you are trying to do more with less (employees, budgets, time). Not exactly the time to be making deep changes to the philosophy behind your business. You need a tugboat. You need someone to help you negotiate the twists and turns of the Port of Call you want to arrive safely in.

Which is why it is crucial that businesses focus less on adopting the tools of social media and spend more of their time talking about the 21st Century. What does new mean to your business? What does breaking with the past mean? What does sustainability conjour? How are we going to communicate better (and no this doesn’t mean more emailing)? How are we going to move past the jealousies, the politics, the bureacratic obfuscations that prevent your business from actually changing? How are you going to retrofit your business?

It’s only going to come from the top. This can only be done through the illustration of true leadership. Motivating your employees not just to buy into what you are selling them but in believing in even more than you may, and providing them the freedom to be nimble and to go off and motivate others on their own. This is how the 21st Century requires you to adapt.

How are you going to talk about competition without sounding afraid? I know of some businesses, even new media enterprises, where even mentioning the name of their chief rival in the office can get you nasty stares? How preposterous!

It’s stunning to see how many businesses are talking the talk with social media, saying all the right things, making gestures in all the right directions, and ABSOLUTELY FAILING at learning the lessons behind what makes social media work.

What makes social media work is the lubricating influence of an entire new set of eyes. How’s your vision these days?

Image Courtesy of Dan Kamminga on Flickr

Well if you’ve been reading here lately, this post can’t be that much of a shock. What a whirlwind 6 months it has been. Starting a business, revving up this blog, meeting and greeting everyone in NYC. Hundreds of phone calls, dozens of meetings, some fantastic client interactions. Lots of successes and few failures, a lot of learning every single day.

This has been one of the wildest most trans-formative phases of my life. And if this sounds like a letter in which I say something dramatic and then drop off the face of the earth for 6 months and start tweeting in Thailand, well, its not.

No More Social Media Strategy

For the time being, I don’t see the value in referring to myself, on my website, on my business cards, or in person, as a social media strategist. I think the time isn’t right. And even though the majority of the work I do for clients still involves social media in one way or another: from building websites and blogs, developing creative content strategies, joining, adding to and leading conversations online, consulting on mobile and other technology issues, and bridging the gap between online and offline communities, the truth is that social media can’t fulfill its promise all on its own.

The world is still too variegated and the ROI is still thin. For small businesses and brands, the people that I have chosen to work with and for, social media is still in its infancy, especially when it comes to finding a thick return. Now I can go on and on about website traffic, twitter followers, engagement, brand equity, visibility. I’ve got stacks of excel sheets with data. And I’ve got a roll of former clients that still chat with me (Win), refer me to their friends (Win Win!) and who I’ll probably end up working with again at some later date.

So What Happened?

Nothing. Everything.

What has happened is that I have come to see social media less as the end all be all, and more as just another tool in the toolbox for businesses. Social media is a new tool, and it can be very powerful when harnessed properly. But to harness that power, and the extract the most value from social media means asking businesses to spend a lot of time, energy and money on something that they don’t quite believe in it. And you know what? They are right.

There is a lot of talk out there about how businesses don’t get it, they don’t see the value in social media and they are hurting their brands by not activating themselves to embrace social media and start engaging. I lot of that talk has emanated from me. But it was only through working with more and more clients, being on the ground with them, that I have come to see that business owners and brands are smart indeed. They absolutely need to be convinced of the value. But ONLY they can convince themselves.

I have stopped trying to do the convincing, something that I was more apt to do last year as I first geared up. You can’t change people. They have to come to the recognition on their own time, in their own way. And it is so much better that way. Because even if you can just barely convince a company to use social media, they won’t believe it in their heart. And for small businesses and brands, it is all about heart. It is all about feeling. That is the exciting and terrifying part about running your own business. Or working for a small business. Every decision is personal and intimate. There is no distance in anything like there is when you work for a large corporation with layers and protections.

So Now What?

My role has shifted. I am still focusing on social media, but I spend more time rolling social media into traditional marketing efforts. This is a good thing. And for companies that have strong and coherent social media strategies it makes traditional marketing so much easier. It provides a back up. In case traditional marketing tools don’t work on a particular campaign or with a set of ideas (blog posts, video series, community exercises) a nice base of social media engagement allows businesses an extra marketing channel with which to push our message out.

The real beauty is when social and traditional work hand in hand. I am seeing this more and more. I’ll tell you about it soon. But for now, I am hitting my word limit on this post, and I’ve really got some work to do.

Image Source: Bien Stephenson on Flickr

Right now, I am bit frightened. And no this is not just another lament how hard I am struggling to make ends meet or fears for the integrity of our cultural legacy. I think we’ve had just about enough of that. What I am worried about is my own profile on social media. In fact, what I am really worried about is that my Twitter account is growing too fast.

Crazy right? I thought the whole point of Twitter was to get as many followers, to have as big a platform as possible to broadcast my thoughts, my links, my blog content, my projects. The more followers, the more influence. The more free invites to swank VIP parties. The more swag bags, and free dinners. Press contacts reaching out for commentary or promotional help.

That may be the point to many of the people on Twitter. Grow the brand. The bigger the better. Nope, not for me. In fact, I want less followers. Small is beautiful. I want intimacy. I have the exposure I want. I am lucky. Many days while working the interwebs, I feel I am in the zone. Dashing between client work, blog posts, Twitter streams and conversations, my consciousness level actually rises. It’s kind of like being on drugs. (Trust me on this one)

It seems the more authentic I’ve become, the more honest I have been, even when that honesty is pretty horrendous or humiliating, my follower count kicks up a notch.

I believe in something called the “Social Media G Spot.” I can’t really describe it. It’s actually quite intangible and includes a potent mix of having enough followers from enough various backgrounds that no matter what kind of content I produce or share, it it will find the right audience. The benefit of hitting this sweet spot is having the kind of followers, and enough of them, where there is always a conversation either going on, or enough people willing to engage should I decide to start one. I do this often.

Right now, I feel like I am in that sweet spot. I’ve got the best followers in the world, and I wouldn’t trade them in for anything. I’d hate to see anybody go, but it happens from time to time. All for the better though, it allows me to find my more natural, native audience. The people who REALLY belong with me.

But I am worried that if my account keeps growing that I’ll lose some of the connection. I don’t want to lose that intimacy, that closeness. What if I am not around to engage and share their own content because my attention is one someone new who I don’t know as well? What if my client list grows too long that I can’t be as active as I occasionally, alright frequently, am.

It’s true that at a certain level, accounts get so big that the people behind them simply cannot keep up with all the comments, replies, direct messages and questions. Thankfully, I am not at that level. If’ I have achieved anything like success with social media, which I would never say whether I have or have not, it is because, to date, I have been able to respond and engage with everyone that came at me.

I hope very much to continue this, as I believe in the value of the community. I also extract tremendous value from it. And right now, I’ve found the sweet spot. Or at least I think I have. And the last thing I want to do is lose. Because it may never come back.

Image Source: RealEstateZebra on Flickr

Some of you already know this, but I came into social media from a rather different angle than most. I don’t come from the communications or PR industries. I come from finance. But after leaving the financial services world behind, I launched a venture called Farm to Table: The Emerging American Meal. It started as a TV show I wrote that aimed to chronicle the people, places and trends emerging in America’s local sustainable food movement.

The TV show, which was never sold or produced (though is still technically alive), led me to start a blog. That blog became a community of writers, activists, farmers, artisans and commentators and soon ballooned into one of the biggest websites in the sustainable food universe. I shepherded Farm to Table through various iterations, a few redesigns and eventually led it to a place of prominence both online and off.

Of course, in that process, I learned all the skills that I know use in my social media consulting business, inbound marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, traditional PR outreach, metrics, etc. Without Farm to Table I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today. I owe that experience a lot.

This past fall, it became clear that I could no longer continue to run Farm to Table and build my new business. So I shut the thing down. I had looked for all sorts of partners to team up with, made tons of phone calls and pitches, but ultimately couldn’t find anyone willing to do the heavy lifting. So I wrote, bravely or stupidly, a post called The Failure of Farm to Table that summarized my experience, discussed openly my failure in finding a way to develop the TV show and basically said goodbye.

A day later, an entrepreurial young man named Khaled Allen, who had written for Farm to Table previously, and who, on top of being an excellent writer and committed sustainable food activist, was looking for a project to take on. Within a week, plans were hatched and I turned over the keys to Khaled and Dawn Gifford, another talented community member, who was willing to do some graphical work and administrative tasks along with Khaled. In fact, Dawn had a prescient vision for Farm to Table which the two of them, plus a few others, are implementing now. It’s going really well, and from my perspective, I am just lucky that a creative project that I started resonated enough with others that they were willing to adopt it as their own, and indeed, improve and build it.

But one thing that had been on my mind was that I wasn’t contributing to Farm to Table. Perhaps it was selfishness, or simply the stresses and time committments required to start my own consulting firm. But it kept gnawing at me, that something I had pushed out into the world, was now moving forward and that I had all but turned my back on it.

Well, I wrote not one but two pieces today for Farm to Table and wanted to call attention to them here.

1. Can We Please Retire the Shopping Cart?

The shopping cart is the device that should come to symbolize everything that was wrong about the 20th Century approach to food in America. Food-like products were overabundant, they were cheap, they were concentrated in one-stop mega marts, and most of all, they were easy to pick up and throw in the cart. All we had to do was walk down the aisles pushing this contraption at 2 miles an hour and fill our baskets. But what were we filling ourselves with?

2. Consumers Can Change The Market

For years now, the mainstream agriculture community, corporations, farmers, middlemen, even large grocers, have obstructed local, sustainable food from entering broad swaths of the market. Their reasoning has always been specious at best, but one of the answers they gave that actually did make sense was that the demand for local sustainable food did not exist. That answer no longer stands.

Hope you enjoy the posts and if you do, consider sharing them. Also, it is worth nothing that as a blogger, it is important to have multiple outlets for your writing. There are just some days when we don’t want to remain in our niche. We need to branch out. Embrace other blogs, write guest posts, contribute something outside of your tight circle. You’ll meet new people and expose a whole new community to your writing. I am so happy to have these outlets.

The Value of Curmudgeous

Social media needs curmudgeons. We need critics. In fact, what we need is full-on investigative journalism in the world of social media. There is too much hype–and hyperventilating about the power of social media, the power of these new tools and the benefits to our weakened culture.

Of course, I am guilty of the above hyperbole. Thinking back I am reminded of how many blog posts I’ve started with the whole “Social media is revolutionizing our culture at large” blather. Well, no more. Or at least not as much. Even though I do believe that by hook or by crook social media is remapping our culture, our society and empowering people, I also believe that somewhere beneath all this gloss and sheen there is a seedier underbelly to social media. And I’m not just talking about all those “social media gurus” read: snake-oil salesman. That phenomenon is just the beginning.

The reason that social media needs critics and, as I said, full on investigative journalism, is not, as one would expect, to weaken or harm the world of social media. In fact, we need these functions being performed in order to strengthen social media for the long run. A free and unfettered press improves democracy. We all need to see what goes on beneath the blogs and twitter accounts. Does anyone doubt that malfeasance occurs, that ethics are being corrupted? Does anyone doubt that people are being scammed? Does anyone doubt that there are large sums of money being made in less than savory, even illegal, ways?

Who Can Investigate Social Media?

How about all those journalists who have lost their jobs recently? Of course this is only a partial answer but it is clear there are a lot of talented journalists who are sitting out these days, navel gazing and trying to figure out what happened to their jobs, their way of life, their industry.

I believe that journalists with experience in national security, local politics, foreign affairs, the areas where newspapers have been hardest hit, can be extremely valuable as checks upon the growing reach and influence of social media. The same skills of investigation, news gathering, reportage, narrative are important to social media.

And as social media investigations develop, more and more people will become aware. I think one thing these journalists will soon learn is that social media is a very closed world. What’s more, social media likes nothing more than to read about…social media. It’s why sites like Mashable are so popular. They are cheerleaders for social media. And that’s not a bad thing. Social media needs its cheerleaders, it needs it celebrators, but just as well it needs it critics.

And of course, it does have its critics. Plenty of sites and blogs these days take it upon themselves to burst bubbles and poke fun at the buzz and hype surrounding social media. But I can’t really think of any newspapers that are taking on social media directly in the same way they would an investigation in the Pentagon’s misuse of funds, or a politician’s schemings. This is what we should begin to see.

And when these investigations do appear, they’ll be vastly more popular than people think. The truth is even the loudest cheerleaders and evangelists for social media know there is a long way to go before we realize the full potential. Social media for all its gains, is still not mainstream. There are millions of American’s who just don’t see the point.

Investigative reporting in the social media sphere is one way that they’ll begin to see the context. With great stories, even of malfeasance, social media will appear as something real, something tangible. And that is something that we should all want.

Image Source: cliff1066™ on Flickr

I spent the better part of yesterday evening on the phone with a precocious, eager young man in another major east coast city. The person had contacted me via my website with a professional email asking for some of my time. They wanted to discover if there was a business future in doing social media strategy for the hospitality business. I think the conversation is worth going over here because some of the things I articulated caught me by surprise, even though I think about this stuff all the time.

The first thing I said to this person was yes there is a future in doing social media strategy for the hospitality business. But as soon as I said it out loud, I found myself wondering if that is what I truly believed. While X (the name I’ve now given this person to make this blog post a lot easier to write from a pronoun POV) was talking, and while indeed I was listening, I found my mind racing over many of the fears I have hypothesized.

1. What if social media is a short-lived fad?
2. What if once hospitality businesses, once they make the commitment to learning social media, learn far quicker and more comprehensively than previously imagined?
3. What if PR companies, both large and small, dedicate more time and resources to social media marketing?
4. What if the financial scalability of social media marketing collapses?
5. What if the ROI doesn’t materialize?

You can imagine my frustrations as I am listening to these several conversations at once. The one that X is provoking as well as the one going on in my head.

But that frustration quickly gave way to an overarching desire to be helpful. After letting X finish their initial questions, I found myself going over X’s points one by one and in doing so, became much more comfortable with helping X out.

X actually had some great ideas; I’ll probably end up stealing a few of them, which I promptly informed X of. We both got a chuckle out of that. But X also brought up some major issues that I feel he/she did not adequately think through. Working in the hospitality business means adapting to a time schedule and overall flexibility that suits the client. As restaurants, in particular, have hectic schedules its almost like being on call. You never quite know when the crises are going to manifest. And you’ve got to be available at inopportune times.

X wanted to know if they could do social media marketing on the side. I said no way. Businesses and brands want to meet when it is convenient for them, and in the hospitality sector that means at the quiet times of the day and week. The last thing a restaurant wants to do is to meet at 5pm on a Saturday night just as they are getting ready to serve 250 people over the next 5 hours.

Furthermore, there was some discussion about costs, something I’ve written extensively about lately. Lumped into that cost question is the fundamental issue of WHO is going to do the social media work. X wanted to know if they should offer to be the one implementing the strategy. X knew, from reading my blog and following me on Twitter, that the choice I made was not to be the implementer. My perspective is that strategy is more important than the implementation and that it works best when clients do it themselves, with clear direction and with someone looking over their shoulder for awhile. Clients do learn quickly and with someone doing the heavy lifting of consolidating metrics, watching tweet and blog post flow, managing a foursquare account, etc, clients’ time is freed up to creating content, engaging in conversation and building the community.

There are all sorts of problems present for social media marketers right now. At the same time that I think it wise for marketers to focus on specific industries I do have legitimate and lasting concerns that certain industries are going to take time to mature when it comes to social media marketing. The best piece of advice that I could give X last night was simply to start experimenting with different cost and time structures. I told X to make a bunch of mistakes, then make better ones, to write about it, to chronicle their progress for the world to see. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to steal some ideas from them again. Or simply hire X!

I have been brutally honest this week about some of the problems I am facing with my own work. I recently ended a very successful campaign with a client. It was 3 months and it was lucrative. During that time I was actively developing new business as I knew when the current client relationship ended I needed to find other sources of income.

I got close with a bunch of clients who ultimately pulled back at the last second. One of them pulled an offer almost immediately after I accepted it, which I suppose goes with the territory, but which I found in terrible taste.

I’ll be even more honest right now. I initially though social media work would be both lucrative and easy. It’s not why I started my business, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the fantasies were present in the back of my mind. But getting rich quick was never in my mind.

Rather, what I am trying to do is to establish myself as someone who brings tremendous value to clients, who is on the front lines of experimentation and frankly, as someone that will be in high demand as social media becomes more embedded in the everyday fabric of business.

But there are a lot of problems to the long-term sustainability of my business as I see it. Some of them are professional, some of them are financial, some creative. I’d like to sketch them out here as based on my previous posts on the subject there are a lot of people out there grappling with same or similar issues. The engagement and support I have gleaned from the wider community has been tremendous and I will continue to give back to that community as often as I can.

The Recession Is Dampening Spending

I have no doubt that had I geared up my business few years ago, before the financial crisis put its big black boot right on the throat of New York City, my business would be gangbusters. Businesses, especially in the hospitality sector, were spending money left and right on all manner of expansion and PR. Social media was still new and I could have got my foot in the door a whole lot quicker.

The reality now is much different. Hundreds of restaurants have failed. Many more are on the brink. People are pulling their marketing expenditures by cutting back or excising entirely their marketing and PR budgets . Many are trying to do it on their own. For now, this is what they need to do.

In this climate, a new consultant, even one less expensive and more personalized than traditional restaurant PR, is fighting against the odds. If a firm is going to spend money on marketing, they want to do it somewhere that is known, that is safe and comfortable, even if its not ideally what they want. I do not know a single restaurateur who is happy with their PR agency. They all say the same thing. They don’t do anything for me and its too expensive. Of course, this is one-sided and we should all know that PR firms do do things. But perception is reality no?

Even taking these circumstances into account, what hospitality business are NOT likely to do is give an outsider money for something that isn’t proven and is in fact, in its infancy.

The Question of Scale

The next issue to bring up is the one of scale. Can an independent consultant afford to work for brands and businesses that are accustomed to a certain price point for marketing and PR? Most PR companies charge between $2500-5000 a month for their services per restaurant. The reason they can charge that is that they have achieved an economy of scale. Sign up 50 restaurants at that amount and you have enough income to hire enough people to satisfy your clients’ needs.

But what gets lost often enough in this mix is that as you grow larger as an agency, you naturally lose some (ok A LOT) of that personalized, tailored service that is essential for successful marketing and PR. As firms grow, the raw ideation is passed off to lower level employees while the owner and client managers spend more of their time on developing new business and ensuring existing clients are happy.

That is not to say that low level employees are not creative or engaged. Often they are even more engaged then their seniors. But the fact of the matter is, the larger you grow the harder it is too tailor your strategies specifically to your clients. I don’t know exactly why it happens, I just know it does.

You end up using a lot of the same tactics, contacts and maneuvers. And before long, they lose their efficacy. Add to that a generational shift in the operations and business foundations of the media, press and marketing fields in general, and you have a formula for disaster, and opportunity. But mostly disaster.

The Dilemma Is Money

The crux of this whole thing comes down to dollars and cents. At least for now. Ideally, working with 3 clients a month at $2500-3500 a month is the sweet spot. That is enough to ensure one has the resources and freedom to be as creative as possible. But creativity is not the only thing. It ensures one has enough money to stay current with trends, anticipate developments in the industry before they occur and prepare clients for those changes. It is enough to stay engaged on a daily basis, work through your weekly punch list, work the hours we need to work. Hopefully, I will get to that point sometime soon.

But as of now, clients almost universally are not going to spend that kind of money on social media marketing. It’s just too soon. So I, and we, are stuck with the conundrum of being able to extract not much more than $1500 per client. With 3 clients, you are breaking even. In a city like NYC, you aren’t putting any money away and you are working very hard.

If you try to scale up to 7 or 10 clients, you are left with the problem of losing that humanized, tailored service. The kind of service that only comes from being able to devote a great deal of attention, face time and just pure brainstorming to individual clients. Just try being creative in 8 different directions at once. Maybe there are those out there who can do that…but I have no problem admitting that it isn’t me. No Sir!

So What’s A Social Media Professional To Do?

Honestly, I don’t have the answers. But if I were going to proffer a solution I would say that, in the meantime, if you are looking to build an independent social marketing firm, one has to take what they can in the meantime.  I am in this business because I love working with small businesses and the people behind them. There is no shortage of amazing people doing amazing things. Companies are being built, products are being designed. Firms need help around the periphery of their business, especially marketing and PR.

So for now, we are caught in a kind of holding pattern, where you simply need to take the customers you can, pay your rent and don’t expect a rich catch anytime soon. If the economy begins to improve, there will be more opportunities to scale up, charge more, etc. Social media is maturing very quickly. In fact, it has to because it is both so new and so powerful, potentially.

But if the economy does not improve, whether nationally or locally, we could be up in the air here for awhile. If that is the case, I hope you really love social media marketing. Because none of us is going to get rich anytime soon. It’s not why we are here. That is not to say that I fully expect to make a good healthy living in the future as someone with deep experience and a roster of clients in different industries. I want my skill set to be as wide and deep as possible. I also hope to collaborate with the very best people. I’d love to work hand in hand with a terrific graphic designer and developer. I am also very interested in the mobile market.

The tide will turn. Social media is already revolutionizing the way brands market, the way consumers consume and everything else in between. One day, we will charge, and receive premiums for our services. But that day is not today.

Image Source: ‘Playingwithbrushes’ on Flickr