Sorry folks. But there just isn’t any discernible ROI for restaurants in social media. Does that mean that restaurants shouldn’t be using social media, or investing in their digital presence and strategy? Absolutely not, but let’s cut the crap and cease muddying the waters with terms like “return on investment”. Is that why you opened a restaurant? To get a healthy return on your friggin’ capital?

I think not, so let’s stop playing that game with one another and talk about what’s important.

What’s important is that your brand, your business be visible and in front of the most passionate and committed segment of your given cities dining community. You need to be where these people are, where they hang out: to chat, to gossip, to have fun, to gripe, to praise. These are the people who appreciate when restaurants engage with them and do so on the platforms they prefer.

What else do I mean?

• I mean conversing with customers and potential ones. I don’t mean tweeting out nothing but your daily specials once a day and peace-ing out back to the kitchen.
• I mean reading the blogs and tumblrs, testing out new apps and platforms. I don’t mean sticking your fingers in your hears and hoping it all goes away.
• I mean listening to your followers and friends and creating content that is relevant, humorous and helpful to them. I don’t mean soliciting or sucking up to people in hopes of getting a few more “likes”.
• I mean joining the community of other restaurants in your city and neighborhood and building them up as much as you should. That means get out of the kitchen, go meet the other chefs and restauranteurs, collaborate with them, work together to solve mutual problems or to create fun new opportunities. We are watching and we will reward those establishments that are proactive online and off.
• I mean involving yourself in the events, charities, opportunities, street fairs and markets where your customers hang, not just the ones that give you the promise of great press.
• I mean taking terms like strategy and analytics seriously.

Ultimately, I mean generating and executing a strategy that is line with those passionate principles you had when you started the business.

Just do me a favor, stop obfuscating, stop obstructing. There is a very healthy return to be had on Social Media. Stop looking for it in the wrong places and with the wrong terms.

Things can get ugly quickly. This story from Houston seems like a harbinger of things to come:

​Allison Matsu was having drinks at Down House on Sunday night when she posted a Tweet, since deleted, wherein she called a bartender a “twerp” for quoting Bobby Heugel — the owner of Anvil Bar & Refuge — and appended her statement with the hashtag #jackass#jackoff.

Matsu has achieved mild, local notoriety for her late-night Tweets, even recently winning aHouston Press Web Award for that very activity. Down House, for its part, has achieved a reputation in the short time that it’s been open for having capricious service. The two collided in a Twitter-fueled spectacle that resulted in general manager Forrest DeSpain calling the bar, speaking shortly with Matsu, and asking her to be ejected from his establishment.

“She called him a twerp,” DeSpain said by phone yesterday afternoon. DeSpain runs the Twitter account for Down House and was agitated that someone would bully his bartender, as he saw it, and took action despite not being at the restaurant that night. “I immediately called up here and talked to her for a few minutes and asked her if she had any kinder words.” She didn’t, DeSpain said, so he asked her to leave.

Left @DownHouseHTX in tears after GM called up & asked the bartender to hand me the phone. He proceeded to curse a me & ask me to leave. Wow

August 15, 2011 12:14 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@AllisonHiromi

Alli

I prefer to stay on the positive side of things when I think about where social media and real-life meet. But as more of our lives are shared in real-time, and are geo-located, incidents like the one mentioned above are much more likely to crop up. Restaurants and other businesses that are subject to social media interactions taking place in real-time need to develop policies and protocols for situations just like this.

The truth, however unfair, is this: when these incidents happen, most outsiders are immediately and inherently going to sympathize with the client. A woman leaving a restaurant in tears after being berated on the phone by a manager? Not good. Who knows if the woman was drunk? Or overly aggressive? Shit, maybe she works for a rival restaurant and is just causing trouble.

We have all been trained that the customer is always right, especially in a place like a restaurant or a bar. Anyone who goes out regularly knows these situations crop up form time to time, though of course most of the time, the situation never gets close to the intensity and seriousness of this incident.

But because consumers and the general public will almost always, at least initially, side with the offended customer, businesses needed to be extra careful how they handle these instances. Customers can be bullies no doubt. And a business owner should always protect their team members and employees from an aggressive and offending customer. This really is new territory.

I have a recurring fear about tweeting something unsatisfactory about a chef or a particular dish and having that chef or general manager see my tweet and confront me. I wonder if I would be able to collect myself and back up my critique, or cave and apologize. I really don’t know.

This past week, the Soho Grand Hotel launched a brand spanking new Facebook brand page, complete with customized graphics, a reservation system loaded directly in, an interactive neighborhood guide with links to their awesome blog Grand Life. Take a look:

So what’s the problem you might ask? Well, nothing. They did a great job, and knowing the team behind the Grand Hotel’s digital platform, especially the irreplaceable Steven Rojas, the did all their research and pulled off exactly what they should have. Except for timing. Because they launched this initiative roughly at the same exact moment that Google Plus launched. This means that the power and scale of Grand Life’s Facebook just got severely marginalized. Doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or that bookings and deals and terrific web traffic won’t go there way but it just means that by waiting so long to launch this, they’ve proven how ephemeral social networking can be. Especially for businesses.

Now I don’t know what went on internally with Soho Grand’s team. It’s possible they ideated and launched this in 5 weeks. And if they did, great for them. But I am guessing that this is something Steven and his team wanted to do for a long time and for which the natural bureaucracy of an offline hospitality business dragged their feet on.

If that is the case, then it cost them. And I am not saying that Google Plus is going to kill Facebook. In fact, it may make Facebook stronger and better at what IT IS. But the mere fact that another major social network launched, one that as of this writing has crossed the 10 million member mark already, in the time that it took to get this Facebook strategy launched, proves the point that marketers and brands cannot wait to act.

When you need something done, do it. Don’t spend months and weeks analyzing and researching and putting it off. Marketers and consultants, designers and developers as well, need to move quickly and efficiently. And most of all, those holding the purse strings need to know that their instransigence, their caution, is costing their companies a great deal of money.

(UPDATED: Scott Rosen, COO of Equinox, emailed me this week to offer his apologies and personal assistance handling the matter. Scott was more than courteous and honest in his outreach to me and simply wanted to find a way to help. He offered me a free month of membership which I politely declined. I informed him that for now there was nothing he could do and would he please cancel my account which he handled immediately. I also told him how much I appreciated his emails and that it made me feel that perhaps there was a future for myself and his gym. This is without a doubt a step in the right direction)

Equinox is perhaps the leading group of fitness clubs in Manhattan. You’ve probably seen their tagline, It’s not Fitness, It’s Life around town on buses and billboards. In one form or another (some corporate, some personal) I’ve been a member since I was in high school. Back then it was just a few clubs around town, not the national brand they’ve grown into. They’ve got clubs all over the country now, even in Texas.

For some time now, it has been clear that the club’s commitment to maintaining a truly friendly and even familial atmosphere was thinning. For people who visit gyms a few times a week, like I have for more than a decade, this matters. Part of this thinning I described springs from the fact that their customer service was failing, dramatically in some cases. Because I’ve been a member for so long, I’ve gotten to know many of the staff, trainers, teachers and especially members. More and more though, I’ve met a lot of former members on the streets and around town. The number one complaint echoes what I will say here: that as the company has grown, their attention to the needs of individual members has lessened. This, coupled with the fact that even though we are in a recession, Equinox has continued to raise its already astronomical monthly rates, is just too much to bear.

So I am taking the step of canceling my account. Right now it is currently frozen. But after the latest customer service boondoggle I simply cannot in good conscious continue to pay hard-earned money to a company that clearly cares more about opening new clubs and acquiring new members than it does about properly serving its existing ones.

The Customer Service Breakdown at Equinox

A couple of months ago, I realized that I wasn’t visiting the gym as frequently as I usually do. I had started taking Bikram Yoga last summer and this year my practice really developed to the point where I was taking class 4-5 days a week and working out or running at the gym on other days. When this summer’s crazy heat wave hit New York City, I stopped going to the gym entirely and instead switched to running outside in the park the couple of days a week I wasn’t practicing my Yoga.

I was paying nearly $200 a month and barely using my membership and it dawned on me that I was throwing away my money. And when you take into account a $135/ month yoga studio membership, I really had to do something. At the very least I could freeze my account for a few months until the summer was over and reassess. Except it wasn’t that easy.

I called Equinox a few days before my next monthly charge was supposed to be processed. No sales or membership reps were available so I left a message. Couple of days go by, I get busy. I receive no call back, and boom! my card is charged. Already I am pissed because I had purposefully called several days before the charge was to go through. I tried logging into my account, was not able to, and then the system that was supposed to email me back my forgotten password had an email associated with it from several jobs ago and had not been updated. Part their fault, part mine. Apparently I called the wrong club, but if someone had called me back and told me, that could have been avoided. But what really stuck out was that I had called days ahead and was told that I had to freeze my account online and that speaking to someone wasn’t going to help.

This the embodiment of a customer service failure: When a customer wants something done, and the responsibility for that action is passed along into the ether of corporate protocol.

I am a paying customer. If I want to verbally communicate my cancellation, you better be willing to take it. Otherwise the message is “We are going to make it as difficult as possible for you to cancel or freeze your membership. Your money is way too important to us. But your voice is not.” Literally.

Fast forward a couple of months and I receive an email (I finally got in and updated my account) saying that my account was due to be unfrozen. My mind was made up over the past few weeks to cancel my membership, partially due to Equinox’s high costs, and partially because I felt that their customer service was no longer a good fit for me.

The email said that my freeze would end on the 25th of this month. So I called on the 23rd to ensure that this would in fact not happen and to break the news that I was cancelling my account. Nothing. I call again this afternoon, and get this, they are having their customer appreciation event, and no one is available to speak with me. Infuriated I tell the receptionist that someone needs to call me back ASAP and that I’ll be cancelling my account.

It should be noted that the General Manager of the Columbus Circle club where I have my account is a guy named Michael Buonocore. He is an excellent general manager who personally called and emailed me each time these problems occurred. But that is the problem right there. AFTER these problems occurred. Michael was able to refund my charge both times this happened and calm me down. He is clearly a wonderful asset to a company that otherwise is failing at customer service so dramatically, that a client like me, who has been with the club for as long as I have is no longer willing to pay for the privilege.

It really is too bad and its been a long ride for me with Equinox. But like all good things, it has come to a close. I just can’t believe that if these customer service problems hadn’t been so painful and frustrating, I would still be a member in good standing there. Alas, with my account frozen I am counting the days down until its time to break the bad news.

Equinox is a company that is failing at customer service so poorly that even a pretty forgiving guy like myself felt prompted to take to my blog and tell this story. I think what is most shocking to me is that in a world where customer service is public, that companies such as Equinox, big national brands with major money behind them, can’t see that customer service is an area they absolutely have to invest in. It may be a long road from a boutique gym in Manhattan to a national gym lifestyle brand, but I can assure you that it is more of a short cliff back. Equinox is at the precipice.

The Ups and Downs

The twists and turns of independent consulting right now are dramatic and severe. One day we are absolutely essential and urgent RFP’s flow in. The next we are as unnecessary as can be. The hot and cold nature of clients can throw even the most stable consultant into a tizzy. I’ve had clients pepper me with questions until both they and I are blue in the face. And then come back for another round. I’ve had potential clients ask me for proposals only to tell me my services won’t be necessary and sitting back and watching them institute every single one of my ideas.

As more and more companies get familiar with social media and convince themselves they need to engage, the temperature and intensity of client interactions and pitches is heightening. And so much as independent strategists like myself desire this, there are some pitfalls to watch out for.

Most of all is the tendency to react to quickly to client overtures. Personally, I get way too excited by consults that go well. I even get excited by meetings that don’t go so well. This a form of arrogance that needs to be tempered. Because people on the bleeding edge of social media interaction, those that are well-informed of trends and developments in the social space, who know how to use the tools, who have programs worked out ahead of time for their clients, believe themselves to be more than necessary. And you know what, in a way we are. But just because we feel this way, doesn’t meant the rest of the world does, especially those that we are pitching.

Yes its true that many managers and those holding the purse strings are taking social media much more seriously than they were even a few short months ago. I spent most of the fall explaining to potential clients why they need to engage with social media. I no longer need to do that. Great! But with this added businesses comes another level of scrutiny that social media marketers need to adjust to. We are often faced with people who only have a tentative grasp of the issues and the tendency is for people to act like they know more then they do. It then requires time for us to parse through exactly what we are dealing with.

The Twists and Turns

The twists and turns that social media marketing can take are varied. I’ve had consultancies start with a specific set of goals in mind only to find two weeks in I am knee deep in issues that were never on the table. Often this is because clients don’t have the necessary infrastructure to carry out our pre-approved goals. This is one of the most fraught situations to face because everything gets pushed back, and then the client, often looking for reasons to believe you aren’t worth the trouble, time or money, can point to lack of progress. It’s not fair, but life never is! And we are the ones who have to shoulder the burden, because after all, we work for the client. It’s their dime.

The rapid nature of social media marketing, and the entire world online forces strategists to constantly be on their toes. Not only do we need to effectively service our current clients, we have to perform due diligence on future projects, pitch new clients. On top of all that we have to remain completely up to date with developments in the social space.

What new apps or applications or social networks are launching?

How will these effect my current or future clients? What about client’s that have already been serviced? Do we have to go back to those clients and ensure that they are up to date with these new developments.

For instance, right now I am watching the controversy over Facebook, which I wrote about yesterday, and how it may effect marketing on social networks. At the exact moment that many of the businesses I know are getting ready to finally engage Facebook in a serious way, it may be that Facebook is on its way out. Yes that is exactly how serious this controversy is. Facebook may be on its way out. And right now businesses are out there making plans to dominate what could very well be a defunct or at the least a highly compromised service.

In short, social media is a roller coaster ride of emotions and actions. The best we can hope for is to hold on tight, trust in the integrity of the system we have in place, and even try to have a little fun! Throw your hands up in the air! I know that after a tough couple of weeks here I am pledged to try , sit back, trust in the integrity of the system I have built over the past 9 months, and simply enjoy the ride.

Image Courtesy of flatluigi on Flickr

Kerfuffle is the only way to describe the latest controversy over Facebook and its new stance towards its user’s privacy. The truth is that Facebook can’t believe in privacy anymore because if it does, it doesn’t have much of a future. The future of Facebook (and of every other social network) lies in its ability to monetize its user base. The best way to monetize your user base is to collect and organize that highly detailed and targeted information and sell it to marketers. Or package it in a way that marketers can deploy it using the internet’s ingrained and sophisticated form of advertising.

From today’s Financial Times:

Facebook is thus important not only to investors but to everyone interested in the future of the internet, which is practically all of us. If it decides, in Google’s phrase for deceiving or messing around with its customers, to “be evil” then millions feel the effects.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old who founded Facebook as a private social network for Harvard students, has recently been displaying a disregard bordering on disdain for Facebook users’ right to maintain control over personal information.

This is the dilemma facing social networks. If they go too far with their user’s data, then they run the risk of losing the trust of those user’s (perhaps the most important equity there is in the 21st century). But if they don’t go far enough, then they aren’t of much value in the long run.

I think what we are missing in all of this is that our definition of Privacy is shifting. Not for everyone, in fact, some are calling for stricter standards and default settings. I have to say that these people have a point, even though I fundamentally disagree with it. The truth is that the goal posts have shifted. Privacy is certainly not what it was a generation ago. The problem our culture seems to have is even recognizing that the shift is going on, and then overreacting when it hits us in the face. Here is the dirty truth about privacy: most people don’t care.

Mr Zuckerberg was at least speaking plainly, unlike last December, when he wrote in an open letter that “our work to improve privacy continues today”. He failed to mention that, eight days later, it would turn six aspects of each user profile, including gender, location and the friends list, into “publicly available information”.

If Facebook users were allowed a free choice, they might well tick the box to accept anyway. His vision of the “open graph”, in which Facebook’s users engage more with websites they visit and applications they use because the services are tailored to them, has allure.

Facebook’s Social Graph API

I spent the better part of last week going over the extensive documentation for Facebook’s new social graph API. Discovering just how OPEN the default settings were was pretty shocking. It allows a website to access not only a person’s name but their email, address, birthday as well as their entire list of friends. That’s pretty dramatic. If only I were a savvy sick manipulating marketer I could have a field day with all that data.

And here I am looking at this radical approach to openness and privacy and realizing that we’ve now reached the crossroads between marketing and privacy. Marketers have spent the better part of a century trying to get the very same data that networks like Facebook and Foursquare now have on us. Who we are, who are friends are, what we like, what we consume, where we are, where we spend our money and how we do so?

I mean this is the holy grail of marketing segmentation. And yet, I couldn’t help but be turned off by the thought of that data being used for the wrong purposes. And yet knowing what I know about human nature I know that is exactly what will happen. I think people are in for a surprise in the coming months. They will soon be targeted with advertisements in ways that are so personal and so relevant that it is going to be severely off-putting.

But I think what bothers me most is our society’s total inability to actually have the conversation that we need to have about privacy. Let’s just talk about it: let us talk about what should and should not be off-limits. From my perspective, I actually have no problem with my privacy settings being wide open. That is because I am analyzing how I am marketed so that I can turn it around and help my clients think strategically about how to do it better. Or differently.

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Image Source: alancleaver_2000 on Flickr

I’ve just come back from a client consultation. Great brand, growing business, terrific press relations. Just one problem: the community they represent mistrusts them. Viscerally so. Is it because they are simply the biggest player in this field? Is it because they are perceived as too “markety?” Or due to the fact that they’ve made mistakes in the past and operate in a world where the margin for error is slim?

It doesn’t matter! The fact is they have a problem and they know it.

We talked about how social media can begin to alleviate this problem. I told them to forget their critics for right now (I used slightly more flowery language to get my point across) and to go direct to the community. Social media allows a brand to do this. This firm has a great service, is staffed by wonderful people, has an honest mission and at the end of the day does good things.

So instead of trying to change the minds of their critics, I advised them to go around them. Don’t disrespect the criticism, don’t pretend its not there. Acknowledge it, and deal with it publicly. Open up the conversation. Start telling the story of the brand directly to your customers and clients. Use the openness and targeting inherent in social tools like Twitter and Facebook to bypass the critics. Let the people decide. They are the only ones that matter and if you provide great service and great content, then eventually your customers and future customers will share that. They’ll talk about it. They’ll become your own little brand ambassadors.

The critics don’t stand a chance. They’ll eventually have to confront the fact that there is a groundswell of support and that if they continue to carp from the sidelines, it will look like they are out of touch. In point of fact, they will be out of touch.

Social media might be the best tool that businesses have to manage a crisis, whether its a product recall, a bad review, or even just the critique of a few influential community members. It is such a perfect tool because you it allows you, when properly wielded, the ability to do two things:

1. Go directly to your customers (current and potential) with your business and brand and let them be the decision makers. This bypasses the critical voices, neutralizing them and giving the brand time to rebuild and reinvigorate.

2. Brings the criticism into the forefront. If a social media strategy is one properly, it means the brand is finally willing to say we are unafraid of our criticism. Because it WILL show up. For every positive blog post, or tweet, for every testimonial video posted on YouTube, there will be a reaction. But as long as the brand or business is conducting its marketing in the open, for all to see, in an authentic and earnestly engaged way, the critics don’t stand a chance. Social media marketing allows for this. It allows for brands to confront their critics out in the open, instead of in the hushed tones and whisperings that so much of community.

Every crisis is an opportunity. Social media brings this aphorism to a truly spectacular level.

Flickr image courtesy of Daquella manera

How much is too much? How much social media interaction and engagement is worth it? Does social media even work?

These are the questions that the majority of business owners I speak to are asking themselves. I won’t even mention the few people I talk to who aren’t convinced that social media is the future of their marketing efforts. It still happens.

But I think I am turning into a social media critic. Yeah. I am a social media critic.

We really need critics right now. I can tell you from the front lines of social media marketing, we are not as smart as we think we are. And business owners aren’t as stupid as we make them out to be. Simply put, social media, as it stand now, is not for everyone.

The cost in both technology investments, branding, training and, most importantly, time are too high for many businesses.

The Technology Requirements of Social Media

For businesses unaccustomed to social media and its inner workings, even the most basic assumptions social media marketers make can be an enormous leap. Some businesses don’t have WiFi set up, which means they may be tethered to desktop computers. And those computers may not even be able to handle applications like Tweetdeck, YouTube, Facebook and other tools.

The last thing a social media marketer wants to find out when starting a new consulting gig is that they’ll have to wait to get new computers bought, or WiFi installed, or a laptop replaced. You just lost two weeks. Talented marketers will adapt to this by either talking about technology during their pitches and initial conversations, or being able to train people and provide overviews of social media while the technology is being upgraded.

The Branding Requirements of Social Media

I like starting blogs. Inbound marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to being their social media interactions with. Because my business primarily deals with businesses involved in the hospitality sector, I consider their content to be top-notch. What is their content? Their food! Their wine! Their daily specials. Most of all the people, the chefs, the sommeliers, the owners, the managers.

But good blogs and websites cost money. I really don’t believe in using poorly designed blogs or off-the-shelf products for websites. I think the great content that clients will be illustrating need fantastic, unique design in order for it to make even a minor impact. Launch a crappy blog and I actually think you might be doing your business harm. Influencers online can tell the difference, and although they may not be your target audience, they are the ones you want to enfranchise to share and promote your content (and therefore your business) when they do find out about it. Your customers are following them.

So websites, blogs, Twitter account, Facebook fan pages: these all cost money to do properly. And those costs can range from $500 for a decent blog into the man thousands for a blog, new website and other customized sites.

Social Media Training

Catching businesses up on the daily ebb and flow of social media is one that social media marketers really need to excel at. But it also requires time to bring someone from newbie status to experienced networker. Bringing up Tweetdeck or Tweetie or Seesmic for a client for the first time scares the crap out of them. All those columns! Where is Twitter? What is this? It’s moving too fast!

It usually takes me between 3-5 hours to properly train someone in the functionality and capabilities in a Twitter client. And that is not counting the month or more it takes to monitor their tweeting to ensure they are tweeting properly: shortening their links, retweeting enough stories, or sharing appropriate content. Are they following people back? Are they creating or maintaining lists as any good business should?

All told social media training takes a couple of months until a client approaches that sweet spot when they not only feel comfortable but are enjoying themselves and serving the needs of their business.

Even Now Social Media is Not For Every Business

It’s true. Sorry. I have to retract things I have said in the past. Simply put, the costs and time involved in social media are still too high, and the return is just not provable yet. I know it is coming. Eventually we won’t even use the words social media. It will just be embedded in our daily lives and interactions. The technologies and philosophies will just be part of our operations.

But for now, social media takes a heavy toll on a businesses operations, and for some small businesses, where few people where many hats, asking them to don one more may not be worth it.

Image Source: Peter Kaminski on Flickr

What happens when a client doesn’t listen?

This is a potential powder keg of a situation actually because it is often the first step in the wrong direction for a successful business partnership.

Now this is not to say that clients should just blindly follow their consulants wishes. That would be disastrous. Most of the time the client knows more than their consultants about their own business. There are exceptions, for instance when a consultant previously worked in the given industry and has more experience and a track record of success.

But most of the time clients know the ins and outs of their business with a depth that an outside consultant, no matter how savvy, cannot match. That client may frequently disagree or flat out overrule a consultants particular strategy. As they should. And if all goes well then there is nothing to worry about. Client is happy and the consultant still has a job. Obviously if this situation repeats enough times said consultant is going to be out of a job.

But what happens when the client is wrong and they still won’t listen. What happens when they can’t or won’t enunciate their goals beforehand and they won’t examine their metrics after the fact. Most importantly, what if they aren’t listening to the consultant on matters which that consultant can speak specifically to?

Consultants are paid to perform specific tasks. But there is also an implication that a consultant will provide objective opinion regarding their clients strategy as well as aligning their clients success with their own.

I do well. Client does well. We all prosper and maintain a long healthy relationship.

Perfect!

Except we don’t live in that perfect world and a client unwilling to listen to their consultants advice often asks that consultant to blindly follow them. I wonder if it is an ownership issue? “Even though you’ve disagreed with us on this, this is the decision we’ve decided upon and we want you to support it.”

But here is the question: What is the right play for the consultant? Do they, in an about face, blindly support their client’s wishes. Or do they disengage? Is that even possible?

What do you do when clients won’t listen and then expect you to go along? 20th century thinking says, fall in line, support the team, do what’s right. But is that really what we want people doing? Subsuming their own values to myopia?

I just came back from my local wine store, 9th Avenue Vintner. Great place, friendly people, lots of tastings and a fantastic newsletter. They had a tasting this evening with a gentlemen from a winery up near the Finger Lakes. We got to talking and I asked him what kind of social presence his winery had.

Sheesh. It was like I just pissed on his leg. The guy immediately got cold and distanced, his eyes glazed over a bit and he told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t see how “that kind of thing” worked at all with his family winery.

Now, I was actually hurt by this. I was hurt that the guy actually seemed to find my question offensive, sure. But I was more hurt by the fact that as much as I live in a social world, there is still a huge segment of the population, and in particular, small business owners, who simply haven’t had the time to begin engaging.

Is It Too Late To Catch Up On Social Media?

Seth Godin asked this question the other day on his blog.

What if your organization or your client has done nothing?

What if they’ve just watched the last fourteen years go by? No real website, no social media, no permission assets. What if now they’re ready and they ask your advice? And, by the way, they have no real cash to spend…

Seth has a helpful list of suggestions to get people caught up, my favorites of which are these:

Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.

Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.

Start a book group for your top executives and every person who answers the phone, designs a product or interacts with customers. Read a great online media book a week and discuss. It’ll take you about a year to catch up.

Hit his blog for the rest of the list.

Personally, I don’t think its ever too late to catch up on social media. But that ignorance that I encountered, that is what has to change. Because what that small winemaker was telling me was not that social media had no application for his business. What he was telling me was he simply didn’t know where to start, was frustrated by this fact, and had unfortunately decided, rather conveniently, that social media wasn’t for him.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. And he knew it.

Image Source: US Army on Flickr