Social Media Survivor

If you came here looking for some kind of duality to be drawn between the CBS hit series Survivor and the world of social media, then click away dear friends. Cause that is not what this post is about. Although now that I think about it, a post like that would be pretty appropriate seeing how, like the CBS show, in order to survive the wilds of social media, one has got to be not only crafty and smart, hard working and diligent, but manipulative and cold.

OK but wait, manipulative? It almost pains me to say so, and perhaps the better word is crafty. One has to be crafty in order to eek out a living. I still haven’t found a great way to scale my services which means I am stuck (though happily so) single-handedly serving my clients. Social media is a full-time hands on experience. A strategist needs to be fully engaged in all aspects of a clients social media interaction, from the initial client meetings, to the writing of a strategy and down to the implementation and refinement of that strategy.

But back to those survival skills for a second. I think persuasion is an important skill. Particularly if you are an independent social media (insert buzzword here e.g. guru, maven, expert, ninja), then the only way to make it work, is to powerfully persuade people. Do not be fooled. We are selling ourselves. And of course all sales comes down to this, whether you are selling bathroom tile or used cars or consulting service, but the client isn’t buying unless they believe that YOU believe what you are telling them.

Social media is a new service offering for businesses and brands. It’s unclear, its buzzy, the ROI is tough to pinpoint. Which means that in order to make a living you better be a pretty good salesman. You better have amazing answers to every conceivable question that clients can throw at you. How many times over the past 6 months have you been asked a question that you simply can’t answer, or worse, hadn’t even heard before or considered?

If you are a social media survivor than you’ve gone through this. And you’ve adapted. I’ve written frequently about how the speed of social media is one of the absolutes in this world. Things change, dramatically, and they do so early and often. Just when you’ve got a handle on something, a new service comes out, or a network makes changes to their policy and this might, and often does, effect just what you recently put in place.

Personally, I enjoy this aspect of social media. The fact is a social media marketer not only needs to be adaptable to new realities on the ground, as a commander might say, but they’ve also got to incorporate the totality of what they’ve learned into an amalgam of knowledge. And that knowledge, when its pierced and begins to flow out, better be persuasive. It has to make sense. And it has to do so quickly and easily.

We are still in the hands of a nasty recession and new spending has not come online in the way that one might have hoped. Which means that you’ve still got to be happy just to get by. Actually, in order for survive, I’ve had to put off hiring people. I just don’t want to have to fire them if something doesn’t go right. Right now I am concerned about seasonality. What happens if business dries up in the summer?

So be lean, be smart, be thinking several steps ahead. What is social media going to look like in October? What does it mean that PR firms are catching up, finally owning up to the fact that they can no longer tell clients they don’t have the capability to service their social media needs. I won’t lie, I am working with a few PR firms either to help them with their clients, and at the same time teaching them how to do it for themselves.

It’s what I gotta do to survive.

Tagged as: Social Media, Survivor