Social Media: New Rules, Old Court

I was speaking this morning at IMC SoCal on the topic of Social Media as it applies to the business of being a consultant. As I, a 28 yr old white girl, am standing at the front of a room predominantly 40+ men, chattering on about Myspace and Facebook I realized that I’d lost half the room. These new terms, terms like networks, communities, social media and blogging, are all terms that we just “made up” in the last 10 years. It’s not that these folks were out of touch, it’s that they are so focused on the very particular needs of the industries they serve that they just missed out on it.

I’m standing before project management consultants, sales compensation consultants, HR practice consultants… and not the new guys that became consultants 10 minutes after they received the pink slip from xxyczz company – these guys (and gals) have been consultants for 20, 30 even 40 years. How do you relate their world to the world of Myspace and vlogging and twitter?

By getting back to the basics – the rules may have changed, but the game remains the same. We still ask the standard who, what, when, where, how questions of ourselves and our clients. Consistency and repetition are still the cornerstones of any good marketing program. Google analytics has taken the place of our excel spreadsheet, and url’s and backlinks have become our affiliate programs. The questions of branding still drive our planning and strategy. Without knowing clearly who you are, who you want to reach (specifically) and where you can find said audience, it makes no difference whether you’re working online or offline. Without focus, none of these strategies hold water.