Those of us involved in the social media space understand how powerful social media can be for things such as relationship building, PR, and marketing. But should social media be pitched to companies that aren’t already using it? I don’t think so.
In my opinion a company needs to realize how beneficial social media can be and should then actively look for help. To me this signifies a commitment on the part of the company to want to learn and explore. if you pitch social media to a company and have to convince them to use it, then you are taking away from the authenticity and transparency of the whole process. Convincing a company to get involved in social media is like making a kid do his homework, sure it may get done but if you have to convince them do it then the end result is probably going to be sub par and then nobody is going to be happy.
This goes back to my whole philosophy of social media which is, be creative and be clever. In general when a company comes to you for help they are more likely to be open minded which leads to creative and clever ways to use social media. There is still this idea floating around that social media is relative simple, that all you need to do is create a blog, make a twitter account, upload a few youtube videos, and then people are going to want to talk to you and interact with your brand. If this were the case then we would definitely every company out there with a blog or a twitter account and social media consultant type folks would be out of a job. The truth is uploading the videos and creating the accounts is easy, sure anyone can input their email address and sign up for anything, but then what?
This is where the being creative and clever part comes into play, it’s one thing to have access to the tools but it’s an entirely separate thing to know what to do with the tools once you have access to them. By pitching social media to a company and convincing them to get involved in the conversation you are going to limit the creativity and the cleverness of the campaign, which will ultimately end in failue. Then the company you pitched to will have a negative association with social media and will most likely not get involved again.
It’s one thing to educate a company about social media put pitching them and convincing them to use it is a different story.
They say you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.
What do you think? Should you pitch social media? Why or why not?
Thanks for reading
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