I’ve trained hundreds of business professionals over the years on how to use the internet. My focus has been on stripping away the mysteries of the underlying mechanics – I believe that mastery of the foundation building blocks enables organisations to establish a meaningful online infrastructure. Yes, strategic insight is another requirement, but any strategy without the ability to implement it at a tactical level will be compromised.
I’ve also observed that strategies often fail, social media ones in particular, because organisations over-reach their technical and resource capabilities. They have too little hands-on experience to be able to estimate the input requirements – time and money (mostly time) against their expectations of a reasonable return. Understanding the tactical in’s and out’s helps in the formation of a realistic strategy.
If you don’t play with the web – roll in it, push it, pull it and get your hands dirty, you’ll have difficulty appreciating the different scales of difficulty vs. reward – is it just as easy and productive to build up a video library as it is to build up a community on Twitter? Is is easier to elicit online reviews or Facebook Likes and which gets more visibility? Is a blog post that takes an hour to write more or less valuable than a 2 minute LinkedIn status update? People will readily offer their opinions on what do do and what not to do when it comes to social media, but until you’ve attempted to do any of these things yourself how can you get your arms around any ROI calculation?
When you outsource online marketing and social media functions you’re bypassing those valuable experimentation and observation experiences. So roll your sleeves up and get a little dirty – the internet Gods will applaud you.
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