A (some might contend THE) business periodical in Columbus, Ohio put together a “Social Media Bootcamp” this summer aimed at small-medium businesses. The goals (quickly paraphrasing here) are to introduce social media and a number of tools for use.

I’ve got some good friends who are presenting as part of the summer-long series. These friends, unlike many, are legitimate digitals - concerned with strategic deployment, measurement and bigger picture.

However, their presentations are focused on specific tools and networks (because this is what the camp is aimed at).

I’m not opposed to the introduction of and education on tools. It’s important.

However, I think that this camp, and SMB in general, with regard to the approach to ’social media’ is off-target, or at least putting the cart before the horse.

1) Stop calling it social media. Start calling it social web. Web is the platform,  and tools, behaviors, expectations and technology are socializing it.

2) Before you pick up your hammer and swing, let’s talk about why you’re doing it. Will the picture you’re hanging balance the room? Will you be moving it later in the month when you remodel? Are others hanging pictures? Do people even want to see this picture? Is it the right one? or does it completely throw off the theme you’re going for?

-Straight up - small and medium (even large) businesses are hip to the hype - they hear “twitter” “social media” “linkedIn” “money money money” and think “my god I’ve got to get into this!”.

Ok - maybe.

I’d like people to take a step back and understand their environments in more detail before running to learn about tools.

1) Understand your business/industry environment. Who are you serving? Who should you be serving? What is your brand? What is the industry doing? etc etc. Often, when we engage clients and work through our process, we find the standard discovery is eye-opening in that the questions we are asking have never been asked (or at least haven’t been asked in a very long time). Before you run to broadcast to the world, to engage clients and activate advocates, don’t you think you should be pretty solid on who you are, what you stand for and what you want to achieve? Else, you’re creating a spike - something that’s not sustainable and won’t have lasting impact.

2) Understand the web environment. Being able to Google something and having a Hotmail account does not mean understanding the web environment (no offense to anyone there - it helps us stay in business). The web environment is not LinkedIn & Twitter. It’s not generating leads and broadcasting (read: shouting). The web environment is a combination of light, flexible, adaptable technologies, psychological and sociological factors, time and space shift, combination and recombination, human and NOW. Business-speak: the web environment is consumer empowerment and pull-model. It’s customization, comparison, 24-7, conversation and individual. The web environment is access, value-add and trust.

If you can’t understand the web enviornment, the paradigm shift from pages to streams , then tools which exist there are useless. Time put into them is useless. Lasting value can’t be generated.

Small business or large, regardless of end-goals for implementing social web in a business environment, a failure or inability to understand the landscape and fundamental parameters often means an attempt at a quick fix and an outstretched hand at dollars instead of value.

What do you think?

Good stuff as always Nick!

What do I think? Several thoughts come to mind.

1. Its “in” to be an expert right now. Hats off to all the said players in the game to turn a buck for being the dude/dudette that shows a schmo how to hit a nail. You learned the ropes, saw the big picture, fanned the flames and now you wanna teach, have at it. I expect even more pros to come outa the wood work. Sadly the core message of the material will continue to get twisted, labeled, shaped, and reshaped as a result.

2. For those learning these new super cool tools, Nick is spot on in that you need to first know who you are, what your message is, and what your brand is all about. Because most of these social media/web tools are all about is amplification of you. And guess what, if you suck, you just amplified that message! Hot dang it works!

Of course this happens all the time is one of the big “oh wells” in biz I think. Most people are gravitating to these supa cool new tools because they want a slice of the new out there and think that newness will get them 100 fold return of goodness. They don’t factor in the work to do it, and or don’t even think about how to measure the ROI of it. All the while if core still sucks, no tweet will ever save you from that.

3. Realize that the potential customers you hope to find, impress, win over, connect to, may be a bit more challenging than you think. Authentic comes to mind, which is funny if you think about using these tools, most of them overtime, seem less authentic than just making a good product/service, standing behind it, and actually shaking some real customer hands. Basically you’re buying into a tool structure that is aimed at the evolved audience- that’s one that is choosey and has the attention span of about a second. Sure they are highly powerful if engaged properly, they can be your flash mob telling the planet you rock, but they also can forget you in a second. So gauge your new social web effort accordingly. ADD peeps love ya today, forget about you tomorrow unless the message you have is supa sweet and keeps delivering over and over. You’ll need alot more than just twitter and linkedin to make that kind of message. You will need good ole hard earned effort.

dan

are you ripping me off? http://ryansquire.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/stop-hammering-with-social-media/

Good post, you took my idea to the next level… which is no surprise; but I really like how you define the rest of the picture. No matter what it ends up being called, we need to have a better understanding of our own environment (business or personal) and how that environment interconnects with every other entity when we combine it with the streaming environment of the web.