Fire Your Social Media Consultant!

take take take take enjoyment, welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody. This is Neal Schaffer with the fifth episode of social business unplugged, we are now well into February of 2013. And how's it working out for all of you, you know, I recently spoke at a conference. And it's always fascinating to hear the stories that businesses have of working with external resources for their social media. And that's why the name of this episode is fire your social media consultant. You know, in all honesty, I took a course very, very early in my career, and I talked about this in an earlier podcast, of actually not implementing social media on behalf of other companies, because I truly believe that it is something that should be done by that company, if they really want to get the most effective use of social media, it really is a no brainer. Now, I understand there's a business reality that companies just don't have the resources don't have the time, and therefore they want to hire an intern, or outsource or what have you. And I think that there are good ways of outsourcing it. But the problem is 99% of the businesses that I talk with, if they're outsourcing it, whether it be an agency or consultant, or what have you, there are not doing it with the right people. And the reason is, everybody is trying to get their hands in the pot, or their perceived pot of gold. That is social media. In other words, whether you're a marketing agency, well, we can do your social media to a website development company. We do social media, SEO companies, yes, we can do social media, content marketing companies, the latest rage, we do social media as well. And the problem with all these are, they're not specialists in social media. And they do business in a way that's very similar to how they would do it, whether they're developing a website or doing SEO, I had some great conversations with some small businesses, one business, they wanted to get access to the Google Analytics of their website, one business said it was going to cost them money to get that code input into the website, which any of you if you're familiar with Google Analytics, it's just copying and pasting one line of code. The other companies said, well, we want to get Google Analytics access, they're not giving it to us, or they literally will not give us access to the FTP servers that we can start to transfer data that we may want to put on another website, what have you, in other words, black box very similar to SEO companies. And you know, there are some reputable SEO companies out there that are not using Blackhat techniques. But the problem is the same thing with this website development, it's the black box, well, we're paying you several $100, if not a few $1,000 a month, what are we getting from you in terms of how well you're doing the SEO for us. And a lot of companies are just blindly throwing away that money, there may be random reports that they get. But the feeling that I got and I continue to get from a lot of businesses is they just don't see the ROI of that expense, social media the exact same? Well, we're paying an agency to do our social media, we really don't know how well we're doing. Or one of my favorites was a company that actually used an agency that they use for pay per click campaigns to acquire Facebook likes for a campaign. And now they have a page with one or 2000 likes, and they just get zero engagement. And the reason is that the people that like them are completely irrelevant to their market. Here's the thing. And sometimes I feel like the Robin Hood of social media, I need to help all these companies. And this is what I do. I have the social media coaching service, which is almost like having an expert social media adviser on call. And I think that's what really works best for a lot of the small businesses that I work with. But here's the thing, number one, you have to own your strategy, you can't expect these companies to build a social media strategy for you. Because even if they do it, there's a conflict of interest. They just want your money. So they're gonna write into the strategy, whatever they're going to write in, in order to be able to get money from it. I mean, that's why they're in business. So you if you're going to outsource, you need to be able to manage them by one owning the strategy. And in terms of owning the strategy, you need to educate yourself on social media. I met one gentleman, small business owner, you know, a lot of the terms that I brought up in my speech like RSS, Facebook, fan gating, these were terms even hashtag right. These were terms that were completely foreign to him. And I realized that there's still a lot of small businesses that are like that, and a lot of executives and companies, maybe not fortune 500 companies, still very large companies who just aren't themselves active on social media, and therefore they don't understand it. But if you don't understand the basics, you're not gonna be able to create a strategy and you're not going to be able to manage these external resources. Which is always why I say look, can't you INSOURCE your social media ask around who in your office is very, very proficient at using social media now, using social media for a personal use versus a professional use are two absolutely completely different things. But if you can find someone, I don't care how old they are, but if they're an active user of a certain platform, have them sit down with you for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, buy them lunch, see what they do ask them questions, I think that's going to give you a really good understanding. And I do believe as many of you already know, social media is not rocket science. It's teachable. And if you have good obviously business acumen, you can learn social media and become very proficient at it, it doesn't need to be a full time job either. So for those companies that are outsourcing to the wrong companies, or are not managing the process, it doesn't cost a lot of money, or it doesn't have to eat up a lot of time to have someone internally doing it for starting at 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day. I know companies that I've worked with where I created their social media strategies, they INSOURCE it to the point where every day of the week they have a different person managing their social media channels makes it more authentic, right? They INSOURCE blog posts, what have you. So the title of this episode is fire your social media consultant, because most of them are not teaching you anything. It's a black box. And they hold the power by not teaching you because the more you know, the more you realize you may not need their services, because most of them are doing very, very basic thing. If you look at what a lot of the social media people have on their websites, X number of tweets, X number of follows. It's very random. It's cookie cutter, and it's not going to lead to success for your company. So if you want to be successful in social media, and that's what this podcast is really all about social business unplug, telling it like it is, as a social media consultant myself, really think twice. And ask yourself some serious questions if you're hiring someone or outsourcing your current social media. If not, I hope you're successful in sourcing if you haven't, now's the time to start. Thank you once again for listening. I hope that you'll rate this on iTunes. Follow me on social media. Neal Schaffer women on networking.com. Make it a great day. Bye bye. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.