Lessons in Social Media Management: Slow and Steady

                                                                                                

                           

I just finished a three month trial working with a local startup called Mikey’s Balloons.  It’s a one-man company started by balloon artist Michael Guerts.  The company is in its infancy so I decided to try to take this company through a social media campaign to see if I could get some momentum started for my friend Mikey.

The lessons I learned are worth sharing.  In short:  Slow and Steady, Client Involvement, and Budget.  This post will center on the first lesson invloved:  Slow and Steady.

Slow and Steady

You remember that bed time story of the Tortoise and the Hare.  The Hare erupted from the starting gate.  The turtle was soon so far behind that the Hare lost momentum stopped for a nap.  While he was sleeping the Tourtise slowly but steadily gained ground, passed the Hare, and won the race.

Social media fits that story to a tee.  We hear the Cinderella stories Social Media stories and we dangle them in front of us like a carrot.  We jump from the gate and sprint as fast as we can.  All too soon however, we have used up all our energy and we stop. 

As surprising as it may seem for so many, social media is not the end-all-be-all of next generation business. As far as I know there is no magic wand that magically triples business and turns a start up into a household name. Slow, steady consistant growth in social media is the only way to stay afloat.  This is a lesson I learned first-hand, thanks to Mikey’s Balloons. 

I came into the campaign ready for immediate, organic, self-perpetuating growth.  I know Mikey and believe in his skill.  A few videos, a facebook, twitter, and flikr account and we should be good.

Two weeks into the campagn I started to see the light.  After friends and family joined the Mikey’s Balloons facebook page, it lost all momentum.  The results resembled the behavior of a traditional brick-and-mortar company, not the instant sucess that online marketing touts.

So, we went back to the slow and steady approach, posting only once per day to every other day about things not necessarily related to Mikey’s Balloons.  We started building a community-oriented page and slowly we started gaining more followers.  It was a longer process than we expected and it took much more energy.  But such is life as the turtle instead of the Hare.

Meg Fligg, Senior Manager of Social Media at Georgia-Pacific, referenced the Tourtoise and the Hare analogy in a presentation at Blogwell this November.  Her presentation centered on Georgia-Pacific’s recruiting success using social media.  “Georgia-Pacific is a lot more tortoise-like than hare-like when it comes to social media,” she said. “Embracing my tortoise-ness helped me understand that slow and steady wins the race.”

Andrea Lyn Van Benschoten with SocialMediaClub.org also endorses the idea.  She writes, “Slow and Steady will Always Win the Race.”

#Social Media Management is #Ruining my #Life! (rt @toddhamann)

For the last few months, I’ve been focusing on the Social Media and the Small Business posts.  It’s been an education and I hope it’s helped some small business somewhere.  As a Matter of Fact I’ve been focusing so much on introducing small businesses to the power of social media that it’s most of what I think about.  As my poor wife knows all too well, if I’m thinking about it, I’m talking about it.

I thought I would take a couple blog posts as a deep breath.  I am enjoying social media management so much that I worry sometimes of burnout.  So, a healthy breather is probably a good thing.  I have decided to ramble…just a little.  You know, just close my eyes and type and see where my thoughts take me.

I am getting ready to graduate in May 2012 from Utah State University in Public Relations.  I am gearing that toward, you guessed it, social media management.  It’s fun. Plain and simple.  We’ll see what comes down the pipeline after graduation, but I am doing everything I can to gear my career toward Social.

I’ve been working with a small one man company out here called Mikey’s Balloons (No explanation needed).  Mikey is increadibly talented and has utilized word-of-mouth advertising up until about three weeks ago.  Facebook: non-existant.  Twitter:  nope.  Flikr/Youtube/Google+ were all resoundingly absent as well.  Mikey is a performer by nature.  He is fantastic at what he does.  I’m going to see how fantastic my team is at what we do.  Trying to build something from nothing with no budget…well, hold on to your seats!  I want to do this from here on out with the blog watching, completely transparent.

Argh!  There I go again!!!!!  You see, it is a fever.  It’s a hobby turned into a sick and twisted obsession toward promoting all things facebook and G+. 

I heard a story about six months ago of a world-renowned Chemist who asked his son how college was going.  His son, who was majoring in chemistry, told him that everything was ‘fine’ and left it at that.  The father sat his son down and looked him in the eye.

 “You never talk about school,” he said.

“So,” his surprised son replied, “I talk about school at school.”

“You need to study something that you love enough that you talk about it even when you don’t have to talk about it.”

The son took it to heart, changed his major to Business Administration, and crafted a highly sucessful career.

I relay that to you so you can ask yourself, “What do I talk about?”  What makes you tick?  What is that one thing that you can talk about for hours at a time?  That thing that you don’t mind researching because it’s just that fun? 

I’ve found my thing and it’s taken entirely too long to find.  In my situation however, when I started college Social Media wasn’t Social Media.  It wasn’t accessable.  It wasn’t invented!!!!  I was forced to feel my way blindly through most of my college education until my thing found me.  It was a long, tedious, process full of dead ends and broken dreams, but from this side of the tunnel finding my thing, my major, my passion, is that much sweeter. 

So, to end my rambling, Social Media is ruining my life.  Short and sweet.  Just like Mickey Mouse ruined Walt Disney’s.