Social business goes to school

Becoming a social business isn’t as easy as adopting a few tools and making a few status updates.  Designing an innovative company around disruptive technology means more than taking a shallow swipe at establishing a service line and chalkboarding a “sometime, down the road” SaaS.

Work the room

Last week I attended a networking event coordinated by the Technology Association of Iowa.  Dubbed Pitch and Grow and well attended by University of Iowa types, the event centered around entreprenurship in tech fields and featured a discussion panel followed by groups of concurrent presentation sessions.  The sessions gave startups and early-growth companies an opportunity to present a pitch to seasoned serial entrepreneurs. Some pitches were of the does-this-idea-have-legs variety while others were more if-I-were-asking-you-to-invest-would-you-buy-it type.  While all sessions were mock – not actual requests for support – they gave the presenters opportunities to get their sea legs when presenting to a crowd as well as test their preparedness to describe their business idea and its viability. It was also a great time to network and gain new ideas to twist and apply to our own businesses.

Thumbs up; thumbs down

I attended two vastly different pitch sessions.  Session B was presented by a software development company and was superb, top down.  Well planned, well rehearsed, and the content covered all of the fundamentals (market overview/the product/why its unique and needed/delivery models/revenue streams/needs assessment/etc.).  The speaker was very comfortable speaking with the group; I walked out wanting a piece of that, big-time (and aren’t those involved with start-ups the wild-eyed, big-hairy-idea-minded kind? mavericks?).  That fledgling company is really on to something; they described a market, its opportunities, inroads plowed to date, and their nuts-and-bolts work to solve a real-world problem as well as their earnings potential.  In a word, wow.

Session A was…well, precisely the opposite.  I can discount the presenter’s nerves (been there). I can be generous and even discount the quality of the actual slides (although maybe I shouldn’t; much has been written about building and delivering presentations that work and potential investors would surely yawn at it).  But I’m having a hard time understanding why this person had a stage with the audience at all.  I fear the company will perpetuate every misconception and malignment ever grumbled or groused about social media’s value for business.

Lipstick on a pig

Near as I can tell, the speakers’ company started as an IT consulting business. Someone then saw an opportunity ($$) to layer on tactical elements of social media marketing for SMB’s. Sure, because *that* makes sense (?!). What these guys are really doing is setting up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for local businesses.  Maybe slapping on a poorly Photoshopped background or avatar outside of any kind of brand planning. Unless I misunderstood, the company will help local businesses acquire fans/followers, too – the mass “Will you like this new client of ours on FB?” kind of pandering.

The presentation spoke of plans to develop social media marketing strategies and a proprietary process along with software tools to “implement social media messaging and collect/analyze SM feedback using data and text mining.”  I say hooey.  Fancy words. No projected time frame. And that stuff already exists, too. Until those wish-fors become part of an actual product release – will settle for alpha – there’s nothing there for clients to latch onto. Seriously, social media account setup is not a long term viable business model in and of itself. And by the time the value-add stuff got latched on (assuming it was), the train will have long left the station. We’d be in the next stage of evolution and adoption.  I began to wonder if the company was plying snake oil. The question was, did they even know it? They mouthed some of the right key phrases but then talked about Will It Blend views on YouTube. From 18 months ago. Binkety-blink.

When the time came for Q&A I had a notepad of questions.  No, I didn’t want to skewer anybody – it wasn’t a popularity contest and I’m not into finger pointing.  But I really hoped I missed some vital parts of the preso during my autonomic blinking process (or the search for gum in my purse). I wanted to understand just what these guys hoped to bring to market. I was anxious to dig into some  social business concepts. Eager to learn more, I asked a few ground ball-type questions:

• How do you help clients tie social media activity to their business goals? Map out a social media strategy? Do you also coach them through integration?  Just what are some of your clients’ goals?
• So you perform keyword research? How do you interpret and use findings? How do the findings bring about change? Got any case studies?
• The content you say you’ll help clients share via SM tools – describe the development and curation process and your best practice recommendations. Is that managed internally?
• How does reputation management fit into your service model? That’s what I think of when I hear “analyze SM feedback.”
• How will your as-yet-developed social software differ from existing products like Radian6, Techrigy, Scout Labs, Social Mention. Or any other SaaS priced more competitively for a SMB?

Next!

Suffice to say the responses offered to me were vague and incomplete.  He spoke of numbers of fans; I wanted to hear about shares, interactions, traffic changes, time on site and new customer inquiries/referrals (more, please!).  Maybe that’s a whole layer of “Why are we doing this?” that his clients to date hadn’t gotten to yet.  If that’s the case, which is the worse offense – that the clients didn’t grasp how social media could affect their business in direct, tangible, measurable ways? Or that the consultant hadn’t educated (nay, considered how) his clients about what what social media strategy and execution  could deliver?

What’s the most tragic example of social media convolution you’ve run across?  How do you propose we turn the tide?

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