The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

Gonna take my time

Published by Esteban Glas on February 21st, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Social Media, Web Marketing, long term thinking

Gonna take my time
I have all the time in the world
To make you mine
                 -Depeche Mode

In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not giving this blog a romantic twist. Neither am I going to put focus on pop music. I’m going to talk about Social Media.

I often ask myself the reasons why I’m into Social Media Marketing. There are number of different lines of thought that are in accordance with some fundamental "values" (I lack a better word) of mine. One of them is long term thinking.

One of the fundamental aspects of modern life I find my self fighting against is the lack of ideas that can span longer than a couple of quarters or a full fiscal year in the best of cases. Working in the PC industry most certainly does not help a lot to alleviate this. Crazy deadlines, short product life cycles and a never ending succession of technological advancements drive all companies in the area to get on board a non-stop bullet train.

Campaigns follow this sort of schedule as well. Online advertising is very target oriented, it only gets worse (in terms of timing) for computer & Electronics companies. The same happens with traditional advertising.

Social media ventures, on the other hand take time. Communities and connections take time to build up. Reach is not something that happens overnight. Even on those rare cases where a blog is a hit from post #1, keeping the readership committed is an ongoing and time consuming task.

The old cliche of "trust takes a lifetime to get built and only a second to fall apart" couldn’t apply better to online engagement efforts. There’s nothing less time consuming than deleting a feed subscription or simply stop visiting a site. Those of us who work on social media walk on a thin ledge between engaging and losing people.

Hitting the nail with the correct blog posting, forum and overall communication policies is hard. Yet, what is even harder is to keep that same policies over time. Consistency is key, and the temptation to post with fireworks or give in to external and internal pressures is omnipresent. What makes such temptations harder to cope with is that results usually take time to emerge from the background noise.

The usual insecurities are always present until a noticeable shift towards the positive end of the spectrum becomes evident. And that can potentially kill perfectly good startups in social media. Zen-like patience is key to success. After all, a conversation with friends usually lasts longer and is more fulfilling than just going to a store and buying.

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