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BizDev Heresy - Not Every Company Needs Social Media

By @Stephen • 3 February 2009 • Filed in: Blogging, Conversations

Ruud Hein writing at Search Engine People | Toronto has a fascinating interview with Chris Brogan, one of the top (if not the) people to listen to when it comes to Social Media Strategy. Hein is asking a series of people in the blogosphere what he calls “Ruud Questions” in an effort to shake things up this year, to break out of the echo chamber and bring forward some brand new content.

This is real thought-leadership

Hein writes:

As I thought about this and started to ask people if they would be willing to answer some questions, I started to believe in this more and more.

Can we pull this off together and turn this into something larger than “just” a set of Q&A’s?

Yeah, I think so.

I think that the overlap of many smart people talking about what they know and do best while also advising you makes for something bigger and better. A bit like the value created by the single best link building post of 2008 (more on my reason to use the words “single” and “best” in one sentence in a later post).

Does it sounds presumptuous? Maybe, but so what?!

“To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.“

Plus — let’s be honest here — I really like the idea of doing a series of Q&A’s the name of which can come out sounding a lot like “rude questions”.

Ruud Hein Interviews Chris Brogan

I’m Jane & John Doe. I think the company where I work could really benefit from social media; that it would help the business grow. Am I right — and if so, what do I tell my manager now?

Not every company needs social media. Companies who do better with broadcasting don’t need social media. Companies who feel they’re still getting great returns on their existing marketing methods probably don’t need the tools.

For companies who believe their customers have individual tastes, this is the right way to go. For companies who like to deliver quality and value in their conversational methods, social media is the evolution of media. It’s all tomorrow’s radios, as Julien Smith and I will write about in our book, Trust Agents [Ruud: they already did the free Trust Economies]. By that, we mean that the people who jumped from print marketing to radio marketing owned the game.

We feel social media is a gate-jumping technology, and that the people who master it will win.

As a professional coach for Social Media Literacy I say “Amen”. I promise that I will be the very first to tell you if your company needs to get involved with Social Media or not. If you should, there are a variety of ways to do so, involving different strategies and tactics, tools and applications.

Some you need, some you don’t. Believe it or not, not everyone should be blogging. But if you should be, do it right. Watch Search Engine People for more of these interviews, you might even see someone you know…

 

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