Find Passionate People to Execute Strategy

Yesterday’s Social Media Jungle in Boston was full of great discussion and ideas. One discussion leader, Justin Levy, advocated the need to stop talking about social media and start doing. But many of us are trying to figure out how to help others who aren’t ready to “do” yet.

Justin has used social media to help make his Caminito Argentinian Steakhouse successful. His Prime Cuts blog is all about food–he uses the site to talk about something he cares passionately about and that passion and enthusiasm contagiously engages his customers.

But Justin is also General Manager of New Marketing Labs where Chris Brogan is President. These guys are “social media rockstars.” He’s totally practicing what he preaches, but it’s a little bit like the crazy hypothetical of working a job next to Lance Armstrong and having him tell you that you ought to be bike commuting.

I asked what advice he’d give to a company that was unlikely to have the time to do it themselves–but how to preserve authenticity. His answer was to find someone who could write passionately about something relevant to the company.

That’s much like the strategy I’ve adopted for my first client, Heroix, a vendor of applications monitoring software. I’m blogging about what I know–the technology operations day-to-day life and relating stories of what I learned the hard way. I’m passionate about improving things–eliminating frustration and utilizing technology to make people’s work easier. That’s a trait I share with many of the people who should be customers of Heroix. I’m not trying to directly sell their product, but to help them connect with their customers.

But as my wife quickly noted, this is not reproducible. I’m using a part of myself to execute the strategy and there’s only so much of me to go around. But it did give me an idea for moving beyond “consulting company” or “solopreneurship.”

What if we truly think of marketing as a partnership between enthusiasts and producers? When I worked at ConsumerReview, their approach (for flagship site MTBR.com) was based on the idea of having a passionate enthusiast like mountain biker and founder Frances Cebedo manage a community of people who wrote reviews and shared tips. I think, if you are Gary Fisher, Trek, or Santa Cruz, and you want to get into the social media space, you need to find guys like Francis to blog, tweet, and manage your facebook pages. In fact, that is exactly what Trek is doing with their Trek Life site.

It’s daunting to tell people they should be doing things like blogging, tweeting, participating in Facebook, etc. when they don’t want to. And social media is not some advertising campaign you can just pay someone to execute effectively. It is all about making personal connections and engaging in person-to-person communication, not business-to-consumer commerce. So find people not to speak for the company, but to participate in what they love under the sponsorship and guidance of the company. Hire a third party to facilitate and measure effectiveness (hint: that’s Dave Atkins Media!).

But now…I need to get back to following Mr. Levy’s advice and stop talking and start doing…