Livingston

Sep
08
2008

Good is the Enemy of Great

searchcamp.jpg

This weekend, I had the great privilege of giving five, highly interactive unconference sessions at PodCamp/SearchCamp Philly. For me the biggest takeaway was the need to train social media marketers about traditional communications theory.

It reminded me of a Jim Collins quote in Good to Great, “Good is the Enemy of Great.” There are many good social media experts out there. They have proven they can build personal brands, but they are not great.

The social media expert’s inability or unwillingness to learn traditional PR and marketing strategy and skills causes them to frequently fail. In essence, their security lies in their good community skills, but their lack of formal marketing and PR training (and real PR, not media relations) makes them painfully inadequate for business-oriented social media.

Yes, networking skills are paramount to messaging skills. Yet without understanding a businesses’ core objectives, and how those create a value proposition for the marketplace, social media initiatives often fail to deliver measurable ROI, much less a tangible affect on a company’s communications effort. As Jonny Goldstein noted, you need both bleeding edge social media savoir fair AND “old school chops” to build a program that works.

In one session on business blogging, we ended up spending more than 30 minutes alone on how to build a value proposition, and then how to map it to a social media effort. For those social media engaged who are struggling with this problem, I created a social media content process on the Now Is Gone blog which should enable a basic content strategy. However, I will caution that publishing content does not yield eyeballs, rather it keeps them coming back after you’ve engaged them. Community participation is paramount to delivering content.

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by Geoff Livingston | Geoff, Internet Marketing |

9 Responses to “Good is the Enemy of Great”

  • Jonny Goldstein Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am

    Appreciated the biz strategy 101 schoolage Geoff. Great to see you in the city of Cheese Whiz and fried beef.

  • Steve Radick Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am

    Amen! Using social media to build buzz is one thing, but what does that buzz accomplish? I love when people brag that they built a really great blog for their client, but when I ask why they built the blog in the first place, they don’t know - it’s always, “well, that’s what they asked for.” I know social media is really cool, but you’ve still got to have a purpose - it has to actually accomplish something for you and/or your organization!

  • Lewis Green Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    Geoff,

    I couldn’t agree with you more. Social Media as we know it today is a set of tools. It is not a strategy, even a new idea and certainly not a profession. In the hands of anyone other than trained communications professionals, be they in marketing, PR, advertising, internal communications, media or other such professions, it’s like giving a hammer to someone like me. More bad than good comes of it.

  • Geoff Livingston Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    Jonny: Great to see you.

    Steve: It’s something folks like Lewis (good to see you, brother) and I have been saying for well over a year now, but that the marketplace still has not picked up on. I wonder if its just the way of the world to learn by trial and error rather than formal training. I hope not.

  • jonny goldstein Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    Maybe it’s that enough “trained communications professionals” don’t have the social media chops yet. Although there did seem to be quite a few communications peeps in DC who got it. Maybe it was just the folks I hung out with from though…

  • Geoff Livingston Says:

    September 8th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    Jonny: I think there are problems on the communications side of the street, too!

  • Jimmy Baker Says:

    September 9th, 2008 at 10:17 am

    Excellent article. Having graduated college in 1991 without a computer and experience the IT revoloution that started in the 1990s and continues today, I have the priviledge of learning my marketing skills from folks that have no idea what twitter, digg, facebook and my space are. In the next 5 years, I predict that computers will replace television.

    My point is technology is changing faster and faster but there are some threads that are building blocks to any campaign wether you are selling in the 50’s, 90’s or today. Know your customer is the most critical key to winning and positioning any new business. This is the first time in American where there is not only a generational gap but a cultural gap between different age groups.

  • Kara LaFleur Says:

    September 9th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

    Geoff, your sessions and constant energy were a huge source of inspiration this weekend @PodCampPhilly. Howard Greenstein’s session “What Old Media Can Teach New Media” also touched on these topics . When new methods lose sight of old techniques a dangerous gap in perspective is generated. New tools frequently lead to Shiny Object Syndrome causing practioners to ignore many standards and practices which continue to hold true regardless of the medium. New Media likes to think that it is reinventing the wheel, but that attitude rarely results in success.

    Further more, a two-way conversation has to take place for Social Media to truly be effective, and for it to do so, we, as advocates or marketers or whatever, also have to be informed participants. Too many people are out there engaging in one-way communication, and their businesses are suffering for it. What’s worse, some of them are pretending to be engaged, but actually seem to have the incoming volume on mute. The community connection is what Social Media has to offer, but in order to do so everyone has to be open to participating in the discussion.

    Thanks for making PodCamp Philly a huge success!

  • Cynthia Wallace Says:

    September 10th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    Hello Geoff, I was in your session (with Li) on Blogging. Thanks to you both. Great information, great inspiration. I’m taking virtually all of the advice so generously given, even “not falling in love” with the copy on my blog.

    All the best,
    Cynthia

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