When explaining concepts to clients and potential clients, a lot of times I’ll filter my thoughts through my personal experiences in social media stuff.
For example, I’ve had decent success selling my novels online, and most of those sales comes via people who find me (directly or indirectly) via my blogging, Twitter, and Facebook exploits.
I’ve not had astounding success – don’t get me wrong.
(Frankly, I could execute much better on my own stuff. I know marketing, and I can do marketing, but…I loathe it on a personal level for some reason. I don’t know why – it’s better explored on my personal blog.)
Still, success has been achieved to some degree, and I get a lot of questions from other authors about how they could get more readers, how they could get more attention, etc. They generally ask for a template of some kind.
My answer is usually as follows, more or less:
1) You have a different book than me.
2) You a different personality than me.
3) You aren’t on the social networks I’m on at the same times I’m on them.
4) You aren’t me.
None of these are criticisms – just truths. They need to find out what will work for them, because social networking tools are all about personal connections.
Yes, that even counts for a company as large as Best Buy.
Basically, all the rules are out the window, and there is no turn-key Program A, B, or C for any given type of business.
There are no exact rules and no templates to follow.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of ways to measure the program and strategies you use, and even moreso the promotions you might do.
It can still be scientific in terms of ROI, it’s simply more experimental in these waters. That right there either excites you or scares you.
For me – as you can imagine – it’s the latter.
