365 days @SMCpros
It has been a very eventful and educational year at SMCpros. Tim, Tyler, and I launched SMCpros a year ago this week with the vague premise that we could ‘help people understand and use social media’ (however that would pan out). True, it was a very simple vision at that time (and probably sounds a little naive to outsiders and traditional business minds), but how the heck else could you approach such a thing as social media? At the rate at which things change in this industry, you really have to just play it by ear and be confident enough in your abilities to adapt, multi-task, fix, jerry-rig, bend, break, scrap, sketch, wait, ignore, test, exclude, A/B test, and extinguish fires with an ounce of charisma and a pound of foresight. Remembering that we have no control over the development, execution, and support of third party platforms and applications allows us to maintain our sanity in a world of what seems like quarterly planned obsolescence…Not to mention that most web 2.0 products lack the same partner services that other IT and Enterprise IT companies provide to organizations interfacing between consumers and their products.
When the three of us came together to start a company, we each had very diverse backgrounds and interests that all hovered around a common interest in the web 2.0 space. I think what has really allowed us to differentiate ourselves is that we came to the table with no pre-conceived notions of what a social media company “should” look like…We simply started with one client, then two, then three, and so on — continually growing along the way. Each new project challenged us to figure out how to effectively ‘nail jell-o to the wall’ long enough to explain, educate, and train clients how to start at step 7 rather than square 1 (considering the rate at which an already overwhelming industry changes directions).
The ultimate question that we had to solve was how to remain relevant while not watering down social media so much so that clients wrote it off as a trend, but still maintain a level of technicality that would ensure that the market would respect the importance it needed to place on making social related decisions. (LOL) If you can effectively learn, experiment, problem solve, analyze your ‘in hind-sight discoveries’, and simultaneously teach others how to do it along the way, then a career in social media is right up your alley. It’s kind of like asking an artist to analyze the affect their art will have on viewers as he/she creates it on the fly.
There have been a few realities that exposed themselves over the last year. 1) There will always be an aspect of experimentation involved in any social initiative. Social media is social because it involves people. People are very social and people are very complex; making it a double whammy. Regularly, you are trying to shoehorn solutions together based on limited information and changing features/capabilities of said platforms and tools. In the planning process, a feature is appealing, but by the time execution time arrives, the technology slightly changes and the critical aspect of the tool which had persuaded you to move no longer functions with the breadth you’d become enchanted with. Rather than scrap the entire project, you scramble to figure out the ripple effects of the changes, adapt your game plans, and move forward aware that more changes will arrive in the execution process – (read: expect the unexpected).
Over the past year, a few common questions have remained at the forefront. I for one have learned that you truly have to do different to be different. It all starts with your actions. All too often, people tell us that they ‘do not want to touch it’ and would rather have somebody else deal with all of their social media. But, this is missing the point. That’s like saying you would rather have somebody else exercise on your behalf for your benefit (Well, duh. Who wouldn’t?). As ideal as that would be, it just is not physically possible. You have to get in there and do it yourself to be most effective. Fortunately, just like exercising, you do not have to be the most knowledgeable, motivated, or experienced person in the gym as you can always rely on others to motivate, educate, and guide your exercise routines. It is those people who provide the training, coaching, and guidance over time to keep you on track.
As social media continues to grow, there will be a learning curve as late adopters try to hop onto the scene. From a cultural studies perspective, the thing that fascinates me is that social media will just be an innate form of communication for future generations (just like past generations stepped right into telephones and AIM). In the interim, questions will continue to arise, tools will continue to evolve, and problems solved.
Thank you to everybody who has helped us along the way. What started as helping people understand and use social media has grown into strategic development, implementation, advertising, training, monitoring, reporting, and many more services.
Who knows what day 730 will look like? Thanks for reading!
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