A couple weeks ago, someone on Linkedin started a discussion and asked the question “why Social Media fails sometimes”, and I answered: expectation.
Businesses are having all kinds of wrong expectation about online marketing/web 2.0/social media/whatever. Yes, it’s true that the web space is filled with people — potential customers who might just turn your failing business around. Yes, all these new tools are cool and fun to play around with. And yes, if you are lucky, you might just stumble onto something that attracts tons of traffic to your website. You hear about these stories all the time, all around the web. So naturally, you expect to have the same kind of success by following the success stories.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Copycat marketers who steal ideas. I am all for marketers who search outside of their industry, try to figure out what works, and apply it onto their own business. But here is the thing, it’s easy to see and copy the tactics at work, but much more difficult to grasp the strategies behind the tactics. Lazy marketers do the former because it’s simple; the smart ones do the latter because it works.
Example:
You can hire some newly grads and have them start acting all weird, then start a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a Youtube channel and a blog. Doesn’t sound too hard, does it? You do it for 10 years and expect to sell your business to Amazon for $928 million. Probably won’t work.
But if you take the 10 core values that Zappos lives by, combine it with a entirely open company culture, and get rid of all your call-center scripts, you might have just found something that will actually work. No, you probably won’t end up selling your business to Amazon, but do it for 10 years, by then you will be writing your own success story.
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