I met with some big-brained individuals this morning, just shooting the sh*t about the industry, social tools, developments in various established and start up companies and the people we’ve met along the way.
We got to talking about Social Media events and I had a massive realization that hit me like an ice cream truck.
The people who are most likely to attend Social Media events, are the ones least likely to need it.
I’ve been to a number of Social Media conferences, meetups, tweetups and events. You know who I see there? The same people, talking about the same things.
Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE these people and I LOVE talking about Social Media but aside from optimizing our own usage, learning about a few new tools and expanding our professional network, what is the outcome of these meetings? We continually stress points that we all already know and talk about. We try to convince each other that engagement is important and authenticity and transparency is a necessity. Now and again a point of contention presents itself and we debate the merits of “to outsource or not to outsource” or “how PR is being affected by Twitter” but it’s all the same.
The people that we are all trying to work with are the ones that should be at these meetings.
Working in Social Media, I spend a majority of my time in new business meetings educating the prospect as to why they should be paying attention to Social Media; my job is to be an educator first, it is the first step in my sales pipeline. It can take a very long time to get business in the door. It would be nice to see is more small businesses, CEOs, and non-Social Media professionals/enthusiasts attending these events and conferences. It would make the sales cycle time shorter and make prospects more adept at spotting true Social Media professionals from the rest.
Fatigue
I think what we’re going to begin seeing is a new format. Because every Social Media / Social PR professional that I encounter inevitably gets to the same point. We’re tired of rehashing the same concepts and telling each other of how great we are. We’re tired of going to conferences where there is little-to-no chance of getting business because we all work in the same field. Coke is rushing out to buy Pepsi when it is thirsty.
Enough with the “look how great we are” conferences and incestuous “preaching to the choir” conferences. Let’s expand. We need a conference format that caters to different industries. We need a panel of big thinkers 5-20 of them depending on the size of the event. And we need an audience of novice and non-social media users. If our ultimate goal is to prove the value of these tools beyond “What are you doing?” and the value to the 5% of Twitter that creates the majority of the tweets, then we need an audience of prospects. We need to make it local so that Social Media Professionals have a room of potential new business and businesses have a small panel of professionals to choose from a la “Best in Show.”
Again, I LOVE the people in the Social Media community. I LOVE the BIG thinkers leading the way but, I’m not going to be hiring them.