You Had Me At Hello

I was talking with a business owner recently and he told me this:

“I’d LIKE to send social media updates more often, but my business partner thinks it’s a big mistake. He says we’ll alienate our community and he’s concerned people will unsubscribe in droves.”

I gave him my view on that, which is basically: You can’t post too often …

You can only post poorly … or too obnoxiously … or too salesy … and without a sufficient amount of storytelling or other value-driven content intended to make the lives of your subscribers better, well yeah, then you WILL get people jumping off like deck chairs being tossed off the Titanic.

(I mangled that simile on purpose, just to see if you were paying attention 🙂

Anyway, he listened to my thoughts on all this. He did not disagree with the notion that posting more content on social media generally equates to increased revenue and a cascade of other good things as well.

He was part of the choir that didn’t need preaching to.

But then he said the following:

“No, I think it’s something else. I believe his refusal to post more often stems from his thinking that social media isn’t that important. I’m not sure how to handle this, it’s really infuriating.”

Wow. So his best explanation for this impasse was his partner not caring about social media. It’s rare that my sympathies can change so abruptly over the course of a short conversation.

In Minute 1, I’m feeling his pain. Two sentences into his rebuttal I’m on Team Business Partner and Googling “vertigo symptoms.”

There are lots of definitions of what makes up a good person or contractor, but you could do a lot worse than this one: humility, with a willingness to look inward for responsibility when something goes wrong.

The alternative is to be the finger-pointer, the excuse-maker. And this is not to say that this man’s business partner doesn’t have his own issues.

Look, I am not Dr. Phil and this is not an advice column. This is not about that. But I thought this story was worth telling for the lesson of getting out of your own way when it comes to social media marketing.

Get your message out there, imperfect as they may be. (Like this one.)