Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

We Have No Magic Beans

Over the past year, we’ve taught at least fifteen day-long workshops and at least two dozen shorter sessions, including a couple of classes for UBC Continued Studies. We’ve seen a variety of students from all sorts of different industries with a wide range of tech-savviness. I’ve taught people who still think you can pay to get to the top of Google search engine results, and people who can name far more Twitter tools than I can.

We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.

Who is Most Resistant?

Clearly it’s our job to help everybody get it. And we work hard to do so. But we don’t reach everybody.

I’ve been puzzling over why this happens. Specifically, who is most resistant to adopting these tools? Certainly some industries are late adopters (the publishing world for one, based on my experiences at BookCamp Vancouver and the Surrey International Writers Conference). And those come from industries threatened by technological innovation–the media, for example–tend to be more hesitant. But neither of these seemed really satisfactory. Then Julie hit on the answer.

Our unhappy students were hoping for magic beans.

She was referring to a great blog post by Seth Godin, in which he compares traditional TV ads (and, I’d add, advertisements in other media) to magic beans. Things used to be simple, Godin explains. “Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.”

Marketing on the web, Godin continues, is different:

Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.

Perhaps there will never be magic beans again. Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

Maybe some of our students come to our talks hoping to hear “just do these three things, and you’re sorted. You’ll have this social media thing beat.” In many of talks, we actually say “there are no secrets”. Of course, then we go on to show one tiny pseudo-secret, but, trust me, it’s underwhelming.

The truth is that this work is a marathon, not a sprint, and often involves learning new skills or thinking in new ways.

So those unhappy students go away with lots of work to do, but without any magic beans.

Am I wrong? Are there magic beans out there that I just don’t know about?

Tags: foursquare, magic beans, seth godin, ubc