Going Beyond Social Media (Going Back)

It’s all about being social. Everyone might be foaming at the mouth about social media and how to use this app or that to build a following that leads to some marvelous return on investment, but maybe that’s just because we’re losing sight of why these new modes of connectivity are so popular.

Think for a moment about what the internet does in the most basic terms.  The internet is nothing more than a bunch of interconnected computers. In the early days, this was a limited number of computers connected in a limited number of locations, but it’s since grown to several million computers located all over the world.

When the internet was in its infancy outside ultra-secret, military installations, how was it used?  Before Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Google, or Napster, what were people doing on the internet?  People were connecting with one another to share information.  Sound familiar?

People with similar interests were discovering new ways to connect with each other.  Email was the hot, new technology, so people began emailing each other until a couple of guys from Duke University invented what would become known as Usenet. Usenet laid the foundation for threaded discussions online and led to the still-very-popular-today forum. All these technologies – from day one – revolving around people connecting to share ideas and information.

But what did we do before the internet came along?

We got together in person and did whatever was needed to keep moving forward.  Humans are social animals and interaction with each other is a necessary part of life.

Many of the old school types in business look back at the “good old days” and wax nostalgic about salesmen pounding pavement, shaking hands, and “just getting out there.”  Even today, that’s still very much the way to do business in the world.  Sales requires marketing and, over time, that marketing has left the realm of personal contact, meeting face-to-face, shaking hands, and “just getting out there.”  It’s become more about pushing messages to barely comprehensible numbers of people in the hopes that it strikes a chord with a carefully calculated percentage of those exposed to the message.

We still need to “suit up” if we’re going to get anything done in the world today, but whereas we used to pound the pavement – getting out there in the trenches to shake hands and work those deals one-on-one – today we have the benefit of being able to pound the silicon if you will.

Ask any salesman, any real salesman, and he’ll tell you that referrals are worth their weight in gold.  Referrals come from that one-on-one interaction, from conversations between people.  This was the heart of the classic sales gig.  This was what “getting out there” was all about – talking to as many people as possible.

Today, everyone’s talking about social media like it’s some crazy, ridiculous new thing.  Like, somehow, the internet has been used for anything other than connecting people to share ideas since the very first cable was plugged in.

Today, managers used to the way things used to be done and (rightfully) apprehensive of the extent of the changes that would have to be made to the enterprise to make the use of these new media technologies worry that all this buzz might just be hype; that social media is just another passing fad.

Today, it’s important to recognize that there’s really nothing new going on.  It was important to get out there and interact with prospects in the market, to listen to their needs and explain why yours was the ideal solution to their problems, and it still is.  If nothing else, social media is really the way things used to be around here.

Today, we can all achieve great things…  together.