Mastering the Art of Business

Since I jumped aboard the social media wave I turned millionaire almost overnight. Ok, that’s not true at all, it’s just a joke. But if you read blogs, articles, tweets, and books about the topic, it’s something you’ll see from self-proclaimed social media gurus. Is it just me or does it seem like EVERYONE is a social guru nowadays? So you’ve been using Twitter and Facebook for while and now you have revolutionary marketing advice for every business out there?

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly agree that being social is an extremely powerful way of building your business or even your personal brand. After all, I wouldn’t be blogging here and using Twitter if I didn’t believe it. (For the record though, I’m not pretending to be a guru or almighty expert, I’m just sharing my opinions from experience). But the reality is everyone out there (figure of speech) is doing the same. Some books I’ve read recently seemed to imply that if you create exceptional content and you indirectly promote it through social media you’ll eventually be successful in your endeavor. But let’s face it; with millions of blogs out there, it’ll be a challenge. It certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it because of that – after all we do it for the fun of it in the first place, but I think it’s important to realize that it requires effort, dedication, and persistence.

If you were an early adopter and strategically positioned yourself in your ecosystem, then you certainly have a good head start which increases your chance for success. But I believe the methods that have worked for the now famous bloggers and authors will not be as efficient for newcomers, who started in the past year, like me for instance. I believe it’ll require us to step it up, be innovative, and leverage the existing tools to breakout of the crowd. Differentiation is not that easy, but it’s possible, and quite frankly necessary in my opinion.

In any case, I do believe startups and small businesses do need to get onboard very quickly, otherwise they risk of being left behind and if they wait, it’ll take them too much effort to get back to par. Here’s some great statistics on social media adoption posted by @SocialSonya.