On the same vein as my lost post regarding a blogging hiccup or what I see as a new era of business blogging, we are now at a crossroad of corporate advertising, marketing and PR online.  There are many forward thinking companies that are early adopters, and especially in the technical world where technology is seen as a tool to harness if you want to succeed.  So where are we in the adoption of social media as it relates to the rest of the companies and corporations?  We are at a new beginning, the stage of educating the rest of the world. Those companies that didn’t get it, the ones that want to see what the early adopters did and what worked and what didn’t.

We have seen it in our own business model here at One By One Media and Bloggers For Hire.  We really didn’t have to sell real hard to get companies that were contacting us about business blogging and hiring bloggers.  They wanted to adopt the technology and they wanted to make it a part of their online presence.  They were already sold on the idea.  All I or any other social media consultant had to do was implement the tools necessary for the company to join in the social media world.  We had the good life then, and our sales were self fulfilling prophecies.  Now we are in the education stage of the rest of the world.  These companies and corporations are not yet sold on the idea of social media.  In fact, I think it was stated best in a post and thread at the newly canceled Blog Business Summit.

Steve Broback wrote:

Like the Lambada, I don?t believe my original, 1990?s era event model is nearly as viable as it used to be, and certainly not so for the BBS. The BBS really never attracted the huge numbers of marketing and PR types that clearly *needed* to learn this stuff. I tried very hard with the Chicago event to attract that demographic and our efforts washed up on shore like a dead fish.

In addition, we emailed, snail mailed, and telephoned 250 CTOs and CIOs and invited them to come and learn how Wikis and blogs can enable internal knowledge sharing. They were terrified, and only 3 signed up. A couple even said they were ?too busy? with their current efforts to reign in email overload to take the time to attend(!) (emphasis added)

This was a very astute thought and a comment by Kevin Hillstrom about the event:

In the posts of the past two days, one can see that you feel hurt by spending so much time and effort to evangelize something you believe in, only to have to make tough choices that may, on the surface, appear contrary to what you?ve evangelized over a period of several years.

It will probably be hard, but try to not blame people who ?don?t get it?. It is just as likely that people failed to do a good job of educating folks as it is that people ?don?t get it?. You?ll never know which of those two issues is the right one.

Teresa mentioned that companies that don?t get this are ?sunk?. They aren?t. They are simply missing an opportunity to improve the performance of their business.

When the conversation turns to picking on the ones who you are trying to evangelize, you make it that much harder to be successful in the long term.

Don?t feel bad about having to cancel something you so strongly believed in. Spend your efforts moving forward, showing folks that they can benefit by doing what you?re suggesting, and that what you?re suggesting is evolving and changing every day.

I sent two folks to your conference last year. One of those folks made a difference in her organization, armed with the knowledge she gained. Know that your efforts do help others who have an interest in your subject matter.

Kevin’s comment is spot on in my opinion.  We will need to show the examples of the past early adopters.  We need to take those examples and show the rest of the corporate world how the companies used the tool and how it benefited them and provide hard numbers for those companies to see for a return on their investment. As mentioned, Teresa stating that companies not adopting this social media tool are not sunk, but if companies want to differentiate themselves from their competitors, they can, if not, they are missing the opportunity.  I think we agree on the fact that if a company misses out on enough opportunities, sooner than later they will eventually sink  and die.  It will be up to them if they sink or swim, but it is up to us as social media consultants to throw them a life raft if needed.

So where do we go from here?  Now is truly the call for social media consultants to become evangelists. It’s time to stop preaching to the choir and truly find followers that want to succeed in business using social media tools.  Now is when we have the tough sell.  The easy sell is a thing of the past.  Pull in your numbers, get those examples ready, and show what you have done, and what you can do in the future.  It’s not going to be the easy contract that you get now, but one that you truly earn.