You don’t need an expert for Social Media
I spend a lot of time reading and trying to figure out social media. Generally I don’t trust “social media experts” because how can you have expertise in a subject that has only been relevant for a short period of time? I’m pretty sure the “social media” space consists of 10,000 cowboys just trying anything and everything to drive traffic to their clients. Even though Dell has reportedly brought in 3 million in orders from Twitter I’m still a little skeptical about the space.
Skepticism aside social media is probably going to be very important in the next 2-3 years but for right now success stories are few and far between. That’s why I was amazed when I watched a great episode of social media delivering its promosies and saving a family business.
The story starts last week when the reddit user posted a a pretty sad tale involving a lot of work, passion and sudsy bubbles. To summarize a family’s soap business was starting to feel the effects of a shakey economy and a brother son wrote the reddit.com community telling their story and asking for help.
Whats remarkable is that cleanliness and the horror or working part time jobs struck a chord with the reddit community and the business, sopier.com, saw a massive increase in orders. Redditors from all over the world started becoming serious about being clean and really helped this family business out. The story was eventually featured on a local news station, bringing in some extra exposure and orders. Even Reddits owners have taken an interest and there has been some talk of developing some some reddit.com branded soaps.
I think the best part about this story is it wasn’t brought on by some expert, sopier.com didn’t hire anybody. A concerned brother and son just told it like it is and boom the digital community responded. Think about the fact that he hired no PR company to come up with a message, no marketing or advertising dollars were spent, yet a business was saved and it’s future looks bright.
My personal opinion is that social media experts are just a bunch of mouth flappers don’t serve much of a purpose. All sopier.com had to do was write their story and people became interested. If you need an expert to tell you how to tell other people about your life then… well… I don’t know what to tell you.