Wow, This Stuff is Work!

I just had a great lunch meeting with a old friend and former co-worker yesterday. It was truly great to see her and the discussion was animated, energetic, full of excellent catching up and business blathering. She is a executive at a major PR and social media firm and as such is involved with a lot of pretty major clients with pretty major social media programs running.

We were going back and forth on a lot of the standard topics--managing consumer commentary on your brand, buying up negative-image URLs, whether or not social media tools are glorifying the inane and destroying interpersonal skills, etc. We talked about how great our kids are and what all these tools like Facebook and Twitter are going to mean to them when they are our age. My kids happen to think Twitter is stupid, BTW. Facebook runs their social life, and it's really just the chat functions. The rest is too public!

Then she hit on something that I really think is right. She said that the majority of her clients don't just want advice on how to start up and manage an effective social media campaign. They want someone to DO it for them, to BE them. They do not want to invest the time and energy it takes to launch and then monitor all the touchpoints that campaign creates. The truth is, this IS a lot of work. Many manhours go into designing, testing, and launching all the various programs, promotions, web sites, blogs, twitter feeds, and monitoring tools. Then you have to actually monitor them and make adjustments to your message. It takes a lot of energy to maintain all those relationships and initiatives with a common voice. That might be a hidden cost that is keeping widespread adoption from really taking off.

What do you think?