I was belatedly going through way too many old Sunday New York Times sections recently, and I came across this terrific piece in the Business section by Damon Darlin from July 11. His point can be readily applied to my favorite soapbox topic: social media and the content generation it requires are most definitely not free.

The article is called It’s Free Only If Your Time Is Worthless. Amen to that!

Click here to read the article

The Kellogg Graduate School of Management puts on a great Technology Conference every spring. It’s so good that it actually sold out in two days this year. Impressive! As one of the lucky attendees last week, I decided to really get in to the swing of things by tweeting tidbits from the conference.

This was the first time that I have actively tweeted from an event, and while there was the downside of missing some of what was said while I typed, there was the corresponding upside of 1) Focusing for a longer moment on especially interesting facts 2) Sharing with people who weren’t able to attend and 3) Creating some digital notes.

For those of you who aren’t active on Twitter, I thought it might be interesting to provide a quick snapshot of the conference by reiterating my slightly edited and enhanced Tweets from the conference here:

Keynote Speaker – Chris Dean from Skype:
- Love the word “freemuim.” This is how Skype describes its business model
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Social Networking Isn’t Free
My clients often tell me some variation of “My teenaged daughter thinks my business should have a Facebook site.” Or the client will want to know if they should be blogging or using Twitter. Or they might ask what, exactly, Twitter is.

They are typically intrigued that there might be a free way to hit the buzz lottery. Being ever the pragmatist, I tell them that while the cost of entry for social marketing is free, relevant, ongoing participation is not.

What I mean is this: Generally, doing social networking right requires dedicated resources to generate content and to interact with all of your business’ newfound “friends”. Dedicated resources are not free, nor, typically, even cheap. And this can be especially challenging in leaner organizations where everyone is already wearing too many hats!

There are three key questions you should ask to assess whether social marketing is right for your business now: Read More -›