Mark Schaefer is a college educator, blogger, speaker and consultant who specializes in corporate social media marketing workshops. He is the author of three best-selling books including Return On Influence, The Tao of Twitter, and Born to Blog.
Q:What were the top 3 social media mistakes you made starting out with your business, and if you could start over what would you do differently?
My first mistake … well, it was kind of a mistake and kind of an advantage. When I started, I did absolutely no studying, no reading, no benchmarking. I just dove right in. The downside was that I had a steep learning curve and struggled for quite a bit. Months, in fact.
But the upside was that I took a very fresh approach to everything and that earned some attention I think. When I really started getting active in 2008 there was a small group of thought leaders and everybody was trying to copy them. I did not even know who the thought leaders were, so that was probably a plus in an environment that rewards originality. I think if I didn’t go through this learning curve, I probably wouldn’t have written The Tao of Twitter, which is, at its heart, a story about my social media journey. It has helped thousands of people by keeping them from repeating my mistakes!.
The second mistake I made was starting blog that was separate from my website. As I have already established, I really had no idea what I was doing and started the blog as an experiment. Well, the thing took off. Now, all that SEO benefit I was generating was landing someplace other than my website. Eventually, I had to bite the bullet and shut down my blog and move it to the website. Rookie mistake!
The third mistake was that I got off to a slow start recognizing how important social media could be to my business. I grew up in traditional marketing roles in large companies. I really didn’t understand at first how transformational this new technology could be and how important it could become to a business. It took me nine months to understand that social media is not an afterthought. It became core to my business and has delivered many important business benefits, including sales, new markets, and key business partners.
You can learn more about Mark from his blog Business Grow