Blog, Tweet, Repeat

I’m wrestling with something here. It’s a postulate I’ve been thinking about for some time and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. Maybe you can help by sharing your thoughts on this with my and my readers? Okay, here it goes. Something like this:

Is being social online causing me to be less social?

The more I spend connecting with people online using social media I believe I may actually be spending less time with people in social media.

This is not an argument I can make based on statistical analysis or facts, but I’ll tell ya, it sure seems this is what’s happening to me. You see, I was a real rookie with social when I came to Fresh. In my role as president my primary focus is marketing and selling our brand and it’s services. I figured that I would try social media principles to drive those two initiatives and we’ve had some great successes with this. Our three largest clients came through my participation in social media (until recently when they were trumped by our relationship with an even larger client). My sales approach involves no cold calling. That’s right. Zero. Nada, and yet Fresh Consulting does business in 3 countries and 5 states today.

What’s happened in all of this is that by my connecting and engaging well in social media the business has grown sufficiently to where I have less time to engage with depth like I used to. The success is positive as a business as we’ve had a banner year in 2010. We’ve already surpassed 2010′s performance and it’s only February 2011. My experiment worked! Perhaps too well?

1. For the first time in our company history we turned on an AdWords campaign. We had 5 leads in the first week. We closed one, are in negotiations with another, had to pass one to another firm due to a conflict of interest and passed on  the other two. Oh, and that was the same week we wrapped up eight (8!!) proposals.
2. I’ve developed some fantastic new connections where we’re exploring new ideas and projects, but, oh yeah, those eight proposals I’ve got to get done. Right.
3. I’m finding I have less time to tweet, blog, be in Facebook Groups or look at other social content because my calendar is filled.

But wait. Isn’t this the outcome when you’re in sales? If things are hopping life is good! Deals close, you work the project and deliver results and all the while new leads come in and you work the process, close the deal and do it again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat, right? In my case it’s more like Blog, Tweet, Repeat … but I’m having less time for this as there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Bottom line is this – I’m struggling to stay as social as I’ve been in the past because of my successes in being social and I’m perplexed about it.

Guess what? Social media and digital marketing works and I’m thrilled to see Fresh growing at a healthy pace. I offer you my apologies if I come across as anti-social. I promise you that this is not my intent…

All the best,