1.
It’s a Good Business but the
wrong one for me!
SocialEdge Africa is a social media consultancy company offering companies with
social media solutions in areas of strategy, monitoring and management of
brands and campaigns on social networks. The business was good due to the fact
that firms & people need help with having a strong presence &
visibility of their businesses on social media; there’s a market for what we
do. On the upside it was the wrong one for me because it could not survive
a week without me! In the past one year I have been 70 % involved in pitching our ideas,
literally almost at every meeting (Gitonga Munene, Nick Stewart and Marete Dennis) helped me
a lot though we had to work on presentations together! I want something that
could go on a week without but that was kinda a challenge!
Lesson
Learnt: If your business cannot survive a week or two without you then it’s the
wrong one to spend your time on!(Don't follow this if you follow what motivational speakers tell you! I guess there's a faint line between patience & persistence and learning to let go!)
2.
Rogue Clients & Prospects.
Do not
get me wrong here, they say the customer is the king so is the client in our
case. Some were good others were just not that cool & easy on us. I am not
in anyway trying to say this doesn’t happen to other business but when you do
consultancy there’s a pitching process which involves literally sharing ideas
you have for the client. A lot of effort, IP, money and time go towards this
process and then the nasty prospects would lift us off our ideas, hire some
other guys to execute them or get cheap interns! When you’ve spent time
preparing a strategy and it’s execution, showcased the content plans and the
management schedules of different platforms in a presentation then a sly
prospect will say; “kindly send us that
on email so that we can forward it to our boss”. That was kinda the last we
heard from some of those prospects before we saw our ideas being executed by
them and as their fans or followers we’d RT, LIKE, SHARE, COMMENT or maybe just
leave a REPLY on their Twitter handles! That felt awful! So before you go to
consultancy know this will happen!
Lesson
Learnt: Don’t run your business like a brothel where every man with money or
thinks he has walks in and gets served by his terms! Take time to select people
you want to work with; just think of what you’re giving away and what you might
get in return.
3.
Most people think social media
is their silver bullet!
People
want to make money and more of it (guess that’s common between us); enter
social media, with all the buzz some business owners especially the small ones
saw a huge opportunity to break even without spending much money and effort!
First of all marketing will not fix it if the product doesn’t have a value
proposition or a clear need that it satisfies. Secondly before money changes
hands there has to be a distribution process or channel, there product needs to
be available when the buyer wants it not when you want to deliver! So social
media marketing doesn’t solve that. The other thing is employees of a social
media agency aren’t your sales people so don’t ask us why orders are not
improving. Marketing and PR involve communications to a large scale, actual
closing of sales isn’t done in most cases on Facebook so you need some people
to follow up on those inquiries, knock on doors and befriend strangers online
just because they showed interest in your product or service. All I am trying
to say here is some clients had the wrong expectations! One being a computer
accessories business that wanted us to increase his turnovers from X to Y. The
best we could do was say NO to them!
Lesson
Learnt: Work with clients whose expectations you can deliver! It’s much simpler
as you won’t have to answer calls with questions you’ve got no answers to.
4.
Most managers still don’t
understand social media.
Some
old school brand, PR and Marketing managers still do not have a clue of how to
do social media. Leave that, they don’t understand how to be social; how to
handle the attention craving teenager who wall posts you on everything she thinks
or that 40 year old guy who will ask virtually for everything you sell and
never buy anything!
However
that isn’t the big problem here, the metrics are. So how do we measure success
or failure? Some of these guys just wanted numbers and we gave them because
that’s easy to get, others wanted to see comments and likes and we delivered!
However those are not business metrics that show you are a getting a ROI on
your social media efforts. Do you show your boss comments and number of fans
when he/she asks how your social media is doing and why you spent amount X
between period A to B? NO! That was a
challenge because a sales manager will show his increase or drop of sales in
region Y over a certain period, for us we use various analytical and metric
tools to show how far the message reaches, level of influence, set up keywords
on monitoring tools to up your reputation game on social media, track what
people are saying about you or the industry you’re in and scan conversations
around a client’s key publics. It’s rather tough to put a cost/price/ROI on
human interactions and measure outcomes especially in the short term! So the
old school marketers gave us a hard time! They just don’t get social and here’s
8 reasons why you need to hire a social media manager!
Lesson
learnt: Work with people who understand a bit of what you do! They appreciate
what, how and why you do it plus they will pay for it.
5.
In this business, the client is
not the king!
I have
had the opportunity of working with tough developers, designers and some
creative guys who know you really can’t do much without them! How? The best I
can do is preparing a PowerPoint and present awesome ideas, the designer does
the mock ups for the pitch and they developer explains how we’ll do it! If you
get the business you can’t do it without these two people! To be on the safe
side and work as team we ganged up, I know there are other agencies (more
expensive ones) but since we offered an averagely priced solution and did
awesome work we decided if the client thinks he is the King then our business
should be the queen! Treat us fairly and we’ll do all there can be done to
ensure your brand becomes ‘social and friendly’.
Reminds
of me an email I sent to Sunny Bindra’s PA; the response was if you want Sunny
to speak at your event, you need to book him 6 months before and provide XYZ! I
thought about it; the guy is on top of his game, he’s good and organizations
want him to help so here are his terms! Get there first before you think of
taking this point seriously!
Lesson
Learnt: If the client insists that he is the king just let him know that your
business is the queen! Don’t use that to be cocky and bitchy though. Just let
them know for you to offer X you need Y!
6.
It has to be scalable!
This
is simple, I guess you’ve read amazing stories on startups in leading blogs
such as Mashable and felt like you too can do the same here in Kenya or
elsewhere. The truth if you’re solving a true market need and filling a niche
then you will and if you have a superb business model you’ll make lots of money
while at it. Social Edge Africa is a good business as I said in point one but
it’s needs me. On scalability the capital investment of putting up branches,
running the business, recruiting people in other regions and finally making
money on it will take time and that could be a decade! I guess these days we
want breakthroughs in 3 or less years and so do I. So I did some soul searching
and thought of what else I could do still on Social Edge and it has to do with disrupting education in Africa; making professors cool and edgy using web 4.0 to ‘digitize’ them! Stick around for more!
Lesson
Learnt: Being cool and awesome alone doesn’t make you money, inquiries don’t
pay bills, think ‘cool, superb business model, scalable and disruptive’ that’s all
am doing as I type this!
7.
If you can tolerate the worst
outcome then be open to it!
I
started Social Edge in my 4th year in campus and went on straight to
it after school till now. Guys went to the big 4 audit firms, others got into MNC’s
and others are ‘somewhere’ out there! I resisted that urge to head that way and
went for something rougher and more challenging! That journey hasn’t been easy
but I figured out that if I could tolerate the worst possible outcome then I
could do it! If the worst outcome is sleeping hungry, being homeless, being
unable to provide basic needs for your family (if you have one) then DON’T DO
IT! If the risk is too high, think twice; if you’re not too sure don’t do it! The
smaller the risk, the smaller the reward! So don’t expect to make so much when
you took smaller risks!
Lesson
Learnt: Those who take small risks will never starve!
Majority of the business owners and thier managers aka decision makers have not fully understood the value of social media. Wait untill we have 10 million facebook and an equal number on other social sites and they will realize the good and bad of social media and the need to have a professional guide them.
ReplyDelete