I got to do one of my most favorite things today. I got to talk to a group about social media.
The group was the San Antonio Healthcare Social Media community. They have a tweetup every month and they asked me and my pal Nan Palmero to talk about the return on investment of social media.
For me, that’s easy. It’s community. When you think about it, that is what social media is all about: community. Do you want that community to follow you? Do you want that community to spend money with you? Do you want that community to evangelize about you or your product? No matter what it is you want that community to do, you need to have a community in order to do anything.
Individuals and organizations must determine at the outset what they want out of their time spent in the social media space. Yet, before they even get to that determination, they hem and haw about whether or not they need to get involved in social media. They hear about it but they don’t understand it. As I heard during an news program this morning, if you wait until you understand everything on a subject before you act, you’ll never do anything.
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I agree with your assessment on mobilization: “…if you wait until you understand everything on a subject before you act, you’ll never do anything.”
There was another post about how to go about assessing the potential benefits of social media. One of the more critical points was that you must learn by doing. True, social media is new, but its application should help you achieve your organizational goals.