For years now, we’ve been enthusiastically banging the drum for social networking as an important part of your business life here in the second decade of the 21st century. Our last article in this space, “E-Commerce Merchant or Content Curator?,” looked at the visual social network, Pinterest, as a valuable tool to add to your toolbox of social media efforts.
We’ve been enthusiastic supporters of all the others as they’ve come along. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube have all captured our imaginations and attentions. With each passing year, it seems there are more and more outlets to help you promote your e-commerce business. You only need to master them.
Certainly many e-commerce merchants are doing this, and we have amassed the stories to prove it. But, as an early spring comes to our part of the world, we’ve been captured by some new questions. Is it possible to overdo the whole social networking thing? Can you grow a thriving e-commerce business in 2012 without tweeting, liking, building Facebook pages, creating Pinterest boards and blogging like there’s no tomorrow? We turn to you for these answers.
Social media time sink
As more and more of these networks become available, it seems they require more and more of your timeWe’ve grown a little concerned. As more and more of these networks become available, it seems they require more and more of your time. Unless things have changed dramatically over the last few years, most small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) are still more S businesses than M businesses.
We know that most e-commerce operations are run by one or two people who handle just about everything from sourcing to shipping. Your time is your money. You can’t afford to spend time on tasks that you can’t cost-justify, and you’re already living a great deal of your life in front of a computer. Now you’re hearing that unless you carve out the time (and it would seem to take a lot of time) to also build a social media strategy, incorporating all of these relatively new yet fantastically popular sites, your competitors will leave you in the dust. We ask you, does it have it be this way?
Two things worry us about all this, one is the issue we’ve just mentioned. Where’s the time to do all this coming from, and can you quantify the time spent in a return on your investment? We don’t care how many programs there are that allow you to post your social media comments across multiple platforms. Learning to skillfully use all of these sites takes time, and a lot of it.
The social networks are not homogenous. Facebook isn’t Twitter. Twitter isn’t LinkedIn. LinkedIn isn’t Pinterest. Mastering one doesn’t mean you have mastered them all. When a new site comes along—and they will only continue to appear—the learning begins anew.
Just where are you going to get the time you’ll need to keep up with all this? When we started selling on eBay ourselves in the late 1990s and then interviewed scores of successful e-merchants for our various books, e-commerce merchants shared one singular and very important characteristic: They worked off the parts of their bodies that came between themselves and their seats. And this was in 2003 and 2004, before the wild popularity of Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest.
We’re guessing you still spend countless hours in a room on a chair in front of a computer. That’s what had us so excited about Pinterest to begin with. With the click of a button, you can get an easy boost to your online presence while you do what you would be doing anyway. But as compelling as social networking is, have you found it has actually made your business more successful?
Do you think you could still build a viable online business today with only the barest of social media strategies to augment all of your other efforts?
Social distortion
The other question we’ve begun to ponder is more philosophical and less quantifiable, yet it has come to us more completely with the coming of that aforementioned early spring. In addition to sapping our time, could our social media efforts also be damaging our lives as real social beings? Are we substituting time spent with our virtual social networks for time spent with our real human companions?
As for face-to-face contact? We’re willing to bet you have more than a few business partners you have never metThese are not new questions for e-commerce sellers. Years ago we spoke with a man who opened a small store where he operated his eBay business. When we asked him why he added the overhead expense to his young business, his answer was eye opening. He told us he saw, before too long, that he needed a door to close and lock so he’d stop working.
He said he’d come to see that he wasn’t being a very good husband or father, because he was unable to end his day at work as long as work was also home. He stopped what could have become a familial train wreck, and still went on to build a successful e-commerce business.
In your line of work, and ours, most of the communications we have are via email. It’s easy to go a week without even calling a person on the phone. As for face-to-face contact? We’re willing to bet you have more than a few business partners you have never met.
You may not recognize them on the street, or know them if you bumped into them at a tradeshow. We’re not diminishing the value of how handily machines take care of our communications. We’re just questioning whether there is a time to apply the brakes, at least a little.
Social media’s virtual reality
Many of us feel as though we live more of our lives now in virtual worlds than in our real lives. So the lives we live when all the various screens are turned off can’t help but suffer. We’re writing this not because we claim to know the answers (although writers think that at least if they themselves don’t know the answers to the questions they’re posing they can find someone who does).
We’re putting this out there to you. Can SMBs run a successful e-commerce business these days without devoting considerable time to learning the effective use of social media? Without “relationship marketing” or “likeable social media” or “social commerce,” or all the other buzzwords which you seemingly must know and master to thrive, would you still have a successful business?
We’re not saying forget about Facebook or Pinterest, or Twitter. We’re just saying let’s stop to reassess all this before it overwhelms us—before our virtual lives have sucked the life from the lives we share with our families, our friends and our local business associates, who we can meet in person.
Humans are and always will be social beings. A handshake, a look in another person’s eyes, these are the things that have always bound us together. We propose they still do, and we recommend you take a few minutes on a beautiful spring day to think about it, too.
We’d love to gain your wisdom on this matter, because, honestly, so far all we have are the questions.
