The proverb is ancient: Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.
We’ve been struggling with a similar issue. Do we teach our clients to do social marketing, or do we do it for them?
We hear this kind of comment all the time from prospective clients: “I don’t have time to do social marketing. Can’t you just do it for me?”
Genuine and Persistent
At first, our model was indeed to handle the whole thing ourselves for our clients. But then we hit a couple of brick walls. Social media is effective as a marketing vehicle only when it’s both genuine and persistent.
We could handle the persistent part for our clients. But the genuine part? In some ways we could, by learning our clients really well. But when anything out of the ordinary would happen, especially when a quick response is called for, it could get pretty dicey.
But the biggest obstacle became the good old price-value equation. The time investment to handle everything would mean we’d have to charge so much, we’d price ourselves out of the range of most clients.
So we changed. Three weeks into our business launch, our model has shifted to teach clients how to build effective social marketing programs. To start them off auspiciously, we create good-looking and easy-to-maintain Website and blog platforms, plus any other social media platforms they may need (such at Twitter backgrounds and Facebook Fan Pages), and we stay alongside them until they’ve got the hang of it themselves.
Then we provide a constant supply of tools and ideas for them to Crush It!, a proven way to turn online social activity into business.
A Better Model
It’s a better model, we believe. It matches our skill sets and propensities, and we’re empowering our clients rather than enabling them to avoid what they truly must face. (And our monthly maintenance fees have come down.)
See our home page for a look at our new services and introductory pricing. We hope you like it. Meanwhile, we’re going to start working on a redesign of our own Website. We’re doing so much higher-quality work for our clients that we’ve got to reflect it in our own site.
Thank you for coming on this journey with is. It’s a blast.
–The FunCitySocialMedia team: Fred, Jeff, Reneé
