Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

Amid the mad whirl that surrounds the new semester (teaching PR Tactics at Kent State), the push to finish a paper on PR theory in social media, and reconnecting with people after the holidays, my online brand seems pretty healthy.  I’ve got a fair posse of followers on Twitter, connections on Linked In, a good history of seeding comments on interesting blogs, and a decent batch of posts of my own on this humble blog.  But 10 months into the “become an entrepreneur” adventure, I’m noting a little dampness on my brow.

It’s flop sweat.

I’m having the “omigosh, is this all going to work in the worst economy in 30 years? What do I do if it doesn’t work? Am I doing all I can to be successful?” blues.

Of course, I also know from past experience that attempting to make life decisions in our northern U.S. winter is generally a bad idea. If it weren’t for a strong aversion to living places where there is no variance in weather, I probably should be in Arizona, or someplace like that.  Still, notwithstanding the seasonal component of the sense of fear and loathing, I’ve taken stock of how I spend my days.

As much as I’d like to be wrong, I’m not sure that at this stage of the development of my company I can rely on my current online activity to build my business. I need to pick up the phone and make more personal connections with my contacts, ask for referrals, buy people coffee and generally expand the more proven business development activity.

Perhaps that’s no news at all for the Social Media intelligentsia. And maybe I’m just not giving enough of the calendar time to pass.  But, the authorities frown on eating your followers (is there an app for that? Don’t answer.)

So, what’s that mean?

I’ve never been a prolific blogger — I think I average about a post a week most times — but I have been the Mad Tweeter on occasion, and have observed that it’s a bloody addictive and seductive tool. I like reading interesting things and commenting on them! I’ve also not been much of a link-baiter, and I haven’t Tweeted my own posts very scientifically.  Probably as a consequence, my blog traffic is quite a bit lower than I’d like, and it’s trended lower throughout the fall of 2009 despite some interesting comment conversations and much appreciated RTs from the aforementioned posse.

Where I’m landing (and where I’d appreciate some different perspectives) is to ease back on the Twitter-traffic and make a more disciplined to-do list every day, reserving roughly half of my current Twitter-time for more analog activities.

Like most people in our profession, I didn’t get into this gig to be a cold-calling sales dude. But Cash Is King, as Goodyear’s strategy reads, and I need to get some.

Talk me out of it?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.