Todd Wasserman’s Social Media Mistake

Should all small businesses be using social media? Mashable‘s Todd Wasserman says no in a column published Dec. 5.

His column, “Hey Small Businesss Owner: Maybe Social Media Isn’t For You,” makes the case against small business owners devoting time to social media at the expense of attention to their core business.

Small Business & Social Media

Wasserman makes several misplaced assumptions about small business owners in his piece. Let’s take a point-by-point look at Wasserman’s argument against social media for small businesses.

1. Whatever time you spend on social media is time you’re not spending improving your core business.

You’d be hard-pressed to devise an argument against putting your product or service before promotion, but Wasserman later espouses the value of traditional marketing. He even argues that 80% of profits should be shoveled back into marketing.

Well, marketing is time taken from your core business too, and social media is marketing. These are not either/or propositions. One can’t argue against social media and for marketing retrenchment in the span of 600 words as if they’re mutually exclusive of each other.

If Wasserman wants to argue that you shouldn’t spend time on social media at the expense of your core business, then he should argue against spending that time on traditional marketing as well.

2. Apple doesn’t do social media.

Wasserman writes that Apple is “too busy for social media because it’s improving its products.”

Really, we’re going to compare small businesses to Apple?

Apple is the most valuable company in the world. It’s nearly 40 years old. It spends $1 billion a year on advertising and is most famous for its Super Bowl ad, the most expensive advertising available. Just try to find a major intersection, subway stop, bus stop or magazine that isn’t plastered with Apple’s products and logo.

Now, we’re going to compare what Apple does to market itself to what Johnny’s Pies does? Like Congress and the banking industry, Wasserman appears to misunderstand the reality of operating a true small business, where even a small marketing budget is hard to find.

Apple doesn’t ignore social media because it’s too busy focusing on improving its products. Apple can ignore social media because it can afford to spend $1 billion a year on other advertising.

And who knows how many more Mac fanboys Apple would have if they had a Twitter presence renowned for adeptly answering questions and solving the problems people have with their products?

3. “You’re not a publisher.”

Wasserman argues against the practice of a business creating reams of content for their site, replacing the traditional role of publications. On this point, I agree—to a certain extent. There are a lot of businesses out there filling sites with awful content, flooding the Internet with crap. They shouldn’t be doing that. They should be paying people like me to do that (and paying them handsomely).

But again, Wasserman references one of the world’s most iconic and valuable brands in making his point.

“Instead,” Wasserman writes, “you might ask why Coke doesn’t just buy ads on publications with which it wants to be associated rather than trying to become those publications. That’s the way that advertising has worked for 80 years or so.”

“Why reinvent the wheel?” Wasserman asks.

It’s interesting that a man writing for Mashable, a few paragraphs after praising Apple (a company lauded as the world’s great innovator), is arguing for the status quo in advertising.

4. Truth will prevail on the Internet.

“Not everyone is gifted in transmitting their passion via Facebook,” Wasserman writes. “There’s no reason why that 80% can’t go into ads instead of Facebook activity.”

This makes sense—if you believe that small business owners are gifted in choosing the right slogan, advertisement or radio message. The reality is, most of them are not good at any type of marketing.

I spent Saturday morning having coffee with an old ad man. No, not a Madison Avenue type, but a man who owned a local shopper in Wisconsin for 30 years and called on his clients personally every week, usually with a visit to their business.

“A lot of them hated to see me walk in the door,” he recalled.

They owed him money, or they saw advertising as a necessary—or unnecessary—evil. They couldn’t measure the effectiveness of their ads, and often bought space only when they were flush with money or desperate for business and searching for a quick influx (or when they took pity on their salesman). Few had a long-term marketing plan.

I know this because I was one of them. When I owned a restaurant in another lifetime, I hated to see this ad man show up. Advertising was the last thing on my mind, as it is for most small businesses.

People open businesses because they’re passionate about something – food, technology, event planning. Advertising, or accounting, or plumbing is usually not the inspiration for that passion.

Whether they want to use traditional advertising or social media, a small business owner is likely going to need some help from people who are passionate and well-versed about those areas (same with plumbing and accounting). But the passion they have for their core business is likely to come through on social media much more authentically than through traditional advertising, even if they’re not an expert at it.

Plus, social media is a lot more fun than traditional advertising!