Socialtegic: Social marketing for the AEC industry

Socialtegic.com is still embryonic with just initial posts and 10 Facebook fans, but the concept is intriguing and over time the site may become exceptionally useful.

Curtis Lewis in Orlando Florida describes the site/group as a “guide for using social media in the AEC industry”.  The graphic look and format is really professional but I think it will take some time to gain enough content to be useful and truly interactive.

“No business is too small for social media, ” says Tony James who prepared the site’s first podcast with Curtis.

Will this site reach critical mass to provide enough relevance and value for its participants?  The challenge, I think for the partners involved in this initiative, will be making it though the “Dip” as Seth Godin has described.  People enthusiastically start projects and work hard to get things off the ground.  Sometimes there is a groundswell of support.  But often initiatives plateau and stall, and then the question arises:  Is it really worthwhile carrying forward when other temptations and opportunities present themselves.  Most new ideas fizzle.  It is dangerous to assume success or failure at the start-up.

Nevertheless, I’ll dare to go out on a limb and suggest my business start-up check list and invite people with new initiatives to see how they score.

Design and branding is essential, but substance is crucial

I started my first business — a newspaper for local real estate agents in Ottawa — with a (perhaps unintended) bang.  I filled the badly designed 12-page ‘rag’ with enough news to sink a ship (or more accurately, to cause the local Real Estate Board president to offer his resignation).  The story contained several stories that answered journalistic questions I had not found in my two years in the Industry and opened a Pandora’s box of controversy when I reported on efforts by the Canadian competition bureau (he northern equivalent of anti-trust regulators) to intervene in the industry.  I caught the Real Estate Board president making some rather anti-competitive comments about discount brokers — and taped the conversation.

After all the dust settled, I thought my first issue would be the last, but actually the content quality worked wonders.  Early advertisers signed on for contracts and I had a business.

Ideas are great, but is there a real market?

In developing the original business plan for my publication, I couldn’t make the numbers add up (and in fact I had priced the product too low, for too small a niche market).  But I still had some faith in the concept so decided that I would launch only if I could get enough cash from potential advertisers to pay the hard costs of launching before publishing the first issue.  I could live without salary, but wanted revenue for printing, production, and distribution.  I sold the ads and offered a cash prepayment discount.  Both the skeptical printer and designer were shocked when i showed up with the certified cheques to pay for their services.

Conversely, last week I observed an incredibly well produced magazine with absolutely no paid ads.  The publisher had decided to print a full prototype before selling anything.  Bad move.  Unless you know you have a market, don’t launch.  In many cases, the only way to know you have a market is to receive some real orders first.

If it’s in your heart, go for it.

The last bit of advice is perhaps the most important.  If you follow the previous two suggestions — not playing it safe and having real substance below the hood, and validating you have a market and some actual sales before launching — you are probably on the right track to success.  Then you need to hold your breath and do it. Don’t wait for perfection, but you should never hesitate to launch when you are ready.

So will Socialtegic succeed in the cluttered social media landscape?  Well, “selling” is taboo in Social Media and I’m not sure if Socialtegic is intended to be a business– so the measures of early success will have to be other indicators.  Will there be a second, third and 10th podcast, will the site update frequently with real stories of actual social media success, and will the fan base reach the stage where there is enough critical mass for communication but not so much clutter that the site is filled with thoughtless sales messages from people who don’t get it?  We will see.  I’ll check in again in a month for an update.

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