This is my week to step away from the business, to think about our long-term plans. It happens once every 6-months , and I believe it keeps us nimble as a company – growing, evolving, always with an eye to the future.
I was knee-deep in financials when my mom called. When she heard what I was up to, she asked THE question that is occupying my thoughts this week:
Social Media is hot right now. But what will you do when it dies down? Can your business last when most companies have social media handled and it isn’t the latest buzzword?
I think about it a lot. Social Media is a new and unexpected field (If you had told me 5-years ago when I was a TV anchor that my career path would take this fork in the road, I would never have believed it) and no one knows where it will go, or what changes lie ahead. Keeping a company responsive enough to continue to meet client needs in a quickly changing landscape is an ongoing challenge.
In the two years since I started KWSM, we’ve already seen changes. We’ve weathered 3 major Facebook interface changes, and learned the ‘new’ Twitter, the ‘new’ YouTube and the ‘new’ LinkedIn. In addition to our social media management services, we’ve added workshops and coaching for clients who needed a lower-cost option. We’ve gone from the home office, to the virtual office, to the actual office, which we have now outgrown. (The search is on for our new home.)
How will we keep moving forward? I scribbled notes. I re-worked our Products & Services page. I lost sleep. And then I realized – to answer those questions about the future, I need only remember the past.
We are journalists. It’s what makes KWSM different than the hundreds of social media agencies that spring up seemingly daily. Storytelling is in our blood, and while everybody talks about the importance of stories these days, we knew they were vital back when no one was talking about it.
We were one of the first agencies to help business owners tell their stories on social media. We were here before the others were around, and we will be here after they are gone. I got into social media because it was changing the way people consumed traditional media. I stepped up to the new platform, but my job remained the same: engage an audience, build credibility, start conversations, get noticed and make them remember.
Writing a Tweet isn’t hard. It’s a sentence. Posting on Facebook is a skill pretty much anyone 13+ can master. But knowing what to say and how to say it? That’s an art form. That’s our art form.
At the end of the day, the team at KWSM does today what we have always done. We create content. We tell stories. We write blog posts; we craft pictures and graphics; we shoot videos; we write press releases. And yes, we use social media to distribute those things – because that’s where the eyeballs are these days. But even if social media goes away, stories don’t. Storytelling is a fundamental mode of communications between humans. It’s primal. We’ve come along way since cave drawings and interpretive dance, but the goal is the same: to communicate something about ourselves to an audience that we think needs the information.
Business owners will always need help telling their stories to prospective customers and clients. And no matter what the method of distribution, they will always need to craft content that helps them do that most effectively. We’ll be here to help.
My CPA and Business Advisor, Robert Diemer, urged me to come up with a KWSM Mission Statement this week. I think I just did:
Katie Wagner Social Media is a team that helps business owners craft their story, and share it with those who need to know. We care about and support our clients, and each other. Our greatest joy is watching our clients succeed.
