Taste everything well before serving up your social media offerings.
If you want to succeed in running a
kitchen for the homeless in Washington, DC, or have wildly successful
social media marketing campaigns, it all comes down to one thing: do you
respect and appreciate your guests? Do you cut-corners and just serve
slop or do you prepare organic, healthy, and delicious meals with an
obsession for presentation and taste?
I volunteer as sous chef at a Washington, DC, homeless kitchen. They serve fresh, organic dinners to folks who really need a healthy meal. Miriam's Kitchen treats everyone who dines there as respected and honored guests. I have learned a lot about how to be a much better social media marketer as a direct result of working both in the kitchen as a sous chef and also as dining room captain. Can someone who isn't in love with the taste of food be a top chef? You know what they say, "never trust a skinny chef."
Well, it seems to me that there are quite a few PR
and marketing companies that aren't in love with social media. Even
worse, they have downright contempt for the honest denizens of social
media. Can you truly be effecting in social media marketing, digital PR,
and SEO if you're not completely in love with it? Can one ever trust a
skinny social media maven?
And even if you're not in love with social media, can you be truly
effective if you don't taste what you make? If you're too "busy" or too
"above" rolling up your sleeves and getting into the kitchen, can you
actually create social media campaigns that are fashionable, timely, au courant? Are you serving campaigns that nobody's ordering -- and would you even know?
Too often, for too many traditional agencies, social is just another
channel, another product to sell in order to be integrated and
full-service -- there's very little passion -- or respect -- for online community.
Much of this is not intentional, it's just that "full-service"
agencies, and their practitioners, are oftentimes spread too thin over
too many media and too broad mission.
It reminds me of a recent experience I had at Miriam's: I prepared
enough sauce to feed one-hundred-and-fifty homeless men and women and
forgot to even taste it. Seriously. I was so busy chopping onions,
peeling and crushing tomatoes; browning the onion and garlic; and adding
oregano, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper in the too short amount of
time I had that I never dipped in a plastic tasting spoon to see if it
all worked together.
I looked at my watch: I was on time! However, I looked over at John Murphy, head dinner chef at Miriam's Kitchen, and my boss.
"How does it taste?" he asked. I looked at him dumbfounded.
"We can't feed our guests with food that doesn't taste good," John
continued while dipping a clean plastic tasting spoon into the sauce and
tasting it, "that you wouldn't eat and enjoy yourself -- you need to
always monitor the food you're cooking by both taste and presentation."
"I know we're in a rush but you must put yourself out there in the
dining room and you must make sure what you serve isn't just nutritious,
organic and fresh but also appealing to the eye and palate."
In my mad rush to deliver, I completely forgot that the food I was
preparing didn't just have to get done but also needed to be delicious,
compelling, appealing, and well-seasoned. And, so I tasted. It was bland.
I doctored it up and the results were delicious -- and so was the
presentation, with fresh basil and rosemary adding green to a sea of red
when it was finally served to the kitchen's guests. So, what happens if
you're not willing to be an active participant in the flavor of the
meals you serve.
Corporate folks used to call it "eating your own dog food," right?
What I see in the social media marketing and PR space, however, are
lots of folks who are cooking and cooking and cooking without ever
taking an interest in tasting. What I mean in this case is that there
are too many social media marketers who have zero interest in social
media, social networks, technology, or online community.
And, even if you do taste-as-you-go, how's your palette? Maybe you're
serving fast food but you have a foodie palate -- are you able to
connect with your guests cook to their unique taste in food? Are you
able to produce meals that appeal to your guests or do you feel contempt
for their lack of sophistication, always trying to force tastes and
textures that might, in fact, disgust them and drive them away, never to
return.
How well do you know the palette of your market online? How much of a
died-in-the-wool social media consumer are you yourself? How engaged
are you on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, or Google+ yourself? -- to say nothing of message boards, forums, or reddit.
You make think your know how to market to online denizens but just
because you may understand how to market or promote using traditional
tools to traditional markets doesn't mean that you'll be able to map
those strategies directly to this new, vibrant, global online market --
or, to map those recipes directly to your new restaurant.
Are you invested in social media? Are you a fanboy or fangirl
of social networks? Do you spend too much time developing online
relationships in online communities? Are you the first person rushing
around to try to get an invite to Pinterest, for example? If not, do you
really have the sort of passion and commitment to knowing your audience
well enough to be able to cook for them?
