I've done a lot of travelling and often to some fairly dangerous places. When you land somewhere you have never been before, you want to find a guide you can trust.

Recently I have been to some Social Media talks, most of them to get an idea of how it feels to be on the other side of technology, and two things are for sure,

1. Many people who know they need to be in Social Media are bewildered, confused and extremely frustrated;
2. and the answers they get to their questions and concerns are not helping them to participate.

They want to travel into this exotic location, but they cannot seem to find a guide they can understand.
The reason why this situation exists is also twofold:

1. Firstly the multiple-technology is coming at us at such a rapid rate that we just cannot keep up, I call it "Multinology".
   Let me be quite plain, absolutely no-one has a hold on every facet of this multinology and no-one knows what is going to happen next, they "stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast" (to borrow from the Eagles).
2. The barrier to entry does NOT start at social media, it does not even start at a website.
   It starts with how you view technology as a whole. Then it moves on to how you use Hardware, not software!
   Once you have understood that, you need to understand how you use Software.
   It is absolutely pointless trying to figure out if you need: Skype, Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail Marketing, Yelp, Bing, HotFrog, Facebook, GetListed, Delicious, Digg, TweetDeck, Stumbleupon, SquareUp, Mashable, MadMimi, a Blog, a Forum, a Store Front, a Website, Foursquare, YouTube, Flickr, and the myriad of Google apps until you have gotten comfortable with the hardware devices you will actually use (your handheld, your laptop, e-reader iPad, cellphone, etc).
   And you can't figure that out until you have actually made friends with technology.

The problem:

Many business leaders, especially from the Baby Boom and X generations, have comfortably regarded technology as "someone's job". They know how to deal with, employ, motivate and generally get along with technology people. But technology people have struck oil.

For the non-techies there is a growing panic that their customers have gone from accessible friends, to blank profile pictures just out of their reach. They feel a bit like the man who needs a ticket to get on the train but cannot get the ticket till he's on the train.
they're secretly hoping that the next Social Media conference or article they read will be the "aha" moment for them where someone points to the hidden ticket office around the corner.

Nostalgia does not help, "I remember when we only used to meet with people face-to-face," is nice, but clients are not living in that world any more. Face-to-face meetings happen after digital meetings have already taken place.
That's just the way it is, nostalgia does not help us to understand or leverage that fact; and the inferred sarcasm only serves as further alienation.

The problem is an internal one, the guy giving the presentation is not the enemy and he's not the one with the problem, he already has his ticket. The problem has nothing to do with intelligence, it has everything to do with attitude, with reinvention, with adventure and with exploration, but the first step in solving it is recognising that it is an internal one.

So what to do?

Social Marketing cannot be beaten and is not going away; but it can be joined. Take the time and energy to reinvent yourself in a way that puts technology within your reach and makes it both possible and affordable. Understandably many potential users will need to find a guide they understand and who understands them. You don't need everything! I'll say it again... you really, really don't need everything even if you could get it. And no-one else has got everything. Even the analysts trying to review all of the available technology can't grasp it all. You only need some of it and you probably need some help deciding what you need, that's OK.

If you'd like a guide into this foreign land I'd be happy to consult or to contract, I follow a 3 step approach:

1. Change your view of information technology?
   It may take time and a bit of coaching, maybe some deep breathing, but it is possible. I do understand the frustration and sometimes it helps to vent a bit, but you must move on from there.
2. How do you use your current technology?
   You need to evaluate what you have and how you use it, this is not so that you can become better at how you use technology, it is so that we can determine what software you will actually use, and what you can employ others to use.
3. What technology do you need?
   From that position we can determine what you actually need. This way you have in mind what your end goal is and you have room to experiment with some solutions to get to it.

It's a great and rewarding adventure, and well worth the effort. Give me a call or e-mail for some consulting or contract options.