Paul Segreto, a strategic partner of mine, recently wrote a nice article about the fear that a lot of small business owners have when it comes to getting a social media program up and running.
"A misconception about social media is that is a free or low cost alternative. But typing and building relationships takes time – people time – and time costs money. If you have no marketing budget, then you have no budget to pay someone (or yourself) to do the social media legwork. Social media, like all marketing efforts, shouldn’t been selected because it’s the cheap choice, but because it is the right strategic choice. With limited data to support real ROI impact of social media, particularly for B2B products and services, it makes it very difficult for a small business to take it seriously (considering small business’s limited budgets) over traditional direct sales and marketing activities.”
