We’ve a bit of this mindset that venturing into social media is an all-or-nothing proposition, or at least we have a tendency to sound that way sometimes. As if you must step forward, but never back. And an interesting story came to my attention lately that illustrates why that’s just not the case.

The Approach

There’s a company, we’ll call it a bookstore chain. They’re super interested in getting into all this social media stuff because their CEO, Jerry, is a super personable guy and he loves talking to people. They’ve got a few dozen stores all over the country and they’re growing, and Jerry is eager to get out there and learn about what people love about his bookstores.

Jerry’s got a blog, and he does a decent job of keeping it up, and he even manages to post about things that aren’t about his product, so that’s a step in the right direction. And while he’s out on the road, his marketing team is busy behind the scenes trying to figure out a way to make social media even more impactful for their bookstore business.

So they start a Facebook fan page, and they hire a social media consultant to help them execute the fan page. At the helm of the page is a fictional character, Bernie the Bookworm, and it’s his job to interact with the people that come to the page (driven by the aforementioned social media consultant).

The consultant wisely ask some key questions, like what the company’s overall business goals are, how they’d like to use the Facebook page to better connect with their customers, what other social media efforts they have planned and how they all tie into the bigger picture. The team at the bookstore chain has some trouble answering those questions, but they forged ahead. They set some goals, including a percentage increase in the number of fans on the page, and the number of visitors.

The Obstacles

Bernie the Bookworm had some limitations, however. Bernie was expected to interact with fans, but everything he said needed to be cleared by the corporate team, including things like Happy Birthday! or saying thanks for messages posted on his wall. He was given a slate of “stock responses” to choose from when responding to fans, and he wasn’t allowed to post any content or information about the bookstores or company news. If fans had questions – like why a particular book signing session had been canceled – Bernie wasn’t allowed to answer for the company unless the response was cleared by corporate.

Uh oh. (To add a few complicating factors, Bernie’s handler did some research with Google Alerts and Technorati and some other free tools to hear what customers were saying about the company across the rest of the web. There were lots of fans, but some complaints too about store closings and the discontinuation of some products and services, and no one was yet listening or responding).

Bernie’s handler went back to the corporate team, and explained that it was difficult to be authentic and timely in response to friends and fans when each and every response was meted out and filtered. Likewise, she was concerned that the company was misunderstanding or at least selling themselves short on the use of some of these tools and mechanisms. After all, the Facebook page wasn’t well tied into Jerry’s blog at all, and there wasn’t a clear strategy for what, exactly, the team wanted out of it. Goals were numeric and measurable, sure, but it wasn’t at all clear how those growth numbers tied back to business goals, and there were no objectives outlined for more subjective metrics like customer engagement or sentiment.

The Solution

This is where the company did something really smart. They stepped back to reassess.

They decided that Bernie needed to get put on a shelf for a while until they better understood what they wanted out of his presence on their Facebook page. They decided to look once more at their goals for the growth of their bookstore chain, and how the social media tools could help them not only communicate with their customers, but better understand what they needed and wanted from their local bookstores. The consultant was willing to walk away from the project to allow the company to revisit their strategy, leaving the door open to work together again at a later time.

The point of my drawn-out story (which is true, by the by, with names changed) is to illustrate that it’s completely okay to backtrack. The smartest thing this company did was realize that they were getting ahead of themselves, and step backwards to figure out where they were really headed. They’ve already got some real positives in their favor – fans of their company out there talking, an engaged and eager CEO, a great product – so there’s tons of potential. But once they got out there, they realized the environment was different than they expected, and they chose to step back and take a closer look.

Credit is due, too, to the consultant working with them to raise the difficult questions in the first place and essentially work herself right out of a job.

Screwing up is part of the game. False starts will happen, and you’ll get ahead of yourself and realize that what you’re doing isn’t furthering your goals the right way. That’s completely okay. Have the courage to realize it and backtrack a bit to retool your efforts. Your business will be better for it in the long run.

Are you struggling with efforts and goals that seem to be working against each other? Is this story familiar to you? If you’re Jerry and the bookstore chain, would you have done the same thing? And do you think either the business or the consultant should have done something different? I’d love to hear your take.

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