So my husband, Paul, has lost 5-10 pounds over the past year or so. It’s happened gradually and he attributes it not to a diet, but rather, to a shift in his food selection that he refers to as “replacement.” He’s not eating less food, just replacing many of the refined carbohydrates he was eating with unsaturated fats and protein, e.g. rather reaching for a cookie, he’ll grab a handful of almonds; instead of a sandwich, he’ll have a salad with double turkey. Believe it or not, Paul’s concept of replacement is a relevant lesson for organizations and individuals dipping their toes into the sea of social media.
I had the pleasure of grabbing coffee (no, no muffin or croissant with it) this morning with long-time contact and SVP at Fleishman-Hillard Digital, Dan Horowitz. Conversation flowed from FH Digital’s terrific That Guy website and campaign for military health client Tricare, to the work that I do with DoD’s New Media Directorate, to the challenge of finding the time to actively maintaining a social media presence. Dan explained that one of the biggest challenges in working with clients is getting them to understand that to do some of the social media “stuff,” they have to stop doing some of the traditional “stuff”: replacement.
Whether you are an individual or are reading this in your role with a corporation, organization or government agency, you can’t keep doing what you were doing and also fully participate in the world of social media. There is not enough time. Social media needs to replace a portion of your old media time and resources.
Even if there were a hypothetical situation in which you actually had unlimited time and resources, the concept of replacement still holds true because the relationships that you will build and maintain through social media makes some portion of your old outreach, PR, customer care and other communications functions, obsolete. This means that they need to be replaced. Replacement can help you/your organization, too, to become leaner by focusing on what’s really valuable and usable rather than on the empty calories of some old communications.
