This is starting to become a recurring theme of late. I pitch a social media project and spend the majority of the time explaining my vision and my passion for what the possibilities might be, and I get the blank stare:

Except this time, they nodded their head as I was speaking. So the whole time I’m thinking.. “I’m building momentum”, but something tells me I better ask the following question just to make sure.

You guys know what social media is right?

Before they could answer, I though to say, “Better yet I said, Raise your hand if you understood anything I just said.” Now this is a group of fairly young, hip execs. 1 CEO, 1 CMO, 2 VP’s and 3 sales and marketing people. I got nothing.  So I had to scramble. I said the 50,000 foot view of social media is that of a MySpace or Facebook. They all nodded. I tried going deeper but it was futile. I might have used the term SEO but now that i think back, there is no way they knew what that meant. I did get this question though:

Can you get us ranked #1 for __________ in the whole country?

Uhhhh.. no I cannot, unless I worked for Google, I think I mumbled that. At the end of the day I walked away with a project but it’s not going to involve any social media components. I guess that’s the upside. Here’s the moral.

I need to to do a couple of things going forward. Here’s what they are:

• I’m going to determine if social media even makes sense for the company I’m talking to.
• If it does, I’m going to work backwards with any company or individual I deal with or talk to, and show them examples of companies that do what they do and how they use social media successfully.
• I’m going to simplify my examples of social media and explain some tools that might make sense
• I’m going to show the sizzle of social media
• I’m going to show even more value and demonstrate the power of social media in regards to extending the conversation with their customers.

Now before you say I should have done this homework beforehand, perhaps I could have, but the homework I did do, was on what their business model was. And the potential it posessed for social media adoption.  My assumption was, “Every company has the potential” Maybe, maybe not. But as I head down this road even more, I’ll be able to determine if that is indeed possible.

You see, you have to understand, I’ve rolled out quite a few social media projects for my former company and it’s clients and their products, but now that I’m pitching the projects as well for my new company, all of a sudden it’s a whole different ballgame. One in which i was not completely prepared for.