Is it possible to have a strategy on the unfolding path? If not, what the hell was I doing yesterday most of which was spent finding Twitter followers.
It all started with an email headed “How I grew my Twitter audience to 40k+ real followers”. I read it and it looked fairly simple. It only required 5 minutes if I used a particular tool or an hour if I did it by hand.
By the time I went to bed I’d been at it all day, on and off, and had only completed 2 thirds of the work. Mind you, I did enjoy skimming through people’s profiles and reading the occasional tweet, which were not part of the plan!
Thinking about it . . . the seed was probably sown before I even received the email. I’d been on a Skype call where I was lamenting my lack of audience and decided I was trying too hard not to piss people off by “bothering” them and needed to take more risks in that direction.
Back to Twitter . . . as the day progressed the usual judgmental voices arrived telling me I was wasting my time, asking me what I thought I was doing etc. And there was this sneakily clever one who “knows” stuff about marketing and social media and kept reminding me that Twitter was all well and good but only if it was part of an overall strategy. What was I planning on tweeting to these followers and, more to the point, when? What’s the point in having followers if you don’t know what you’re going to communicate with them and to what end?
But that’s the point of the unfolding path isn’t it? We don’t know. We’re just taking the next step.
It seems it’s easier to understand this when I’m thinking of goals and plans and big things but not so obvious when it’s itty bitty details.
If the path of my life is unfolding, then so is each day, each minute, each second. If those seconds are spent on Twitter, is that not an unfolding too?
So is strategy just another direction – I have an idea of where I might go with this and then I let it unfold taking the next step that presents itself? Or is strategy a big, fat sham?
The right way to do business/social media/marketing is a pretty entrenched concept. The voices scream loudly. I suppose the only way to find out is to keep taking the steps.
14 of 366 book bits