Earlier this week I read a blog post entitled “50 Of The Most Powerful And Influential Women In Social Media” by Lisa Weinberger. In her post, Lisa talks a lot about trying to get others in the online business community to use social media to help grow their business as well as the level of resistance she has received in doing so.

As Lisa puts it, “Social Media is very important and whenever I meet online business owners in person, I continually ‘preach’ to them that they MUST start getting involved in Social Media and they just laugh at me.”

This notion struck me since I’ve also encountered resistance in my attempts to spread the word about the benefits of social media. This made me wonder why many have such a hard time being proactive and exploring new avenues of growth for their businesses.

Over the past few months I have been speaking about social media primarily to professionals that have at least a small online presence. This target audience might be slightly different from Mrs. Weinberger’s, however I find it interesting that resistance seems to be a common response among either group.

Those who I spoke to a few months ago, before the current recession hit, as a group had some similar concerns. Many felt overworked as it was, working long hours to make money was important to them, but most felt that this left them with not enough time to spend with loved ones.

Back then a new venture like a social media campaign seemed like risk, which if it paid-off would be great. The downside however was if the experiment failed. Then they would have spent valuable time, which could have been spent with their family or on more traditional means of gaining clients, in vain.

I would say that this “risk” of time wasted was the biggest hindrance to getting people to experiment with social media. The current recession seems to have spilt this group in two, with half racing to try new means of attracting clients, while the other half becomes more tentative and less adventuresome.

For this second half there are less clients floating around and less money available to be made, and this makes it seem like there is less time than ever before. Any time wasted might mean losing business to competitors who are still using the tried-and-true methods of attracting clients. With these increased pressures some just can’t stand the idea of potentially losing market share to competitors if their time spent experimenting doesn’t bear fruit.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 7:05 am by Phil Weslow and is filed under Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.