Kaitlin Maud

Most companies are horrible at social media. Even if they tell you their engagement numbers, show you their PowerPoint presentations, and use every buzzword in the book, the fact is they have no idea what they are doing. And that’s OK. The having-no-idea-what-they-are-doing part. Because no matter who tells you otherwise, no one knows what they are doing when it comes to using social media. Not now. It’s too new.

That’s because the key to being good at using social media to sell stuff is intuition. People in business don’t like to talk about this. They don’t understand intuition, they aren’t good at intuition, and they can’t quantify intuition. I mean, you go into a big meeting with a billion-dollar company in hopes of getting them to give you millions of dollars to manage their social media platforms, and your PowerPoint presentation in which you show them how you will do this consists of one page that says, “INTUITION,” in giant black letters? That is not going to work.

That doesn’t mean it’s not true, though, that the real — and, honestly, only — way your company will do well in the social media sphere is if you hire someone who intuitively gets it. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, but in other ways. For lack of a better way of putting it, I’ve been chasing traffic online for 10 years, and I’ve been working online for longer than that. I am a creative, but I have a keen understanding of marketing, and my years of experience trading in getting people to do things online — click, comment, engage — cannot be illustrated in a pie chart, represented in a graph, captured with statistics.

Of course, most companies can’t buy into that. They hire twenty-something kids who have been on Facebook since they were tweens to manage accounts, but they don’t take into account whether or not the kid has a feel for it, because you can’t put that on a resume. And that’s why so many companies suck at social media. Because they just don’t get it. And they’re too stupid to hire someone who does.