Vanilla: excellent ice cream, terrible social media
Social marketing is the most incredible opportunity for solopreneurs, and most of us are doing it badly, or not at all.
30 years ago, raising a profile was nearly impossible without institutional resources behind you. You had to be a high-flyer within a large firm, or an academic at a prestigious university in order to have your perspective sought out to appear in the media.
Otherwise, getting attention required advertisements, and ads cost lots and lots of money.
Today, the world of profile building is very, very different.
Large institutions are almost comically bad at social media because they’re so afraid of offending anyone, or of drawing the ‘wrong’ kind of attention to themselves. Their presence is almost universally generic, vanilla*, and boring.
Social media success is almost completely the domain of individuals, because we can have real opinions with specific relevance for the people we seek to serve.
We are unfettered by the need that large institutions have to avoid offending anyone, or expressing ideas that are too far outside the norm.
Or… we should be.
Because in practice, the mistake lots of solo pros make is caring too much about what you read in the comments.
Comments can be made by everyone, not just the people you seek to connect with. If we respond and react to all comments equally, it will tend to push you towards the middle, to make you more average. That's not how you build a brand.
As a general rule, you build your profile as much by making it clear who you disagree with, as much as who you do.
One of the most successful profile-building campaigns I’ve seen in recent years (and one that inspires me the most) is my friend Alicia McKay. Her feed is anything but vanilla. Her comment sections are chock-full of people who disagree with her… but those people are outnumbered by those who absolutely love what she says.
Importantly, however, Alicia is not controversial just for the sake of it. The ideas she shares and the principles she espouses are sincerely held. She simply has the courage to share what she really thinks, and weather the storms that inevitably arise when you do that in public.
If every fifth or every tenth comment on your stuff makes you go “uhhh, I’m not sure you get it, my guy”, then you’re probably doing it right.
If your comment sections are filled with nothing but people saying “I agree”, or “well said” or worse, nothing at all, I’d suggest you’re acting too much like an institution and avoiding offending anyone.
Please don’t make that mistake. You’re conceding possibly the most powerful tool a solopreneur has in today’s world.
*The use of the term ‘vanilla’ in this way is a slight against the absolutely incredible flavour that vanilla really is, by the way. Just because a flavour is so good as to be used in basically everything shouldn’t mean it becomes a euphemism for ‘boring’, in my opinion, but here we are.