What’s everyone’s favorite four letter word beginning with “F?”

No, not that one! I mean the one you can say in polite company. Right, FREE. Everyone loves free.

Last night I was a panelist on a presentation about social media. The audience ran the range from fairly experienced to so-new-someone-didn’t-even-know-the-right-way-to-pronounce-Twitter.

What all three of the panelists stressed repeatedly was that social media is free. Even the tools to manage social media are, by and large, free. Some mobile apps have a cost, but it’s usually not more than a few dollars, and there are plenty of good free apps if you want to go that way.

Free is good. Social media levels the playing field, as one of the panelists, marketing expert @CadenceMarket, pointed out. It used to be that only large companies with huge marketing budgets could get national or international exposure and name recognition. With effective use of social media, small companies with very limited marketing budgets can get that kind of recognition too. And I’m very excited about the possibilities.

But free has a downside, as social media evangelist (cool title!) @BizIncubation discussed. When you don’t have any money invested into something, there is a temptation to do it for a while until the new and shiny rubs off and then quit and do something else.

Conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for. Social media is the same. The tools are available. They are free. You don’t pay anything for them in cash. What you do pay for them is time. And in social media, you get from it in direct proportion to the time and effort you put into it.

How do you make time for social media? Check out the above link to one of my blog posts on the subject.

Please don’t be fooled. Free is good. Free gets you into the room. But good work will take you where you want to go.

Where do you want to go? Will social media help you get there? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: social media, time management

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 8:17 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.