27
2012
Picking your battles: A social media fairytale
An article by 
In the early days, it was easy for Entrepreneur to visit all the bars in town. He would have a beer and spare some time with you to talk about you or some interests you had in common. You’d ask what he was up to and might have been interested in what he was offering to the market. However, the city has been growing and instead of being able to have a beer in every bar, he is struggling to even show his face in most establishments. Every evening he would run in and shout: “I have just received the new product, it’s great!”, or: “Would you use our new solar panels!?”.
When he remains coming in and stating random comments, you get annoyed that he is always talking about himself and start disliking Entrepreneur. You look to your friends and, without needing to say anything, you continue your conversation. You ignore Entrepreneur, although he is trying to do his best to get in touch with you, since he interrupts your conversation.
Then Entrepreneur realises that people are starting to dislike him. He doesn’t understand, Is he not spending all that time to get in touch and connect to people? He decides it is time for a different approach. Instead, he would organise a party himself.
One of your friends is attending the party and asks if you would care to join. You decide to come along and at the party Entrepreneur welcomes everybody with a small speech, gives away some interesting facts and his opinion about the current energy situation. You find out you share a similar taste in music and Entrepreneur has invited your favourite DJ.
“Isn’t Entrepreneur awesome”, you state to your friends. The DJ rocks and I totally agree on his opinion about the greenhouse effect. Shall we go to his party again next time? Maybe it would be cool to have a look at those solar panels he is offering?
Related Posts
Just do it!
How do you cope with social media?
Do not play Bingo with social media
Social media steps in the real world
About the Author: Youri van Dijk
I am a student “Entrepreneurship and SME Management” at Maastricht University with personal interests in design, technology and the development of the internet. Within my studies I have recently set-up the tea company Asana and noticed that pursuing a social media strategy is not as easy as it sometimes seems. Therefore I’m combining my interests in this blog, where I document my search for the right way to use social media as an entrepreneur.
After the headline, I expected something slightly different: A description of the problem that there is many entrepreneurship-related events now which are not worthwhile for entrepreneurs, eventhough maybe interesting or entertaining for others.
Interesting comment, could you give some examples of these events?
I don’t want to offend any particular event(-organizer), but generally there are two general types of Entrepreneurship-related events:
1. “Frontal education”-like settings. You listen to some (hopefully) great entrepreneurs and try to get inspired and learn something.
2. More egalitarian, networking-focused events. There are no people who stand out from the crowd dramatically. You talk to eachother, get and give feedback etc..
The problem is that a) some organizers do not know what kind of event their event should be and/or b) that participants come with the wrong expectations.
In that case you mean
1. A Ted(x) event, or, maybe closer to us, the Maastricht Entrepreneurship week or round table?
2. Networking during a MBD or for example the entrepreneurship drink from last week?
How would you transfer those events to social media?
[...] Post navigation ← Previous [...]