One of my favorite business owners and speakers, Marcus Sheridan wrote a fantastic post about Stan Smith’s concept of social guilt. What I absolutely loved about his take on social guilt was his focus on profitability. The core message is this:
If your you’re letting being social (e.g. jumping on every social platform) trump you’re being profitable, you’re missing the point of being in business (and won’t be in business very long).
Being social is meant to grow your business, your impact and your profitability. It’s not about being social to be social. That’s a time waster, not to mention a potential guilty inducer.
So how can you avoid social guilt in a proven, strategic way? Glad you asked.With my clients, I use deceptively simple 3 stage approach.. The approach is meant to limit social guilt and squirrel syndrome (I’ll explain more on squirrel syndrome later). The approach is simple and comes from Unmarketing author and super awesome sauce dude Scott Stratten:
- STEP 1: Get traction. Choose 1 platform, start mastering how it works, integrate it into your organizational workflow, start connecting with key accounts. You start to build a tribe and following. Most unsuccessful businesses skip this step and jump right to step 3 (which is why they are unsuccessful). This takes time, just like building real, quality relationships takes time.
- STEP 2: Build Momentum. Now that you have traction, grow your reach with the platform. You maintain the traction you’ve created and deepen the value you provide within your chosen a platform.
- STEP 3. Expansion. Now that you have a tool mastered and helping drive profits, you strategically expand to another high value platform or tool.
I often tell my clients I sell crock-pots not microwaves. Yes, the process is a bit slower, but in the long-run it’s works much, much better than the quick microwave method. Put it to work and it WILL help you be profitable and be guilt-free 
