What you save in dollars you spend in time

For my headline to be complete it should read, “What you save in dollars you spend in time because, as you probably know, time is money.” In other words, saving dollars doesn’t always save dollars.

I’m thinking about businesses and web sites and social media. The other night I was at an event, talking to a number of people, many of them business people, and we talked a bit about business, marketing and the various tools available to leverage on the Internet.

I was talking to one guy, a small businessman, and said to him that what I usually tell businesses is that if they’re not sure what the tools are and how to use them, it’s best not to jump in. You should have a specific reason for using them and a good idea of how to go about using them so they’re effective. The biggest problem that I’ve seen is that the tools appear to have all kinds of potential – and they do have loads of potential – but what most people don’t see is the real cost, which is time.

Creating a web site and putting it in place, or getting accounts on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, is relatively easy and there is an almost zero dollar investment – it seems. But maintaining these things is hard. And it involves time, which usually ends up as a cost.

Imagine business cards for example. You get one designed and spend a bit of time figuring out exactly what information you want on them and what message you want them to communicate. And you’ve hired a company to help you with the design, information, and message aspects, and to produce the cards. And they charge you something for all this and that is an expense.

Then you come across a tool that allows you to do all this yourself with almost no cost, and you do so, and you save a bunch of money and that looks good on the books. But …

The problem is, for the card to have value, for it to be effective, you have to rewrite it every week because now you’re on the Internet. And you can’t just rewrite it with anything. You have to think through what it says, each week, and in many cases, spend some time doing a bit of research to ensure what it says is accurate. And you have to present the information in a way that prompts people to read what the card says, not just toss it aside without a look.

In other words, every week (maybe more often, maybe less), you have to spend time on it in order for it to be effective and justify its existence and your effort. Nothing works online the same way it does in the tactile world. That’s why many ads fail online.

In my experience most businesses, especially small businesses, don’t have that time. Even if they do, they don’t have the writing expertise or the social conversation skills to do it well enough to make it work and become a valuable marketing tool.

What they end up with is some reduced marketing and other expenses and some crossed-fingers as they hope it works, which it seldom does without a specific focus on maintenance. People come once, might even like what they see, but without a reason for coming back you won’t see them again.

Maintenance is critical to making any of these things work and maintenance means time and that means money. If you do it yourself, it’s whatever your time is worth to you – how much an hour? It’s also what you don’t do – “If instead of doing this I was doing that, I’d generate …” If you spend an hour of your time and that hour is worth $50 and, while you do it you are not doing something that would pull in $75, you’re losing $25. And that’s a cost. Lost revenue. It might not show up on the books that way, but that’s what it is.

You could pay someone to do it for you – in many cases, the best option. But in trying to keep costs down you go with cheap, that may be what you get and end up being how you’re represented – meaning your brand feels the impact. Regardless of the cost, make sure whoever is doing the maintenance knows what they are doing and are very good at it.

Rumours to the contrary, the web is not a marvel where a storefront can be put in place without a thought and social media tools aren’t a magic pill to reach the world with the message about your product or service … and never give either, your site or your social tools, another thought. They have to be maintained, smartly. They require time and effort in order to work.

Sometimes the desperate need to reduce costs bamboozles us into believing in the pixie dust of the Internet. But the Internet, like life, keeps teaching the same lesson: ain’t nothing free, ain’t no easy routes to financial Valhalla, work and only work makes things work.