Social media personal trainers

A colleague of mine recently said her New Year’s resolution is to blog, blog, blog.

She’s a busy executive, with little time to spare, and always a hundred other things competing for her attention. But she also knows that active participation in the social media sphere — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — is increasingly vital to one’s influence. It’s valuable to one’s employer, who needs genuine personalities as emissaries in the social web landscape, and it’s also valuable for one’s personal brand.

So getting more involved in social media — and maintaining a consistent presence there — sounds like a great New Year’s resolution.

But how to best live up to it? To make sure you don’t get derailed by the first competing priority?

With more mundane New Year’s resolutions, such as exercising more and getting in better shape, a pragmatic solution is to hire a personal trainer. By paying money for a professional’s time and making a commitment to work with them on a regularly scheduled basis, you significantly increase the odds that you’ll stick with the program and reach your goal.

Is there an analogous role for a social media personal trainer?

Quite possibly. (Actually, there’s probably a number of new media PR firms that are charging for this very service now, even if they don’t call it that.) Think about how a social media personal trainer might help:

• Help get you set up on the right platforms and venues, show you how to use them.
• Teach you the rules of engagement, etiquette, and lingo of different venues.
• Put together a scheduled regimen of blogging, Tweeting, etc. — and ping you on it.
• Serve as a proactive sounding board for brainstorming new ideas.
• Push you to write better and think more creatively on subjects.
• Alert you to interesting posts and discussions that you may want to join or riff on.
• Introduce you — or help you introduce yourself — to like-minded people.
• Keep you up-to-date with the latest tools, widgets, browser plug-ins, etc.

Could really help tone your social media muscles.

Would it make sense for someone to be a social media personal trainer?

Modeling this out, hypothetically, a trainer might spend 1-3 hours per week with 10-25 clients, at rates ranging from, say $40/hour to $100/hour or more for elite trainers. (There would be higher outliers, of course: how much would you pay Chris Brogan for 3 months of social media personal trianing?) That’s anywhere from $1,600/month to $10,000/month or more for doing a job you love, bringing tremendous value to the New Marketing world. Not bad.

As marketing evolves, and old media careers fade away, new and interesting new media career arise. This sure seems like one of them to me.

Best wishes to you for your resolutions in 2009!

P.S. In searching for “social media personal trainer”, I found this great post by David Brim on Five Ways Social Media is Like Working Out.