Blue Gypsy Inc. Blog: Jack of All Trades, Expert of None

Jack of All Trades, Expert of None - Part 1

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 |

I’m trying to learn more about Social Media to create a plan to incorporate it into my job as an online sales consultant. Actually I want to strike out on my own and consult to businesses with my skills and experience in relationship building through internet sales. In my wanderings I’ve found that Social Media is the newest latest buzz word out there and businesses are going crazy over how to get some ROI on Social Media. In the past I’ve always been a bit slow to embrace change.

When it comes to technology I used to bury my head in the sand and say, “just give me a butter churn and an oil lamp.” and hoped maybe it would all go away. After all, I traveled around the world for 10 years first as backpacker and would-be writer and photographer, and later as a sailboat captain and dive instructor with only a Pentax K1000 (the battery only powered the light meter), slide film and a journal. I was probably one of the last people in the world to get a computer or cell phone and I did this reluctantly. I only traded my manual camera in for a digital camera this past year because developing, scanning and, God forbid, printing slide film became so prohibitively expensive.

Yes I fancied myself a traveler, a sailor, a dive instructor, a photographer and a would-be writer. I still have the first 107 pages of my travel book on my laptop and if it were a hand written chronology it would have 3 years of dust collected upon its cover. Instead it sits nicely and neatly in some file on my laptop. Technology I finally embraced. As things sometimes happen, an odd turn of events has had me in a career as an internet sales consultant for the past 2 years creating relationships, not through social media, but strictly through email relationships selling new homes for a large local builder. And I’m pretty darn good at it generating 30% of sales last year.

As of late I realize that, if I want to strike out on my own as a consultant, I better embrace technology, get my head out of the sand and understand the wave of social media and all these new and different tools or I will be left in the dust… with my oil lamp and my butter churn. (people don’t even know what those things are for any more) If I want to start my own internet sales consulting business, I might even have to be an “expert” at social media.

But how does one become an expert?