December Connections video: Nothing beats an old-fashioned conversation

During the holiday season, our thoughts often turn to connection with the people we care about most.

What I’ve found is that online content like articles and social media updates are great for answering broad questions — but nothing beats a good, old-fashioned conversation for getting to the heart of a unique challenge.

It’s always been important to me to connect with you one-on-one, to have the opportunity to have those types of authentic conversations and be able to answer your questions. And in 2023, that’s where my focus will be.

In today’s video,  I talk more about why we’ll be spending more time on “old school” connections and conversations in the upcoming year, and less on producing content.

I want to encourage you to reach out directly whenever you have a question, want to talk through a challenge, or you just want to say hello. I value my relationship with you, and I love these conversations!

Transcription:

Hi, Erin Koss, CEO at Syte Consulting Group with you here today. It iis almost the end of the year. Frankly, I can’t believe it. We’re heading into the Christmas holidays here shortly, and I just wanted to take a minute and express my deep gratitude for those of you that have engaged with us all year. Whether it’s in our Connection videos or in the content that we’ve shared with you via various social outlets, it’s really important to us what we put out there lands well and resonates for the people that we care about.

It seems that has been the case and so I want to just thank you for engaging with us in that way. I also want to share with you a little bit of a pivot we’re going to take going into 2023. One of the things that we have found really fascinating about social media over the last couple of years on the business front and I know we see this even in our personal lives is that we spend a lot of time and energy to create content, respond, and try to stay connected in that way. We find that it can be quite a challenge!

It’s hard because there’s so many people we want to connect with on different levels and we try to do that. We try to extend our reach, if you will, or extend our capacity by doing that in social media. There’s also probably a million other reasons people do it right. But the thing that we have started to find is that I think sometimes it’s easy to spend our time and energy in all of the social media places and not as much time with the old school ones.

One connection is a phone call, or it could be an email or a text. Sometimes maybe as kind of an in-between version, but a phone call, a coffee, or even a zoom call to get that in-person touch that I think we have in many ways lost in some areas. Of course, the downside is the nature of social media. The benefit of social media and the content that we provide both personally and professionally, is that it does extend our capacity to reach out and connect with people that we care about. These are people that are both important to developing our business as well as developing our personal relationships. In choosing possibly not to do that version right, we are potentially limiting our capacity. Over the last three years, I guess the thing I want to share is we’ve spent a fair amount of time on social platforms building our brand and building content and extending our messaging in a new capacity.

I’ll speak at least for the business front at this point, and we’re going to try a little different approach in 2023. I want to share that with you because I hope you’ll engage with me in that way as well. So while at one level. I recognize that it diminishes my own and our team’s capacity to engage, we are going to do an experiment next year. This will include less social content production, less marketing, if you will, in that way, and bias toward more one-on-one outreach and connection.

It’s a little scary in a way to do that because we do recognize the capacity decrease that just comes from that. But we also recognize that we’ve been at this long enough that people who really need us to engage and connect with us from a pure business perspective and need the things that we offer know how to find us at this point. They know where to find us. They typically find us through work we’ve done for people they know or others, refer them to us, or they find us by searching for us to connect in that way. This is all to say that we’re trying this kind of scary experiment.

We’re going to go old school next year and really spend more of our time and effort with personal outreach and connection. My ask of you and those of you who want to connect and be part of that ecosystem with us, do that when you need us, reach out. Holler. Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone or send me an email that says that you need to engage in this way and asking if we can hop on a call.

We will respond and so we’re going to try this and call it “The Marketing Experiment of 2023”. As I share that with you, I want to just reiterate how grateful we are for the engagement and connection that you have made with us over the last couple of years. I know that many of you have clicked through and engaged with the content that we’ve provided and so I want to thank you for that.

I also want to encourage you to reach out to us directly when you need us next year or even just to say hello. Your relationship is important to us. And the other thing I guess I would say is where there’s opportunities to think about how you might do that personally and professionally as well. What would that look like for you? I guess I’ll speak for me, of course, I think some of the reason we’re doing this is that’s a bit of an edge for me.

I think it’s easy when we own and run a business and even in our personal lives with Facebook and Instagram type of platforms to click, click, click, click instead of really thinking about those intentions and being intentional in our relationships. That’s an edge for me after years and years of doing this, I think that that’s something that I really want to push myself to do is to really prioritize personal intentional connection in that way. I’d be curious to hear what your take on that is for yourself and for your business as you move into 2023. I certainly am so excited for this experiment on our end.

I’m excited to hear from you and how it may play out on your end as well. With that, I thank you for a wonderful and successful partnership and collaboration in 2022 together and look forward to doing the same in 2023. With that,  much love and happy holidays and we’ll talk soon.

Take care.