I attend a lot of conferences on franchising and marketing. The hot topic the past few years has, of course, been “social media.” As people my generation and older talked about “this social media thing”, it was clear we had no idea how to actually use it.

We were told we need a “social marketing strategy” and that we should hire a young person who “lives in this stuff” to manage it. But, we were reminded that the young person can’t be the voice of the company – the voice has to come from the top it. No one really knew what to do.

At last month’s Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference in San Francisco, it suddenly seemed practical to me that those of us who don’t normally socialize online could market through social media.

A keynote presenter simply said “socialize what you are already doing.”

We don’t need a social media strategy (thank goodness because we don’t know what a good one looks like)! We simply need to talk to our customers about the stuff we already do, know and love. I suppose that’s what the young people are doing.

A couple of weeks before that presentation at I was at a franchise hotel brand’s convention. The franchise leadership was consistently pushing franchisees to do one simple thing – blog about events and attractions in their area. They had some incredible examples of hotels that did it appearing at the top of meaningful natural search engines.

The local hotels already ran paid advertisements leading up to local events like balloon festivals. And, they included pictures of local attractions in their brochures. By quickly and doing the same thing on a blog they were simply “socializing what they were already doing.” I didn’t realize at the time that they were executing a social media strategy – it seemed too simple.