I also agree with you re the first point. It’s similar to one of the reasons why I stress to accountants that twitter is not a necessity for them. Most of them are focused on providing their services within a defined territorial area.

Increasing awareness of their services across a wider area is unlikely to generate much of value to them and could simply serve to distract them. I know one very active accountant twitterer who gets tweets and enquiries from all over the place but has barely generated any fees from his many thousands of twitter followers.

If I may add a 6th category:
Your target audience is not involved in social media. This isn’t quite the same as your point 2. These people aren’t blocked from accessing social media, they just haven’t seen any compelling reason to experiment or commit to social media. Now, I know that one may derive referrals to such people through their friends and associates who are involved in social media. But that’s more of a long shot.

I absolutely accept that if that one man band could suddenly start to service many times more customers then there is value – but in that case they wouldn’t fall into the category of point one. They would actually be more like a real business in its start-up phase rather than being a typical one man band. In other words ready to scale.

However the real cost of executing a social initiative would also apply to a one man band – so I would question the ROI.

Interesting debate – thanks for contributing.

Ed

Within #1 though, I think that it would be a great example of how to spread awareness. Even if you have a small targeted audience or customer base, there is probably a larger audience out there (than 50). Face-to-face meetings may be the core touch-points, but I would also offer a small online community for your customers to interact.

Mike