not will smith

Taking back social media

So it is obviously going to be tough for me to blog every single day - especially when one considers i have mustache competitions to take part in at work that keep me out late. Nonetheless, I am definitely keeping this blog more active and that is in spirit with what i was trying to accomplish!

Last night’s mustache competition went well - got to meet some new people, and i scored pretty well with the crowd. I think it is safe to say I was a crowd favorite!

When I got home I started to think about work topics, specifically, social media and its use in marketing. While I should really make a post about this on social jump, my social news site i never update, its just easier to do here.

Social media, to me, is all about empowering folks (the public) to create their own content. Whether it is sharing photos, videos, audio, written content or simply ideas, social media = public + content. So many companies just think social media is about having a Twitter account and pushing out links to their followers, who if they are like me, by and large don’t read those updates anyway.

So when you sit down and consider social media, and its role in marketing, i think you need to set some goals. What should your campaign actually achieve? At the end of the day, 9 out of 10 times that goal is going to be to get folks to talk about you. So, why not avail yourself of sites like Twitter, or Facebook, or YouTube/Vimeo, and give people ideas and tools that they can use to do just that? Ask them for feedback, and keep a conversation going (PR) but instead of just asking for an email reply, have them post a video response to a question you have on YouTube.  Or actively solicit the best pictures from your customers of your product on Flickr.

To me, thats social media.