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Social Media Presence – Is there an order?

Maya — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:07:07 +0000

Social Media is all about conversation and listening really.

While blogs, twitter, facebook, flick and all form media, the conversation and listening are what make the various forms of media “social”.

Which brings us to a few first things to think about while creating a consistent social presence -
1. what is my goal? Why do I want a presence online?

Once you have an answer to 1, you will have an answer to the next few questions -

2. What do I want to listen for? (words, topics, terms )
3. Who do I want to converse with ? (people, communities)

And once you know the answers to 1, 2 and 3, you can actually start with creating a strategy and mapping out tactics to reach the goals. And that will involve -

4. What platforms do I want to create a presence on ? (where is my community? my consumers?)
5. How will I tie them up?

And finally, once all the above questions are answered, you might be able to finally answer -

6. How do I monetize?
7. How do all of these result in true $? The ROI ?

The order of these questions is really important. Focus on one before the other and you will have it all mixed up.

Thoughts??

Posted via web from thinkmaya’s posterous

Twee-shUp (like Mashup) with Whrrl : Conversation 3.0 Panel at MRMSeattle

Maya — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:52:12 +0000

Attended a super cool and fun panel at MRMSeattle .

It consisted of Brandon Pierce from Facebook, Josh Mattison from Federated Media, Torrey Lincoln from LinkedIn and Wade Rockett from Weber Shandwick. HollyBrown from MRM did a great job with the event. Here is a quick recap of the event and my takeaways –

First a little story about my experiment here – Twitter is many things to me,. Most of all, it is a storytelling tool and a note-taking tool. I LOVE tweeting valuable notes at events I attend because it leads to such awesome conversations with people. However, I also figured that I need to capture these on my blog so they could live longer – and live in context.

SO, I am trying this little experiment – Taking pictures of my Tweets on my Iphone and compiling it into a Whrrl Story. Then, including it on my blog for anyone to see if they like. Let me know what you think about it. I will call them Twee-shups

You can look a the tweet stream above for notes and comments, but some takeaways –

1. Facebook is great to get conversations going WITH brands. And for brands to watch sentiments of people (fan pages).

2. Combination of Ads + fan pages can be a very effective but low cost strategy for marketing brands on twitter. We heard the story of a small camping company that saw a LOT of success.

3. Josh from Federated Media talked about Federated being both a publishing company and a media company. He talked about how you can have sponsored conversations on blogs versus just a product review. As in, if you have to promote you vacuum cleaner, sponsor a conversation on cleaning. This, he said, is far more effective in creating a continued conversation about your product and not just blog mentions.

4.Terry from Linked In said “linkedin is really on to something”. I had not really thought about Linkedin a lot, but the growth they have seen in the past few months has been amazing – 1 million accounts added every 17 days + , 25 M searches per week. He said they adding a lot more conversational tools and ads on Linkedin are a lot more targeted due to how much Linkedin “knows” about you.

5. Social Media Strategy HAS to
- be cohesive
- involve the longer term
- has to be supported by the internal org structure
- has to fit the landscape ( as in break the silos inside organizations)

6. There is a lot you can do with very little money. Get creative with youtube promotions, iphone applications for events and so on. But be sure to define your goal first.

7. Pay per post model does NOT work.

Everything the panel was saying alluded to the fact that the people you enlist the help of online to market your brand have to be an extension of your brand. They really have to be “brand ambassadors”.
Influencers influence only when they are genuine and can sustain an ongoing conversation about a brand. They influence when they can make a brand a part of their story in creative ways.

Choosing and finding your influencer is really hard. But well worth it.
All social media platforms are different. If you are present on them, you better engage. If not, just stay out of the platform. Not engaging is worse that not existing.

New Geekdance post format – A video a day!

Maya — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:26:53 +0000

Starting next week, I will be posting one video a day – A daily dance, a quick step – call it what you may …

I really have so much going on in my life, but I still want to capture and share what I am learning. I cannot afford to write for hours together. I am not ready to give it up completely though, for the learning and the journey is a critical part of what I am doing.

Let me know what you think. The videos will not be more than a couple of minutes long – meant to capture ONE main idea. I will write a accompanying text as well, so you can watch the video or not – totally upto you!

Everything in my life is in beta – ALL the time. SO I will play with this format, change it around, fix it, twist it and so on. Feel free to send suggestions my way!

And thanks a LOT for reading
photo credit: Patricia Figueira