Tag Archives: Community

Ask your followers for favors: spend your social media equity fast and often

shepherd sheep1 Ask your followers for favors: spend your social media equity fast and often

While I don’t believe that the richness of the online world can be reduced to a real estate analogy, that’s what I’m going with in order to explain the way humans work, especially in concert and in community.

If you only give to the people and the community around you and never ask for help or for favors, people might still like you but they’ll never feel the sort of intimacy and humanity needed to really connect with you in a profound way. Instead of just building up brand equity by being the prettiest, smartest, most athletic or most altruistic person in the room, try asking for help; for favors.

Open the window to your daily challenges and processes. Admit that you’re a company or organization that needs to make money in order to thrive. In the end, people don’t enjoy being a sheep in a flock with you as a shepherd so much as they prefer to be a member of your community. The members of a community take care of each other — and that’s not just you and your brand taking care of your community (remember, they’re not your flock), it’s also about your community sustaining you as well. Stop trying to be perfect and try being human.

Spend equity in small doses to resonate with your community

pledge Ask your followers for favors: spend your social media equity fast and often

Don’t just keep on building up brand equity and good faith online ad infinitum — spend it as fast as you make it. Social media is a series of now, now, now, just like real relationships. Saving up all that equity for periodical grandiose gifts is less appealing to your (virtual online) community than is just being there. It’s sort of like being a good parent: It’s better to be home every night at 5 and home on the weekends than it is to be on the road all year or away at the office for your 18-hour-days, only to buy us a car on our birthday.

As the bread winner, you don’t need to buy our love. We’ve chosen to be here, but we can also choose to leave if we feel like were being ignored, abandoned, or taken for granted. Don’t ever ignore us just because you already believe you have our vote.

The biggest mistake I see when it comes to social media engagement is that folks tend to be afraid to spend any of the goodwill built up over time

The biggest mistake I see on a daily basis when it comes to some of the best social media engagement strategies is that folks tend to be afraid to spend any of the goodwill — the equity — that’s built up over time.

To return to the real estate theme, too many of the best social media teams and social media-engaged brands spend all of their time doing home improvement and not enough time reaping the benefits of that selfless improvement in the form of spending some of that equity.

You’re allowed to market your tenants! Don’t be afraid of your followers and friends online. They’re not only fair weather friends and they’re not just crashing there because it’s free and because you’re generous and give them free things. They’re there because they have, for some reason, imprinted on you and your brand. They’re not there because you tricked them into liking or following you, but because they arrived at your door looking for you. You were either their intended destination or you’re where they ended up for whatever reason — but here they are.

Accrued equity cannot be saved for the long term

Yes, the reason they may well be there now is because you’ve been ardently building a safe, generous, happy, fun, informational, educational, responsive, and creative space for them. Bravo. That said, you are running a business and, at the end of the day, you’re entitled to spend some or all of the equity accrued over time on converting, cross-promoting, and up-selling your fans.

You can’t save social media equity — you can only build it and spend it.

Back in my late 20s and early 30s, I used to hold my most impressive and useful acquaintances in reserve. I must have thought that connection was akin to finding a genie in a bottle. With only three wishes, I had better keep them bottled up until the time was right and I needed a get out of jail free card. But it never worked that way. My former business partner and best friend, Mark Harrison, told me something important (and I always appreciated how he would remediate for me simple truths about friendships and relationships that I hadn’t seemed to have picked up in the course of my own life-discovery):

The best way to build intimacy with a new acquaintance, or to get even closer to the friends you have, is to ask for favors; to ask for help. Being needed by someone else is part of it, of course, but the more interesting psychology of it all is that asking someone else for a favor is like a gift to the other person: It gives them the opportunity to do something for you. In our society, too few people ask each other for favors or for help and strangely, helping other people you like generally makes us happy and feel connected.

Let people see the real you

I had another quirk, too: I used to only allow other people to see me and enter my world when I was prepared and ready, with all my armor on. What I learned is that real intimacy and connection happened between people who allow their flaws to show, who have an opportunity to see behind the bravado of game day. Just hanging out and doing nothing together is probably time more valuably spent than the awkward elegance and banter around the table enjoyed at a dinner party.

What I learned over time — and have used to great effect time and time again — is that no matter how generous you are to your friends, followers, and Likers online and in real life; no matter how many of their problems you fix or good counsel you give; no matter how many favors you do for others or days you save from jumping up to help, support, or facilitate; true intimacy and connection will elude you and your brand until you start revealing the face behind the make-up.

In other words, spend your equity early and often by allowing your friends and followers to know that you need something: more business, more customers, more revenue, more donations, a more successful capital campaign. NPR and PBS have this wired for sound.

They offer their members, listeners, and fans an abundance of riches throughout the year in the form of radio and TV programing — building equity out the wazoo — but then they go nuts and spend down a lot of that goodwill and equity by doing multiple days of fundraising in the form of a pledge drive. While this does burn a lot of the accrued goodwill, it also builds intimacy as well: NPR and PBS both throw their humanity at you in segments that unmask hosts, actors, special guests, reporters, and the like. You get to see them presumably without their prompter, you get to see them outside their formal job as entertainer, reporter, analyst, and show host.

dianerehm Ask your followers for favors: spend your social media equity fast and oftenIn the moments of the pledge drive, I discover how much these shows cost NPR affiliate WAMU 88.5 FM and PBS affiliate WETA in Washington, D.C. I discover how much of their money is private, public, and through member donations. I have an opportunity to listen to Diane Rehm (right) speak to Kojo Nnamdi and Ed Walker and Rob Bamberger and Rebecca Sheir — folks who never chat and pitch together on normal days — and each one of them are holding out a cup, asking for alms, from me.

It’s human, it’s open, it’s vulnerable, it’s a little pathetic, and it makes me love them a little bit more. Commercial broadcast television does this in the form of needing to create television programing compelling enough that you’ll forgive the 10 minutes-per-half-hour of commercials that are needed to make that programming viable.

What’s more, the Internet has proved time and time again that denizens of the Internet have a strong fear of falling in love and getting hurt. We have all invested in an online community or a favorite blog or social network only to have it disappear. When someone is shopping around for a community, they’re aware that they could be hurt again. Worse, their hundreds of hours of participation could disappear in the blink of an eye.

So, when a new prospect is sniffing around your brand page or blog or Tumblr or whatever, they ask two things: WIIFM and WIIFT: what’s in it for me and what’s in it for them. If the prospect can figure out why you’re being so nice and generous but can’t sort out your monetization strategy, your sales channel, your conversion process or your fundraising plan, you might set off the “it’s too good to be true” red flag.

Build a durable, loyal community

You can build a loyal community by spending your equity on letting every member of your community know that, for realsies, you need them as much — and more — than they need you. By showing way more than telling you’ll be on your way to building a community that is loyal to you, faithful through good times and bad, and who will have your back.

The best thing about creating a community like this is that it’s durable. And a durable community is what you need for it to be persistent over time. Durability is what superficial communities of purchased followers run by community managers who fancy themselves a social media brand shepherd and their followers to be their flock.

Unless you’re able to build the trust and mutual respect, you won’t really posses anything; only a follower count, maybe, but good luck on being able to activate these followers. Your message penetration, shares, comments and tweets will never be where they could be if you really spent the time to build a family.

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Are you social media agoraphobic?

To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia.

agoraphobia3 Are you social media agoraphobic?And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Continue reading →

The anachronistic social media agoraphobic

red velvet rope policy 300x212 The anachronistic social media agoraphobicTo follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia. And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Continue reading →

Choose talent over tech for your Social Media Marketing PR campaign

In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

hipsterComputer2 Choose talent over tech for your Social Media Marketing PR campaignWell, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

trans2 Choose talent over tech for your Social Media Marketing PR campaignSo, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

Too many people get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web or Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, ignoring the need for good writers and the best marketers.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Continue reading →

Social media marketing success demands talent over technology

In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

hipsterComputer Social media marketing success demands talent over technologyWell, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine  is amazing but content is king”

trans Social media marketing success demands talent over technologySo, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships.  Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing.  People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

Too many people get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web or Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, ignoring the need for good writers and the best marketers.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page.  Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer.  The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people.  Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Continue reading →