Social media isn’t a magic wand
We need to get started on Facebook, start tweeting about our business, stick social media icons on our pages, get social and maybe that will save our business. Um, no. Social media will not save your business. It might enhance it, connect you with others in your industry, and provide some leads. Instead of waiting for the magic to make everything better, take a hard and very real look at where the problem spots are and fix them.
Walmart and The Art of Being Human
As a member of the social media community, I often echo Chris Brogan‘s advice of be human. My experience has been that for the most part people are human almost always. When you hear corporate names like Walmart, you might not think of warm, human communication. Perhaps after reading this you’ll reconsider. This afternoon my mom called to tell me that the ice storm dumped 2-3 inches of ice in the area, downing over 3000 electrical poles and leaving a good majority of Arkansas without power. This includes several counties in Northeast Arkansas’ homes, stores, schools and businesses. I quickly covered the basics with her, my family has food, water and gas heat. Trees are[.....]
Hear me on the Roundtable Podcast!
Sarah Wurrey invited me to be a panelist on the Roundtable Podcast with her and her co-host (and new host) Jen Zingsheim. On the podcast we talked about socnet overload, social media and philanthropy, and measurement tools. You can listen to it here. Afterward I was thinking about social networking and overload and we all have that problem. We’re focused on email and bacn and things that *should* be done but when it gets so overwhelming you don’t know where to start, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing. We’re responsible for creating our own filters and we need to make sure that we don’t have a filter problem. If you do, find a way[.....]
Boston Blog Marketing Meetup
I’ve started a Meetup.com group for Boston area marketers and small businesses to learn about outreach to bloggers. The first meeting will be on October 27th at 7 PM over at Andala Coffee House in the downstairs room. I’ve asked Todd Van Hoosear to speak for about 20 minutes on the topic of how to market and outreach influential bloggers. Then will open the floor to a discussion and forum for folks to get advice marketing techniques. I’ve been looking for a way to help people around the Boston area for a while and in the future will have more advanced topics for pursual but for now I thought this would be a good introduction[.....]
Remarkable Social Media
Earlier today I blogged at Smart Mobs about the RNC protests and the use of social media to back protesters and activists up and protect them if there were arrests made. This is so amazing that I just had to share it with my readers as well. The results of Coldsnap Legal Collective and Uptake were remarkable. Because of all the eyes and ears on the ground, “Nothing that law enforcement did happened in secret, and ACLU lawyers and other observers were able to be quickly alerted to anything that was happening.” This is a departure of the past where the cameras were pushed away or blocked to protect the government and their actions. The[.....]
