I recently got a subscription to the Social Media Today blog, seeing as I am supposedly into all that stuff. I thought I was techy, but compared to these people? Not even close! And, I can’t even keep up with their posts - I try and look at it every day but I always have double-digit “unreads”. There’s something to be said for “less is more”… anyway I digress, as usual.
I did find a couple of posts I found really interesting. Here is the first one, by Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media, “Using Social Media as part of a Product Launch”. In it, he talks about how an author used social marketing tools to launch a book. (WHADITW mark 2 - take note!). From this, Jim extrapolated a few simple lessons:
“So what did Joseph do to kick-start his book sales using a social media marketing campaign? Here are the lessons:
1. He built personal credibility online, well before he wanted anything. (515 people, including me, follow him on Twitter.)
2. He used a wide variety of tools and unleashed them all at once.
3. He made it fun and made it feel like a big group activity even though he’s the sole beneficiary. (He is donating the affiliate fees today, which is nice, but honestly, this benefits only him.)
4. He didn’t pretend to be doing anything other than what he was doing.
5. He didn’t ask anything too hard–you’re just buying a book, which is likely to be pretty decent.”
His lesson #2 - use lots of tools all at once - seems pretty obvious, but I often find volunteers get really bogged down in how to promote their event/program/whatever through ordering mailing lists and mailing flyers. Which is expensive and not much ROI. So I always try to emphasize that there’s lots of other ways to get the word out, as appropriate for each thing we’re promoting, and that we should be doing several methods at once (or at appropriate times).
But #4 and 5 made me stop and think - basically we have to be honest in our messages - “keep it real” so to speak - I do think people see through too much “promotion”.
And #3, making it seem like a big group activity - this definitely works! This has always been my crude philosophy, that if we look like we are a big Center doing lots of interesting things, we eventually will be. Because we are doing lots of interesting things, and “big” is relative…!
