JD Graffam’s Social Media Advice
- Social media does not have the potential to bring you a million visitors each day, (unless you have millions and millions of people using your product or service already).
- Social media will not drive your profitability. In fact, it will cost you money.
- Not everyone, or every company, should be on social media.
For social media to work, you have to understand those three things first. Once you’ve got those down, you can move on to what social media does and how to do it.
What Social Media Does
Social media is about about being social, meeting new people, and opening relationships that didn’t exist before.
- Social media helps you meet new people.
- It helps you talk to people who want to listen to you.
- It gives you opportunities to position yourself or your organization.
- And it helps you to listen better — everyone likes the friend who listens.
How To Do It
Social media only works if you work it. Like my dad taught me, if it doesn’t feel like work, it probably isn’t going to work.
- Pick someone who can own it; he or she needs your support to have the time required to do it right.
- Set a consistent publishing schedule so that you are showing up in folks’ streams enough, but not too much.
- When something timely pops up, don’t pay attention to the consistent publishing schedule — timeliness is the most important thing.
- Make the minority of your posts about your business or product — you’ll do much better if you post things that folks who might like your product or service are interested in, besides your product or service.
- Don’t be afraid to link to your own site, but don’t be a dork about it. Only when appropriate.
- Learn how to blend in — learn to talk like your audience (to the extent that it works with your brand voice, see next item).
- Have a voice — no one will remember you if you sound like everyone else.
- Don’t do what your competitors are doing. Be original.
- Have fun with it. Don’t be stuffy.
- If someone is upset with you online for a good reason, say you’re sorry, don’t let legalese into your stream.
- Ignore folks who are irate. They will shut up eventually. You have no obligation to respond unless you want to.
- Randomly reply to people who say interesting things, or who talk about you.
Caveat Emptor: My company, Simple Focus, is a user experience branding firm — we are not social media consultants, gurus, or experts. And while we do use social media every day for work and play, we don’t have any program in place for managing our streams. Instead, we have fun with it. It’s called social media for a reason — it’s about people. Use it that way, and you might even have a little fun yourself.
I should start a blog
I’m pretty sure it’s an important time for me to start a blog. In the past I’ve tried but it always came off stiff. I was writing for other people.
This time, I’m going to use a blog as a journal of sorts. I’ve got a lot of important things going on with my company I need to process. I won’t protect my posts, but neither will I try and promote the blog heavily. I’m not doing it to position myself competitively, but I’ve got no problem posting my trials and successes for others to learn from.
The trick, as with anything, will be to make a habit of it. I’ll be writing about my business mostly, not because it’s the most important thing in my life, but because it’s where I feel both in and out of my element the most. I also spend the majority of my life sleeping or working, and sleeping would be boring to blog about (though my new iHome app for my iPhone wants to make that possible by tweeting when I go to bed and when I wake up).
I imagine the next several posts will be about some major changes with my company. I need to check with my attorney on a couple of things first, but as soon as I get the go-ahead I’m planning on being sincere and frank about what’s going on behind the scenes. Lots of exciting stuff, no doubt, but some things have been less than fun.
Wish me luck. I feel good. I’m going to do this.
“The improvements to the user interface yield “lighter” pages that will load faster in browsers. These changes will also provide better support for a wider variety of web browsers. Many elements have been improved to provide better readability and usability, including the home page, search events pages, as well as buttons and other graphics throughout the system. This new design will also enable us to provide a better and more consistent display of errors and warnings.”
From a
ServiceU email to a worldwide list of users, in reference to the recently redesigned interface from
Click-Boom
Blind Side
The other day I was watching The Blind Side with my mother-in-law. Yes, I go to the movies with my mother-in-law. Just the two of us. Okay, are you done laughing yet?
Anyway, the movie was filmed in Atlanta but set in Memphis where we live. One scene in the movie shows a MATA bus pulling up in front of a Laundromat, and I totally lol’ed in the theater because it was obviously not a MATA bus.
I mean, it had the MATA logo on it, but to me it just looked like a fake MATA bus. It was a little more sleek, a little cleaner, a newer model. It had a MATA logo slapped on it to make it more Memphisy.
At first there seem to be parallels between this scene and branding — you might think you have to be really good at fooling your viewers into thinking your brand is something that it isn’t. That’s what they were doing in the movie — trying to make Atlanta look like Memphis. But they failed. And they didn’t fail because the bus wasn’t convincing or because the logo was wrong. They failed because it was covering up a lie.
Give people credit. We’re smart. We can spot fakes easily, even if we can’t state explicitly what’s off about something. To successfully suspend disbelief, we have to be telling the truth, even if we’re working in an imaginary world (think of how Star Trek was successful — it is less about special effects and more about sincerity). For more backing on this, you might want to read up on the uncanny valley.
As brand stewards we need to make sure that we craft experiences based on what the brand really is. We have to avoid trying to fool our consumers. We have to create something that from the ground up or uncover what it really is. Something that can be exactly what we say it is.
The Blind Side was based on a true story, but when I found out it was filmed in Atlanta I felt betrayed, like it was insincere. It’s a story about human salvation, certainly, and that isn’t lost because of where it was filmed. But it’s also a story about Memphis, and Ole Miss, and reconciliation in a city shackled by fear and racism. I’m not saying the movie doesn’t have a good message, it does. And Atlanta is an appropriate place to tell the story. But it ain’t Memphis. So I feel like some part of the story has been left out.
All that to say: brands aren’t something we can fake. They are real things we can see and touch and respond to. And now more than ever, the Internet is the last place brands can get away with telling lies.
