Chapter 6- Social Media Presence
Social Media is a tough thing to pin down and talk about. It’s a little tough to get into and learn about if you aren’t the “early adopter” type.
One of the biggest problems for a latecomer trying to figure it all out is that the conversation is completely out of control and unconnected from reality. The experts, the Thought Leaders, in the Social Media world are required to keep up on the latest trends, fads, and technology— even if that fad will never impact you or your business. They are in an arms race to be the one who knows more about the latest Social Network or Semantic-Geo-Locating-4.7-iPoop. It’s what they do, all day long.
So if you start trying to figure out what kind of Social Media presence you should have, you end up reading their search-optimized content, discover that you need to be spending ten hours a day “participating in the conversation,” and promptly give up.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This stuff is a lot easier to understand.
If you are in love with Social Media, or want to be on the cutting edge of everything— the world leader of… whatever, then yes, you need to spend a lot time on a lot of Social Networking sites. If you want to be a Thought Leader on technology or the future or the web, then you need to be at the head of the ridiculous arms race. But if you’re looking to have a meaningful presence in your community— if you want to become a local Thought Leader of cooking or car repair— then your Social Media strategy can be a lot simpler:
Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog/website.
Yes, you can do more. Yes, there are ridiculous success stories from all the other sites. Yes, their technology looks really cool. Yes, lots of experts say you need to do a lot more.
But those four things are all you must do. They are enough to support a robust Thought Leadership campaign, provided your ideal consumers are not technocrats.
