Self Promotion 2.0
It's about getting your point across in 140 characters or less, friending the world—including your hair stylist or your high school nemesis—and sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings every minute of the day.
Social media—Facebook, Twitter, blogging—at its worst can feed narcissism and provide a platform for TMI (too much information). At its best it allows "friends" to raise funds for causes they care about, rediscover relationships and create an arena for groups to communicate in a faster, simpler and more convenient way.
It's a dream for companies. It allows businesses to build brands, strengthen relationships with clients and find out what they think about you on a fairly regular basis. And the data backs it up.
According to Facebook, there are more than 500 million active users and people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on this site.
According to data released by Twitter in September, it has more than 145 million registered users, and users, in total, are tweeting an average of 90 million tweets per day.
Companies ignoring these platforms, brushing them off as kids' stuff or due to fear of the unknown, may as well get back to hunting and pecking on their Smith Coronas (for those born after 1980, those are typewriters) because social media is here to stay.
You may be clueless about blogs, but Print Professional can fix that, helping guide you through your social media options.
WHAT IT IS: Part personal ad and part yearbook, Facebook is essentially a giant collection of connected personal profile pages, photo albums and fan groups dedicated to anything from favorite athletes and musicians to products like Coca-Cola or Starbucks.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: User base. Facebook is currently ranked by the traffic-measuring site Alexa as the second-most visited site on the Web, behind only Google. Alexa estimates that 30 percent of the world's Internet users visit the site daily. Inside Facebook, a website dedicated to statistically tracking and otherwise studying its namesake, reported in 2009 that 8 percent of Facebook's users are between 45 and 54, 17 percent are between 35 and 44 and 24 percent are between 26 and 34.
SUCCESS STORIES: Within the promotional products industry, Charley Johnson, executive vice president of SnugZ USA, Salt Lake City, has created a page entitled "Promo35" that has become very popular within the promotional products industry (viewable at www.facebook.com/promo35). Utilizing a sincere voice and exclusive interviews from the industry's top minds, Johnson's group has risen to become a central hub for promotional product professionals on Facebook.
HOW TO USE IT: Using your personal profile to network and search for prospects may work for some, but to take full advantage of Facebook's marketing abilities, you may want to consider making a fan page. Fan pages allow you to collect enthusiastic supporters of your company in one branded place where communication with each other is centralized and easy. Along with facilitating word-of-mouth marketing, fan pages market virally via status pings Facebook generates about updates to your group, which are visible not only to those connected to your group, but also to anyone connected to one of your fans.
BLOGGING
WHAT IT IS: Short for "Web log," blogs are essentially op-ed newspaper pieces published online. Ranging from manicured political copy to a teenager's open diary, blogs are one of the most pervasive forms of communication on the Internet.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: Less in-vogue now that Twitter and Facebook are dominating the press, blogging is still a potent social networking tool. Mark Graham, long-time industry blogger and president and founder of promotional marketing company Right Sleeve Marketing Inc., Toronto, explained how blogging works and how it can be a valuable marketing device. "It is not a direct sales platform, rather it is a conversational platform as people will weigh in on what you write about and this starts a dialogue," he said. "I have met a number of new and interesting people via blogging (and other Web 2.0 properties like Facebook, Twitter, etc.). As with all solid relationships, a level of trust is established which can often lead to sales."
He continued, "We also operate within a very competitive and commoditized industry with little to differentiate distributors from one another. The standard complaint about our industry is that 'you can buy the same products from any distributor.' However, a blog is something that is unique to a company, something that can't be shopped like a product SKU from a supplier catalog. Anything that is unique like this is a good thing in the industry as it helps set you apart."
SUCCESS STORIES: The Huffington Post and Perezhilton.com are examples of businesses that have been built off blogs. Non-news related blogs have also proven successful, with restaurant, technology and music review blogs becoming trusted sources of information (see "GeekDad" at Wired.com or the music blog "Pampelmoose" for examples). Inside the industry, bloggers like Graham and the Motivators Promotional Products staff, viewable at www.swag20.com and we.motivators.com respectively, use the platforms to create intimacy and a sense of community with customers.
HOW TO USE IT: There are an incredible number of options out there for those looking to start a blog. Accounts with WordPress or Google's Blogger are very simple to set up, and other platforms you may already be using, like Facebook or your company's website, are likely to have blogging features included. Beyond that, the success of your blog depends more on your writing ability and understanding your audience, though a regular update schedule, as well as taking the time to promote your blog online will certainly help.
WHAT IT IS: Best described as "micro-blogging," Twitter is a hybridization of Facebook and blogging where users share one-or-two-sentence blurbs with their network of friends, typically several times a day.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: Scale, intimacy and immediacy. Twitter is designed to make both mobile mass communication and intimate dialogue very easy. The website's emphasis on syncing with cell phones makes talking one-on-one with a key contact very simple, and the program's long, scrolling chat feeds and search features make group communication and listening to the needs of your target demographic easy as well.
SUCCESS STORIES: A quick google search for "Twitter success stories" will turn up dozens of examples pertinent to small businesses, from fledgling media companies using it as a low-cost advertising tool to the owner of a crème brûlée cart in San Francisco being able to quit his day job from all the business it generated. Mega-corporations like Comcast and Zappos.com have used the program to great effect as customer service and marketing tools (viewable at comcastcares and zappos on Twitter). Within this industry, a few thousand distributors and suppliers are already using the young program to stay in touch with clients and keep up on industry news.
HOW TO USE IT: Once you create your account, begin searching out the profiles of people that you have either an interest in speaking or listening to, similar to collecting friends on Facebook. From there, either sit back and listen to the conversation, using Twitter's search and sortation tools to hone in on the parts you're interested in, or begin talking and networking with those you're connected to.
- Companies:
- SnugZ USA
- People:
- Charley Johnson
- Mark Graham