It would be very fair to say that I have been fighting some of this social media craziness for a while now.  My fear is that I don’t need one more thing in my day that takes up time rather than benefiting me.  I am very protective of my time and don’t have a need for an overwhelming amount of communication.  That said, I recognize when change is happening and I don’t think I have seen anything like this in a while.   It’s a frenzy alright; feels more like a cult. 

Here are some facts:

• Facebook has 200 Million Members.
• YouTube visitors are viewing 13 Billion Videos a month.
• LinkedIn has over 15 Million Businesspeople networking.
• Twitter is growing at over 40% a month.
• Digg and Delicious are driving millions of visitors to websites every month. (I don’t even know what these are)

So you can’t deny there is something going on here.  I either need to get on the bus or be left far behind.  In an effort to better understand this frenzy, I’ve been attending some social media events and have learned some info to help me better understand this.  Here are some my learnings thus far:

• Social media is a listening community.  Provide good content that is valulable and relevant and a “tribe” will follow. 
• Have an engaging home base.  This means have a place for people to go, from FB or Twitter, that is interactive.  Like you own blog.
• Be real, honest and transparent.  People will see through you otherwise.
• Build a network online, but grow it offline. 
• All boundaries are broken in terms of a client can now come from any city, country or continent. 
• Give and take; don’t just take from conversations.  Give back to them and in turn, get a lot.
• Don’t be a one night social media stand. 

So what does this mean for me.  Well, I don’t think you will ever find me constantly “tweeting” as that’s just not for me.  But I do see the benefits in terms of meeting really smart people, making connections I would have otherwise not made and potentially making contacts with anyone, anywhere.  That I can get my hands around and will dedicate some time too. 

We know our members have many questions about social media so we putting together a SM TeleSummit called From Prospects to Profits: Thriving Using Social Media.   If you are overwhelmed with the social media frenzy, attend the TeleSummit and get all your questions answered in our mutli-day conference all from the comforts of your own home telephone.  If you want to be the first to know about it, let us know at info@aredbench.com.  We will be announcing it very soon!

Follow us at https://twitter.com/ARedBench.

Tags: Angela Ploetz, Christa Wagner, Maximize your marketing, social media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under Marketing, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.