When everyone was at Blogworld Expo about a month ago, I wrote a post about how I felt like the structure and pricing of events in the Social Media marketing space was kind of…out of whack. The keynote speakers are scheduled for smack dab in the middle of the day. The events occur during the week instead of on weekends, many times. The set-up, I noted, made me feel a bit unwelcome.
Slowly, over the last month, I’ve been noticing that the structure of the events schedule in this space is a reflection of what is going on in this space every day. The surge of Social Media covers people who have made it big or who want to hit it big on their own. Where is the voice of the person who works for someone else? Where is the voice geared towards people like me?
My Two Goals
Earlier this week, I felt like my blog and my Twitter presence were having a City Slickers moment. I know some people feel ashamed to admit that they loved that movie. I still do! In one of the early scenes, Billy Crystal, who is turning 39, notes that he feels like he looks as good as he is ever going to look, he’s working as well as he’s ever going to work – and it’s just not that good. I was feeling like I had hit my plateau for my Social Media presence and it was all going to go downhill from that point.
After a conversation with Stan Smith, who is truly one of the most awesome people ever, I had another City Slickers moment. What is my one thing? Well, actually it’s two. I’m out here to spread the word that our family’s agency can help you do all kinds of things in marketing, and we can help you integrate various tactics together. I’m also here to help folks who, like, me, found getting started in Social Media to be quite the uphill battle.
My Two Goals are in a Different Stadium
If you look at the playing field of the Social Media world, you will see that these goals are not exactly the common currency. There is advice on how to grow your own business. There’s advice on how to make your first x number of dollars with your blog. There is advice on how to use ads on your blog so you can make money. There’s advice on how to do Social Media so that you can grow your business. It is all fantastic advice, and I absorb it all. But I can’t actually *use* a lot of it. I am not an entrepreneur who is sitting on a nest of little baby company eggs. I am not a president or CEO. I am not Director of Marketing at a humongous company. I am one of the employees of Clayman Advertising, a small agency that my grandpa started in 1954. I am not the boss. I am not concerned about how to keep my 27 minions in line because, well, we don’t have minions. I’m not worried about departmental warfare because we’re not really big enough to have armies, and departments in a small company would really just be a synonym for juvenile territorial conceit.
I am not out here to grow a Fortune 500 company, although if our agency could become internationally renowned, hey, that would be okay with me. But in the real world, I am here to let you know that we can help you, whenever, if ever, you need it. There’s nothing very entrepreneurial about that, right? In fact, we are at the polar opposite end of entrepreneurial. We are the old dame sitting on the porch watching the little ones play, but we are also in that crowd of kids playing all of the new games.
Who is talking to me?
Social Media is not my job
While we are in a business where keeping up-to-date on Social Media developments is essential, I’d be able to do my job sufficiently well, not great, but sufficiently well right now if I was not blogging every day or tweeting every day. I am happy I do this, because nine months ago I might have told our clients, “Man, I hear all the time how Twitter is great, but I just can’t figure out how or why.” Now I can explain the sense of community, how to network, and all of the other things you figure out by doing. But being out here in the Social Media world is not what I do from 7-5 every day. I wake up at 6 so that I can see what’s going on. I peek in as I am eating my 5-minute breakfast. I sneak peeks while I am waiting for a meeting to start or waiting for a phonecall. For me, this is a full-time hobby from the time I get home. It’s something I do on the weekends so that I can schedule posts out for the week.
In talking to Stan, the same thing is true of him and I’m sure many others. We work all day, try to eat dinner and do fun stuff (not that Social Media isn’t fun), and then, to use Stan’s word, we hustle. Because that’s the way the game is played. But in all of that hustling, there isn’t really someone talking to us. All of the advice about just telling your boss to go eat an ice cream cone – that’s not real in my world. It might be really motivational to someone who is ready to jump on the entrepreneurial trail, but that’s not real for me.
Who out there is talking to us worker bees? Who is talking about the people who didn’t get laid off over the last two years, but who were able to stay, fight and grasp and pull and fight some more? Who is talking about the fact that now, only just now, are things starting to look a bit rosier in the world for folks like me? Who is talking about the fact that Social Media really helped, but it wasn’t the end salvation?
There are some voices missing in Social Media, the voices who offer advice to folks like me. Are you looking for that kind of advice too?
When you stop and think about it, there are millions of specialists in the world of healthcare. There are your podiatrists, your pediatric doctors, ENTs, heart specialists, brain specialists, and the list goes on and on. There is a certain glistening factor about these specialists. They are called specialists, after all. They are experts in something. There are people walking this planet who know everything you could ever want to know about all of those teeny tiny bones in your foot. That’s amazing! That’s so much knowledge about one thing. It bowls you over, almost.
I know that it’s the fashion these days to speak of print and online advertising as if it’s something like a VHS tape or a butter churner. I have never been one to stick to what’s trendy, however. I did not cuff my pants in fourth grade. I did not wear bell bottoms in high school (bell bottoms and the fear of wearing them were why girls cuffed their pants when we were kids, by the way). I am not going to be fashionable in this regard either, I’m afraid. In fact, I am going to buck the trend and tell you five ways that a traditional media plan can enrich and enhance a Social Media Marketing campaign.
2. Haphazard is not an option: Well, I suppose it is an option, and I’ll detail all of this later, but suffice to say for now that the most effective way to plan any kind of campaign is to look at the big picture. When you are laying the foundation of your traditional media plan, you will see where Social Media and other media could work together. For example, you will see when different publications will offer bonus distribution at key trade shows or conferences. “Oh, I’m going there,” you might think to yourself. Mapping out your Social Media around your key trade shows or conferences in advance will allow you to do neat things like at-the-show interviews, contests, asking your Facebook fans to post pictures, and other interactive activities that are hard to put together on the fly.
I wish I could say that I planned, 11 weeks ago, for #30Thursday number 11 to happen on November 11th. However, there is no way I am that organized. I also did not plan, in the beginning, for #30Thursday to fall on Veterans Day. However, I am kind of glad that it worked out this way. On a day when we stop and think about people who are far from home, who are far from home because they are fighting for our right to sit on our tushes and read blog posts, it seems fitting to share knowledge. Because really, in the end, all wars are about maintaining the ability to be ourselves, right? And who we are in this instant are people who want to read, learn, and share. With that, I give you 30 fantastic posts this week, two of which relate specifically to the importance of today. Enjoy!
When I was a little kid, I took piano lessons. Oddly enough, one of my first favorite movies was Amadeus, and I felt certain that with enough piano lessons, I could play Mozart pieces and thoroughly enjoy myself forever and ever. If you’ve ever taken lessons on a musical instrument, you perhaps have experienced the odd sensation of stepping outside yourself. Your hands are flying across the keyboard or the strings and you think to yourself, “Huh. Weird. That’s me doing that.” Whenever I would have that sensation, the almost inevitable result was that I would mess up whatever I was playing.
Perhaps the second most common question I see about blogging, right along with “how often should I blog?” is “How often should I promote my blog? On this point there is a fair amount of disagreement, so I will just tell you my approach, and then you can tell me if yours is similar, or why you do things differently.