Social Media Marketing Book

Today’s chapter in the 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days is chapter 15, Be Open To Trying New Things, But Don’t Fall Off the Bleeding Edge.  It may sound a little silly, but time and time again I’ve seen senior executives and the c-suite hear something about a new tool or a new community and hand down the “word from on high” that the marketing team needs to use these latest greatest tools or communities.  Many times these communities or tools disappear or stop working and that creates a nightmare for the marketing team.

I go into a lot more detail in Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media about how companies should go about adding new things to their social media strategies, but being wise about how they do that.  To get a glimpse of that, here’s today’s 3 high level tips from Chapter 15.

1. SOS – “Shiny Object Syndrome”
2. Be Prepared for These Tools to Fail (or Break)
3. Fads of the Moment

Video transcript after the jump…

Chapter 15:  Be Open to Trying New Things, But Don’t Fall Off the Bleeding Edge Video Transcript

Hi I’m Li Evans and I’m author of Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.  I’m back with the 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days.  This covers a chapter each day in the book.  It gives you 3 high level tips in 1 to 2 minutes about what’s in the chapter so you can make a decision about whether you want to buy the book or not.   You can find this video and more videos at SMMarketingBook.com.  So with that lets get to today’s chapter, which is chapter 15, Be Open to Trying New Things, But Don’t Fall Off the Bleeding Edge.

So what kind of tips do I have for you?  The first one is, SOS.  What’s SOS?  “Shiny Object Syndrome“.  Not save our ship, but it could be that too, but shiny object syndrome is when people are just so enamored by the brand new things that come out in social media everyday.  People can get just so engrossed in what’s going on Techcrunch that they think every time that there’s a new tool out there that they need to put it into their social media strategy.  A lot of times these tools are here today and gone tomorrow.  A lot of times they don’t build communities, and they end up being just plain out duds.  So if you went and marketed your strategy around these brand new tools that come out you could be in for a big disappointment.  So be careful of the SOS – Shinny Object Syndrome.

The next tip I have for you is to “Be Prepared for These Social Media Tools to Fail“, for them to break.  Some of them aren’t really tested. What happens when they get a ton of users on them?   Think about what happened with Twitter about two years ago.  It was constantly going down, all you would see was the “Fail Whale”, where Twitter was over capacity.  You have to be prepared for situations like this with your social media strategy.   If something fails or something breaks what do you do?  What is your contingency plan?

Tip number three is “Fads of the Moment – They Can Be Here One Day and Gone the Next“.  Biggest example is, I would have to say, is Plurk, where it was really big when Twitter was starting to fail, but it never really took off.  It’s still out there and it is a great tool and a great little community and has a lot of niche users but it never reached the full capacity that Twitter did.  So think about these fads of the moment, here one day, gone tomorrow.  You don’t want to base your strategy on them because a lot of times the communities migrate out of there.

So that is your three tips for chapter 15, Be Open to Trying New Things, in the  book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.  I’m Li Evans and you can find this video at SMMarketingBook.com, we’ll have another one for you tomorrow.

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