The only way to “get” social media is to get into it. Until you do, it’s really just so many words on a page or pixels on a screen. Here are some recommendations for getting started.
For Individuals
- Join LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
- Start reading blogs about both your personal and professional interests
- Lurk for a while and then start leaving a comment every so often, just to see how it feels
- Consider starting a blog about something you are personally interested in, or if you find a relevant group blog, ask if they need additional contributors
For Business
- Start monitoring for key issues and your company name
- Assess tone of comments so you know what problems to solve
- Get executive commitment
- Start responding to comments, positive and negative
- Use results to decide whether to publish a blog or community site
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This post wraps up the series on social media and customer service. Later this week, I’ll be back with more blogger relations SNAFUs and time permitting, a BlogHer preview.
For businesses, one thing that you may want to do it to read/engage and respond to comment as a team.
Let’s say you’re monitoring 1000+ key blogs on your domain, to stay on top of what’s going on you really have to share the workload and collaborate.
Also as you get more used to the who’s who in your community I recommend that you develop relationship thru LinkedIn, Facebook.
You can do this with Google Reader or other market available tools.
We’re using our own solution (in beta) to follow blogs on social media (700+ of them) which is how I got to this post 🙂
http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/05/29/monitoring-600-blogs-on-social-media-marketing/
Susan, can you link to the eight portions of this series in one page? Or include the links on this page for 1-8? I’d like to use it on Catapult as a reference for using blogging and social media for small business. Thank you!