So, the big question is whether you and your company are anywhere in social media? Can your customers find you? Do you know how to setup bots and automatically receive alerts when you and your company name pop up on social networking sites? For better or for worse? How quickly can you defuse potential PR bombs?
I was completely blind-sided by social media when I first started reinvigorating my company, iEngineer. We don’t deliver any services purely focused on marketing or social media, but we understood the need to get our name out there. I’ve personally used social media like LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook for a number of years, but, with the exception of LinkedIn, it was mostly becuase a lot of my friends did.
I even started using Twitter recently, but I still didn’t get the true nature of social media until recently. That was because I started reading about social media in books, magazines, and in blogs. The blogs have been instrumental in helping me understand the true nature of social media: to build trust and relationships like we do with our family, friends and coworkers.
So, why am I writing about it today? Haven’t I already written enough about social networking?
Today’s the day of the week I write about my favorite Blog of the Week. You may have already read last week’s blog about Blogger to Follow, where I referred to a few social networking specialists I’ve been following recently.
To that list I’m adding this week’s entry, Maples Communications’ PR Blog. Maples is a PR and Marketing company that has a particular focus on social networking. I’ve been following their entries and reading some of the back postings over the last week. Though tinged with talk about services and products at Maples, there is some good advice about social media.
What Do You Think?
Feel free to email me or post a comment below to share your thoughts about this and other posts on TheMarq.
I've found the immediacy of Twitter great for passing and reading links but at the same time I feel the social media flood overwhelming. Monitoring Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, emails and now Google Wave constantly is a full time job! It's a wonder people get anything accomplished with all the distractions.
-Henry Bow
Henry,
Have you considered tools like TweetDeck or SocialOomph?
Arash – thank you so much for picking the Maples Communications blog as your blog of the week. I would've responded earlier but your post must have slipped past my alerts.
Bryan,
Thank you for your comment. It's a pleasure reading your blog and I wanted to share it with my community. I think they'll benefit from reviewing your posts.
Good luck!