Mastering the social media geek on a party

As your company does Social Media now you have to face the fact that a lot of geeks and social media evangelists don't like you. Normally you don't have to care about that but as this group growth quickly chances are high you meet them on parties sooner or later. So you better learn how to cope with them in such a situation.

We've all experienced that: You are at party, it ain't that much fun (as in "fun party with friends") but it is okay-ish. At some point one of these geeks pulls out his new iphone/android/whatever, complains ten minutes about the bad reception but eventually is able to show the group surrounding him the thing he was looking for...To understand what happens and how to deal with it let's skip back 12 minutes. That is when it all began.

Patience and Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

After Gary Vaynerchuk took over his family business, Shopper’s Discount Liquors, he rebranded the whole thing. He launched a retail website and started one of the most successful social media campaigns in the history. With the idea of his store  as Wine Library and his Video-Blog Wine Library TV he was able to boost his revenue from $4 million to $60 million.

At the Web2.0 Expo he gave a 15min talk explaining the keys to his success: "Patience and Passion". No other talk concentrated the essence of social media and how to succeed with it as good as this one. Luckily his very inspiring talk  is available at TedTalks and on Youtube.

Take the 15min off your launch brake and watch this video right after the page break. It will change the way you look on social media for ever...

stay disconnected

This Monday I talked about the Social Media Landscape. In there I mentioned in half sentence that "Most of the Media Sharing Platforms allow similar techniques [as Social Networks] by now but it isn't their main purpose." without explaining myself. What I meant with this are all the ways to follow the updates other do on their accounts. For example you can "subscribe" to a users on flickr and youtube. When ever said user is now uploading new content you'll be informed about this. This allows you to stay connected.

Well, kinda. If you are a member of as many platforms as I am (I counted almost 20 I was able to remember by hard a few month ago, since then it grew) you are not logged into each one permanently, checking or updates all the time. This is why so many of the Media Sharing Platforms allow the users to connect with Facebook or Twitter nowadays. And on first sight that sounds like the long wanted feature we were all missing: connect everything with everything and everyone and all the time.

Social Media Landscape

One term I hear a lot lately is "social media". From what I understand marketing people use this term to describe "everything but classic advertising in the internet". One big problem I have with the term and the discussion around it is that people use it in various contexts describing various aspects of it and making it look like "the big picture". In my opinion "social media" can't be understand as one big thing (like "mass media") working in one certain way with one set of rules.

I rather see a "Social Media Landscape" of various tools, ways to share or publish, connect and interact. And from what I see the rules differ between the areas in this landscape. But you can't adapt to the rules for this area when you don't know where you are. So lets start by looking at what this landscape looks like as of today.