Intro to Social Media: Part 1, What is it?

I recently taught a small seminar for the Association of Medical Illustrators 66th Annual Meeting. The course was targeted toward those with little or no knowledge of social media/networks. The objective was to give them a light primer of how to get more exposure for themselves, their clients, or their companies. Here are some highlights from the seminar.

What is Social Media
Its facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter right? That is the goto answer most people will give you if you.. and yes that is correct. However, this definition can be dramatically expanded. One term definition coined from author Chris Brogan (Social Media: 101) that I became quite fond of; Social media is the “Two-way web.” In other words, social media is when we create interaction and/or discussion around some piece content. It doesn’t matter if this content is based in the virtual world (blog posts, links, videos, etc ) or real life happenings (facebook status update about how great your friends day is). Once we expand our definition, we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of social outlets.

Why is there so much hype to use social media to market

1. Its cheap, the ROI (return on investment) is dramatically higher

• Very little upfront cost when compared to tv advertising, and even www display advertising
• It can be targeted to a very specific group, behavior, or demographic

2. A potentially much higher impact

• Pushes content in a much ‘friendlier way’
• Pushes content to those whom care about it
• Interaction and discussion is an active experience vs a passive one (E.g. tv ad)

3. More human

• Since the big corporation/bank bailouts, trust for big companies is at an all time low
• Social marketing is often about getting potential influencers on board, getting rid of the cold corporate identity and giving it a human face

Everyone hates the word blog
Blog contributors automatically become influencers of sort, expert or not. Being an influencer is a great way to get exposure, even if it is to the lightest degree. Starting a blog (shout out to wordpress) is one of the easiest possible things you can do to bump up your web presence. This includes a huge bump in your indexing by google, always a good thing.

The problem is.. for some reason the word blog has all these negative connotations. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure if its from the paparazzi star bashing blogs or what.. but for whatever reason, people hate the word.

What is a blog though? It’s a collection of posts/articles by one or multiple authors. Each post can have comments, tags and categories… that’s it. A Blog can be synonymous with news, updates, articles, journal, and even portfolio. So why wouldn’t you want to create a web presence with company/brand news with the most minute level of effort?

Moral of the story, it’s a great place to start. Don’t be scared!

Part 2 is coming soon..