Grasping Social Media: How To Break The Giant Into Manageable Pieces

I was intrigued by what I would find when “Google This: The New Media Driver’s License” by Richard T. Cole and Derek Mehraban challenged me to search What President Obama Can Teach You About Social Media. (Page 7) After finding and reading the link I found it interesting that the same basic social media principles are applicable to multiple industries and interest groups. The only thing that changes between them is your audience and your content, but the approach is the same. You have to use the right channels.  Always keep your target audience in mind. Stay on topic and keep your branding message consistent. All of these principles work as long as you tweak them to your brand. Evidence is clear that it worked for the Obama campaign, as seen in the infographic below from The Search Engine Journal:

I found these same ideas expressed in another suggested article Social Media: 4 Steps to an Effective Marketing Strategy. (Page 9) Only this time, the concepts were broken down into the 4 C’s, a great way to remember the basics.  Paul Chaney calls them Content, Communication, Conversation and Conversion. Again, all the same principles of knowing your message, your audience, how you’re going to reach them and how to make it all effective are there, just in different words.

Finally, I looked at the suggested article How to Integrate Social Media with Traditional Media (Page 10) and found that Tom Martin suggests the same ideas, but labels them as a “framework”. He says there is no cookie cutter way to use social media, but a guide to get you going in the right direction. He encourages having a true conversation with your audience, which I believe is also a key aspect of social media. If you do not engage with your followers and give them content they will be interested in, eventually they will disappear.

I enjoyed learning that social media has similarities across industry boundaries, as it makes it more realistic and easier to conquer. It is a wonderful tool for building and maintaining an audience, and should not be intimidating if you break it down into smaller parts, making it easier to manage and understand.

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