Featured, Social Media Marketing
Top 10 Social Media Promotion Hacks
Giovanni Gallucci spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on using social media for online promotion. As with most multi-speaker events, there was not enough time for Giovanni to finish his presentation at WordCamp. So, Tony Cecala offered up the Dallas WordPress Meetup group as a space to finish his talk. This months meeting was held at the Art Institute of Dallas on the 8th floor, complete with free wifi, good food, and a nice sound system.
Here are a few notes from his presentation.
What to consider when getting into social media:
- Read and understand the terms of service for social media sites so you know what you can’t do and what you can do
- Traditional PR people are scared to engage audiences by bending the rules
- Do testing in the social media space before you drop your entire traditional media campaigns
- Personal opinion is not the same thing as terms of service
What is social media about?
- Social media is about influencing people, not selling to them
- Social media is about long term relationships and not one time sales
- Spend time online helping people, even if you don’t directly financially benefit from doing so
- People want to deal with other people, so be a real people to others
Is social media cheaper?
- Advertisers are interested in getting their products and services in front of eyeballs
- Advertisers will gladly spend their money with non-celebrities who attract the same number of eyeballs
Should you use automated Twitter tools?
- Don’t abuse automated Twitter tools to spam people
- Do use automated tools to be more efficient with your time
Automated Twitter Tools
- Use TwitterHawk to automatically post on Twitter based on keywords
- Use TwitterFeed to tweet updates to RSS feeds
- Use TweetLater to schedule tweets
- Use search.twitter.com to narrow tweets by geographic area
- Use TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts
- Use Tweet Adder to automatically grow your Twitter followers
- Use Huitter to bulk unfollow Twitter Followers
Giovanni openly advocates “blue hat” promotional hacks. I recommend you take the advice of focusing on building on long term relationships over trying to game social media sites. Do keep in mind though that sometimes black and white isn’t that easy to define and use your best judgement.
UPDATE
Thank you JohnP for shooting and posting this video of Giovanni’s presentation.
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Thanks Charles. My notes were kind of skimpy.
I have already tried Seesmic Desktop and I really like the program. I can group people and searches as well as get a combined feed from both Twitter and Facebook. It’s an Adobe Air program and is pretty robust. The verdict is still out on how much system resources it uses on my MacBook Pro though.
Let me know what you decide about Seesmic. I use a standard Macbook and the TweetDeck client seems really solid now. A few versions ago, it was a resource hog, but now it seems to play well others and I can leave it up in the background all the time now.
I find this blog posting very beneficial for anyone like myself looking for quality information.
Thanks again,
-Jeremy Mandile-
Hey Charles, Seesmic is awesome, we love it. Loic got us to try it maybe 2 mos ago and SO glad we did. it was way worth it.
Indeed it was quite a hog on windows too until a version or two ago, but play much better with others now. it’s cool posting to twitter and facebook at the same time… and anytime now they’re going to add “facebook pages” too… that will be great.
And… so true. some people forget about the most important part of social medial… building trust and real relationships with real people. be real, it’s worth it.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
Hey Dan,
Since you’ve spoken so highly of the Seesmic Twitter client, I guess I’ll have to give it an honest try. I’ve become pretty comfortable with TweetDeck on the Mac, so it will be a real challenge to shake me loose.
I totally agree that social media should be all about the relationship. In fact, is there even a market for unsocial media or has CNN got that all taken care of? Anyway, what I am coming to appreciate though is the use of automated tools to perform tasks that don’t add value to my life, like searching for interesting people by keyword.
I’m finding that tools can actually help me get to the part that matters most, building the relationship. The common mistake I’m seeing people make though is they are leaning to heavily on automated social media tools, thinking that the tools will build the relationship automatically for them and it won’t.
Hey, but look who I’m talking to right? You and Jennifer are all about the relationship stuff. I bet you could share a good bit about building community online and connecting with your audience.
Isn’t technology so absolutely amazing these days… seriously, how many mundane things are fully or largely automated, so we can focus on adding value, or whatever we want to do. It’s such an amazing time.
We’ve personally seen such power in personally connecting with different people from all over the world… sure you can only do so much of that, but even a little personal connection is amazing and can have profound effects.
LOL. a wise man once said, you teach that which you most need to learn. And conversely, the best teacher is also a student.
on Seesmic, whatever works… if Tweetdeck works, I bet it’s just fine. we never really got into it, but rather got started with Seesmic and we love it.
– Dan