Social Media Week: The Beginnings, MySpace and Blogging

To start off Social Media Week, we thought we’d start where social media began. Following is insight and commentary from several of the staff at Step Ahead. You’ll find different topics each day of Social Media Week with our ever so fascinating two cents .

Bailey Surrett: MySpace and Metal Bands!

I joined MySpace in 2003 and the main reason was because all my friends were on it. I’ll say that the majority of my high school friends were in bands (metal bands) so this was the up-and-coming method of reaching out to their fans. All bands had a MySpace page, especially indy bands doing everything on their own.

MTV found my friends in Glass Casket and Between the Buried and Me through MySpace to use some of their songs for shows. I first heard of Colbie Caillat through her MySpace page. It was also a great avenue for me to keep in touch with my musician friends while they were touring.

I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t been on MySpace at all in the last 2 years unless it’s to check new layouts for a social media blog I’m writing or to see a video update from one of the bands who haven’t moved over to Facebook (shame on them). To be even more honest, by the time this blog is posted, I’ll have probably deleted my account.

http://www.myspace.com/ebaileysurrett

Holly Fisher: The Power of the Blog

In doing some research on this post about how blogging has evolved, I discovered the very first blog, Links.net, was created in 1994. That was the year I graduated from high school, started college and had my first e-mail address.

Hard to believe blogs have been on the scene 17 years. Also, hard to believe I graduated from high school 17 years ago, but we’ll save that for another blog post. What’s truly interesting is that the basic premise of blogs has remained the same: sharing stories, opinions and information.

Initially called “weblogs,” blogs turned anyone with a computer into a writer and a publisher. They may not be professional writers (or even very good writers) but they suddenly had a platform to share their passions – sports, travel, parenting or politics. Platforms like Blogger and WordPress made it simple for anyone with the tiniest bit of tech knowledge to set up a blog and call themselves a “blogger.”

A few years ago, women stormed the blogging world to create a nation of influential, diaper-wielding Mommy Bloggers.  Also coming on strong are business blogs. Companies discovered having a corporate blog was a way to tell the inside story of their brand and connect with consumers.

While most people tend to blog as a hobby, others have made quite a successful living at blogging by selling ads on their blogs or turning their blog into a book deal.

Regardless of whether you blog for yourself or for your company, take these basic tenets to heart:

• Keep it short and sweet. With some 100 million blogs in the world, people don’t have a lot of time to read your 4,000-word post.
• Have a personality. And, yes, this applies to corporate blogs. This is where a business can really connect with customers by giving them an insider’s view.
• Be consistent in your posting. You don’t have to post twice a day but you do need to keep your blog updated. One or two posts a week should be your minimum. You can’t attract a following if you never have fresh content.
• Promote your blog via social media. Posting links to your blog on Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking sites is an excellent way to drive traffic and readership.

Laura Angermeier: Blogging Advocate, MySpace Dissenter
I was never a big MySpace person and only got on one night when I was super bored. I was never a fan of the layout and always thought it could have been done better. Then came Facebook. I think I actually still have a MySpace profile, but I haven’t checked it in over 3 years, so if you messaged me, sorry about the delayed response .

Blogs are wonderful social media tool! I haven’t written very many, but love reading them. There’s an opinion about everything, and I tend to lean toward the celebrity/fashion-oriented blogs, as they’re just fun! I encourage every business owner who has something to say about their business to start blogging. It’s a great way to talk with customers and potential customers on a more conversational level. Plus it’s fun!

Lyn Mettler: Creepy MySpace and the Beginning of “Social” Media

I remember the first time I heard of MySpace. It was on some news program like 60 Minutes and it talked about what a phenomenon it was becoming and how many people used it to communicate. I was fascinated. I eventually got on MySpace to see what it was all about, but totally got freaked out with the come-on type requests I was getting! So I never did much with it. But yea for MySpace, it started the whole field of “social” media, where you don’t just take information from the web but give it back as well.

Back when we started Step Ahead, Facebook was just in its beginnings, MySpace was much more popular and blogs and podcasts were all the rage. But it’s funny, no term had been coined yet for these types of media. People threw around Web 2.0 and social media, but as funny as it seems, Web 2.0 was the more popular of the two. We had a hard time naming the company because a standard phrase for what we were working with had not even been coined. Ah, seems so long ago, when really it was only 4 or so years ago – a lifetime in social media.

Most Common Social Media Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes, but I’d prefer to learn from someone else’s whenever possible!

So I’ve compiled a list of the mistakes I’ve made and some of the most frequent mistakes that I see others make when it comes to social media.

So take a read to my latest SocialMoms.com post and see if you can’t avoid these yourself and please share other common mistakes you see people make!

Orwell vs Social Media

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”
George Orwell – Politics and the English Language

(Opening a blog post with an Orwell quote? Pretentious, moi?! Well, I suppose, perhaps, but stick with me, there’s some swearing coming up.)

I’m not a great writer. I understand that. The vast majority of people writing blogs are not great writers, and that’s perfectly fine. But what really irks me are those blog writers who, rather than attempt to write clearly, deliberately write in that buzzword-heavy, cliche-ridden, business speak that is so prevalent on corporate blogs.

And especially on social media blogs.

In the essay quoted above, Orwell rewrites a well know verse from Ecclesiastes in modern English, so that:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

becomes

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

The point being that bad writing is not only uglier, but also more vague.

If Steve Rubel writes in AdAge that people “engage with a unit of media” he hasn’t done anything to help clarify what he is trying to say. It has a ring of scientific evaluation, but in fact it divorces the meaning from the words in order to suggest that there is a Great Big Idea hidden behind them. But he actually just means “read a book or watch a movie”.

Language like this doesn’t express new ideas. It can’t. The use of stock-phrases keeps us locked into patterns of thinking like a train unable to move from its tracks. I had someone DM me on Twitter that they were following me “because they found my content compelling”. That wasn’t a phrase they conjured up themselves, it was a phrase they had learned. A bad habit. A cliche designed to suggest a more rigourous thought than simply saying “I like what you say”. The irony* is, it has the opposite effect.

Nothing makes your content less compelling than using words like ‘compelling content’.

(*that is irony, right? Since I learned that Alanis Morissette was all wrong about what irony is I get so confused)

Now I understand that this isn’t a new thought either, but it has been on my mind lately. And then I came across this site yesterday - What the F#&* is My Social Media “Strategy”? (See? I told you there was going to be swearing).

Inspired by ‘What the F#&* Should I Make for Dinner?‘, WTFIMSMS parodies the social media world’s art of saying nothing in as complicated a way as possible, by giving you a random nonsense sentence to sum up your goals. For instance, I just clicked and got:

Activate audience by giving them compelling social experiences, encouraging advocacy

Great stuff! So I thought we could play a wee game here. Which of the following are from WTFIMSMS, and which are from actual Social Media/Marketing professionals. Ready?

“Humanise the brand by driving the audience conversations”

“(Help) to humanize the interaction with our community while maintaining brand identity and growing a centralized community.”

“Convert every one of your store associates into well-informed product experts by providing an interactive, course-based social platform/community that educates, engages, and rewards them, while showing them how they stack up against their co-workers.”

“(create) user-centric approach to social media design, implementation, and strategy that accounts for how different kinds of users engage with social media, and how sites and application design and execution lead to emergent social practices.”

OK, you get the idea. Obviously (?) the first is from WTFIMSMS, while the others are real. You get the point.

I’m sure there is plenty of hypocricy in me writing this. I’m sure there have been times when I’ve been as guilty as the worst offender. I honestly don’t mean to attack anyone in particular here. I just think it’s about time that we all slowed down a little and thought about what we are really trying to say, and how we can best do that.

And if that means quoting Orwell and getting all pretentious up in here, well, then that’s just what I’ll have to do.

January Social Media Star: Meghan Miller

The television news business is ever changing. The industry has gone from news on only three networks to 24-hour news channels to the reach and speed of the Internet and social media. Meghan Miller, the Web producer for WMBF News, the NBC affiliate in Myrtle Beach, saw the power and importance of social media in TV news early on, and has been using it ever since to keep a step ahead.

We picked Meghan as January’s social media star, because she’s on the front lines of journalism embracing all that social media can do for this industry. She “gets” it where so many media outlets continue to struggle.

Meghan started the WMBF Facebook page in August 2008 with only 10 fans, but has grown the page to over 10,000! Daily, she manages multiple social media accounts for WMBF, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and, one you may not have heard about, Bubbletweet. Here is what Meghan had to say about social media:

What was the first social media technology you used?
Facebook. Over the years, it’s slowly become the No. 1 way I can keep a personal connection with my family and friends back in my hometown of York, Pa.

What is your favorite social media tool?
Definitely Twitter. Believe it or not, I was actually against getting a Twitter account, because I didn’t see the point in posting to the world what I was doing 24/7. Now it’s one of the first things I check on my Blackberry when I wake up – to see who’s doing what and what topics are making news in the Web world.

How have you used social media for your business/company and how has it benefited?
In all honesty, it’s one of the most important tools I use as both a journalist and as a Web producer. Social networking takes news to a whole new extreme – it allows us to see who’s doing what, what issues are important to our viewers, and really allows us to make those important connections with those who keep close tabs on our news product.

Our Facebook fan page has just exceeded 10,000 fans – many of which were gained in 2009. That’s an outlet where we can interact with our fans with a “Question of the Day” and post controversial news stories that we know will draw a response from the public. It also allows us to strengthen the push-pull from social networking sites to WMBFNews.com.

Twitter is another – I can’t tell you how many news stories we’ve broken because of Twitter and how many relationships we’ve built with legislators, community leaders, businesses and organizations because of the exchange of a few tweets. If we can’t pull any news stories off of Twitter, it at least helps us get our brains pumping to come up with new, fresh news content for our shows.
On the flip side, we can keep better track of our competition this way.

How have you seen TV news change since you started in the profession with regard to social media?
It has exploded! I can remember when we had 20 fans on our WMBF News Facebook Fan Page and 100 friends on our MySpace page. We’ve been nursing our social networking sites since we first launched in August 2008 and now depend on it for comments on controversial stories that really affect our viewers or our market drivers. Now, you’ll see a “Facebook Question of the Day” on each of our newscasts – and a big push to become a fan of WMBF News either on Twitter or Facebook.

What role do you see social media playing in TV news in the future?
I see it as a way to gather news stories, build the WMBF News brand, draw people into our product, interact with the community and share breaking news when it happens, as it happens.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?
Ha – it feels like 24 hours a day! It’s hard to gauge because my TweetDeck is always open, I’m always fiddling with UberTwitter on my phone when I’m away from my desk and always checking out Facebook. It’s a part of the job!

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?
It’s hard! I make sure that when I’m at work – that’s what I’m on Twitter or Facebook for – just work. When I go on dinner break, am heading out to do a story or am on my own time, that’s when I hop on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What’s your best tip for using social media for business?
Use it as just another tool to better your product and your overall image. Don’t ignore the fact that your viewers or clients are interacting with you on a “virtual” level – it’s the perfect time to draw people in! Engage, interact and don’t ignore!

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?
This is where I plug BubbleTweet, I do believe! I think BubbleTweet is an AWESOME alternative to Tweets if you have a webcam. It’s been a cool way to take people behind the scenes during a newscast, break news stories on a more personal and visual level and to show people that the news is more than just TV.

Where can people find you online and via social media?
www.twitter.com/wmbfmegmiller
http://www.facebook.com/meghanmillerwmbf

Finding Your Blogging Voice

The mechanics of setting up a blog are pretty simple: create an account with a free blogging site like Blogger or WordPress; select one of the pre-made templates; decide on a name for the blog; and add a few widgets and a blogroll. That can be done in less than an hour.

The next step is a little more challenging. How do you create a blog that’s engaging, informative, smart, witty and well read? Well, if I could bottle that up, I’d be a millionaire for sure.

But there is one piece of the blogging puzzle that shouldn’t be discarded: finding your voice. The beauty of the blog is it’s an extension of you, reflecting your opinions, thoughts and ideas. To grab your readers, they need to get to know you through your blog.

Even the most prolific writers struggle with finding their voice – that style of writing that is uniquely theirs. So don’t give up if you’re stuck, just try of few of these techniques to get started:

1. Find your focus. First and foremost, what is the purpose of your blog? It could be political commentary, information on green living, tips for parents or simply a day-to-day diary of your life.
2. Reach your readers. Think about who might read your blog and write to engage them. Are you trying to reach people interested in international news, green living, organic gardening or how to discipline a toddler? Don’t write to moms if you want dads to read too. Don’t right for left-wing politicos if you want to grab the attention of all political junkies.
3. Write like you talk – for the most part. In many ways, blogs are a compilation of your thoughts and your conversations. That’s not to say your blog should be filled with sloppy grammatical errors, but keep the writing conversational, approaching your blog post as you would meeting a friend for coffee.
4. Don’t be afraid. If you have a dry wit, use it. If you have an uncanny ability for description and can really turn a phrase, do it. Play to your strengths and you’ll quickly see a pattern in your posts.
5. Write what you know. If you have no interest in cats, don’t start a cat blog. If you don’t know the first thing about computers, don’t start  a tech blog. But if you love college basketball, start a college basketball blog. Or if you have tons of great cooking tips, start writing about cooking.

These tips can apply to company blogs as well as personal ones. You company has a focus, an audience and an expertise – all those can be honed to create a well-written blog that gives a voice to your business.

I’d love to hear how you found your blogging voice or if you have examples of great bloggers who have their own distinct voice.

Finding the Best Blogs

Keeping up with all the blogs in the world can be one tough challenge.

Check out this post on our client Spirit Telecom’s No Static Blog about how to weed through the maze of bloggers to find the ones that are best suited for you and your business.

And be sure to share some of your ideas for managing the blogosphere too!

March Social Media Star: Leah England

If you own a dog, you’ll want to meet our March Social Media Star: Leah England, founder and publisher of Lowcountry Dog magazine. Leah has created a fabulous publication that serves as a great resource for anyone living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina as a dog owner.

We picked Leah, because she has recently taken the magazine’s print presence online, as well, and is quickly becoming known as the expert for all things doggies in and around Charleston. She’s on Facebook, Twittering about the latest pet events and news, blogging about the pet world and has become the go to resource. And all this is helping grow her audience both online and in print. So with that, meet Leah!

What was the first social media technology you used?
LinkedIn. Ironically, though, I use it the least now.

What is your favorite social media tool?
Twitter and Facebook are neck and neck. With MySpace in second place, and LinkedIn in third.

How have you used social media to spread the word about Lowcountry Dog (LCD) and how has it benefited?
It’s amazing how social media enables me to interact instantly with LCD readers. It’s like having a constant focus group right in my living room. I ask LCD readers for their content ideas, what issues matter most to them, what they love most about LCD and what I should do more or less of. And the best thing is, they talk to me – like a real person! Not some elusive publisher holding a charette, but someone with whom they can have an open and honest discussion.

This year I’m heavily promoting the annual LCD model contest, held at PetFest, through social media. Even though we’ve always had a good turnout, I’m really pumped to see how things go this year!

I also promote LCD advertisers when it is relevant and newsworthy. If a groomer is offering a discount, a kennel has new online reservations and Web cams, or a retail store is hosting a meet and greet for a rescue – it all gets posted! So social media is giving me another opportunity to help pet-related businesses connect with their demographic.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?
2-3 hours. Weekday only. You’ve got to set some limits.

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?
I schedule my social media activity. Morning, mid-day and late afternoon. I think it’s good to space things out, not only for yourself so you can get other things done, but also so you have the chance to catch different people at different times.

What’s your best tip for using social media for business?
The conversation should flow both ways. Don’t just constantly shove yourself down your followers’ throats. Ask questions. Respond to your followers’ posts. Post truly beneficial, entertaining and useful information. Be gracious. Be authentic. If you use a lot of auto-responders and post one-sided information, people can smell it a mile away. Social media is one of those things where what you get out of it directly correlates with what you put in it.

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?
I’ve only been using social media for about three months, so I’m not an expert. There’s a lot I feel I don’t use enough. I’m excited to begin using Flickr as a visual social networking tool and to start a Squidoo lens for Lowcountry Dogs!

Where can people find you online?
www.lowcountrydog.com
www.lowcountrydog.blogspot.com
www.twitter.com/leahengland

Hubspot Study Suggests Blogs Best Social Media for Leads

A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

Social Media Star: Stacey Crew

Meet our very first Step Ahead Social Media Star: Stacey Crew, organizing expert, author and speaker. Stacey, whom I met many years ago through a friend of mine and who is based in Charleston, S.C., helps moms-to-be, new moms and generally busy women organize their time and space. Her book, The Organized Mom, will hit bookstores nationally in 2009.

Stacey is very active on all the main tools, but has also networked herself well within niche social networks like Girlfriendology, The Integrated Mother, Posh Mama, Twitter Moms, and the Mom Bloggers Club where she has developed a following of moms who look for her seasoned advice on keeping our lives together! Here is what Stacey had to say about social media:

What was the first social media technology you used?
Facebook

What is your favorite social media tool?
Facebook, then Twitter

How has social media benefited your business?

Social media tools have helped me keep my followers informed of blog posts, Web site updates, and general information that I’d like to share—all in a very simple way! Anyone who has been following me, knows that getting a book published is a long process.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?
1 hour

How do you incorporate it into your day?

Sometimes I schedule it. For example, if I’ve made specific blog entries, I’ll post that on my Facebook page and on Twitter. Or if I’ve made changes/updates to my web site, I’ll do the same. Essentially, while working, I’m always connected to Facebook and Twitter, but try and use the time wisely so it’s not all of a sudden the end of the day and I haven’t completed my To Do List.

What’s your best social media tip?

Be yourself. People don’t want to feel like you’re all business or all personal, so find a balance. In my market (moms, essentially), I mention my kids and post pictures. Keep it real, but maintain your position as an expert in your field. It’s like walking a tight rope sometimes.

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is

underutilized that you would like people to know about.

Well, I suspect the iPhone technology. I’m waiting for my new iPhone to arrive and once it does, I think I will be saying, “How did I ever live without it.” I’ll be providing tech tips on my web site for the iPhone and other technology and social media tools. We’ve entered a time when we can truly be more effective and efficient with technology.

Where can people find you online?
www.staceycrew.com, staceycrew.blogspot.com, Facebook and @staceycrew on Twitter.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Everyone should analyze how technology can and does work for them, whether it’s personally and/or professionally. Facebook is a great tool for staying in touch with both family and friends, but it also serves a purpose as a business tool. Twitter, on the other hand, is a fabulous tool for networking outside your local venue. If one is attempting to reach a national audience (like myself), Twitter can get you connected to people far and wide. Just remember to follow Twitter etiquette!

Lyn Joins TwitterMoms as Featured Contributor

I’m so excited that I was selected from some 250 applications to become one of 15 featured bloggers on TwitterMoms.com. TwitterMoms.com is a social network of highly influential and “networked” moms who are very active bloggers and Twitterers.

View my page on Twitter Moms: The Influential Moms Network

Twitter and being a mom definitely sum up two of my biggest passions in life and how great to be able to combine the two in a space with other like-minded individuals! Each of the selected contributors will blog on different topics and guess what mine is? You guessed it — social media!

So for my first post I tackled the infamous Twitter phishing incident and offer some tips on what to do if affected and how to avoid these types of scams to start with.

Were you “phished”? If so, weigh in on what happened and if you got it fixed. And feel free to join TwitterMoms. It’s a great network!

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