Why and How to Do Social Media @ CreateSouth

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Twitter Got Me a Speaking Gig!

Within a week of diving into twitter, I heard CreateSouth, a new web/tech/social media conference, was happening in my town the next weekend (4/19/08).  A few days later, they had a cancellation and I volunteered to speak.  I had 22 hours to prepare a half hour talk... about social networking- how serendipitous!

I spoke on social networking and social media, and I got the crowd involved- how social of me! 

Here's an overview of the talk, notes come later and here's the mp3 of my social media talk (opens new window).

1. What is online social media?
2. How does it relate to web 2.0?
3. What are some social media websites and services?
4. What are the benefits of social media?  WIIFM?
5. I mentioned my twitter success roadmap, which I posted the other day
6. I had some homework for getting into social networking, didn't have time to go through, that's here too

Listen to the mp3 while you read (opens new window)

What is Social Media?

• Web 2.0, which I'll differentiate in a minute
• Technology that enables networking- the web makes it possible for you to connect further and deeper through social networks on similar interests than ever before- like the mooses and lions online?  Better than those lunchtime  networking groups
• Open enough for you to navigate the 6 degrees of separation- you can finally go meet kevin bacon- idea that to reach any person in the world you only have to go through 6 or 7 other people.
• A way to meet your friends' friends so you can pretend to be their friends- a way to make pretend friends that you never meet in real life.  No!  it's a way to meet new friends and go to the bar with them and get funny drunk pictures of them to share on flickr.  No seriously, you can start new friendships this way, for real.

What is Web 2.0?


The coolest tag cloud of web 2.0 ever on Wikipedia

Compared to Web 1.0, Web 2.0 is...

• Web 1.0 was companies... Web 2.0 is communities
• Web 1.0 was homepages... Web 2.0 is blogs
• Web 1.0 was edited and produced... Web 2.0 is raw
• Web 1.0 used categories (taxonomy)... in Web 2.0 we collaborate on tags (folksonomy)
• Web 1.0 was advertised... Web 2.0 is viral
  

For more read Tim O'Reilly's very fine article about web 2.0

Example Social Media Web 2.0 Websites and Services

1. Wikipedia - collaborative encyclopedia
   
2. YouTube - upload video, comment, respond to videos with more videos
   
3. LinkedIn - professional networking, resume 2.0, get references on your online resume
   
4. Facebook - socializing, friends (myspace is bigger than facebook, tho FB gets more int'l traffic, but way slower in growth and ability to create facebook apps is putting them ahead- myspace is clunky and spammy and not as web 2.0 compatible as facebook- this may change with myspace's new developer platform)
5. Yelp - local reviews
6. Technorati/Digg/Reddit/Sphinn - social bookmarking- add and vote for your favorite news, blog posts, articles
   
7. Upcoming/Eventful - share coming events
8. Feedburner - share your RSS feeds
9. Pandora - find similar music to your faves and who else likes it
10. Flickr - share images
11. Twitter - messaging; old style IM doesn't count as web 2.0 because you can't see your friends' friends or what they're talking about with them- with twitter, you can- it's the web 2.0 version of IM
12. StumbleUpon - vote up or down any websites/images/videos - randomly view well-reviewed stuff in your chosen interest categories, message ppl with same interests
13. Friendfeed - aggregates lots of 2.0 services so you can follow your friends on multiple social networking sites - wow, is that 3.0?  :-)  Dunno, what 3.0 is hasn't been agreed on yet.
    

What's In It For You: The Benefits of Social Media/Web 2.0

• Find new ideas. Revise and improve business strategy: e.g. Twitter keeps me up to date on the newest apps and tools and sites
• Find new opportunities.  Exponential business potential increase.
• Meet new people, build long-distance industry relationships. I met Dave Slusher and Paul Reynolds on Twitter and got to speak at CreateSouth. As networking goes, it's a highly efficient way to meet new people- never could replace F2F (face to face) but can enable and enhance F2F and phone business relationships.
  
• Influence online opinion-drivers in your industry (bloggers, twitterers, youtubers).  If you're nice and you share (give), people will like you, and you'll make friends.
• It's a new form of online PR, can shape and increase your reputation.  Old world pr is evolving, and getting its news and information more and more from web 2.0 sources, so if you affect web 2.0 info, you can affect the traditional media as well

Reasons to Social Media for Marketing

- Consumer numbness to ads- overexposure to advertising
- Consumer skepticism, desire for authenticity and relationship
- Power of word of mouth and recommendation

Homework: 8 Steps to Launch Your Social Networking Efforts

1. Get on Friendfeed
2. Sign up for all the web 2.0 services it monitors
3. Start participating in the easiest ones for you- my top suggestions would be: digg, stumbleupon, twitter, youtube, flickr, your blog
4. Put friendfeed on your facebook account
5. Write for your own blog at least twice a week.
6. When you blog, for each post, stumble it, digg it, sphinn it, twitter the url to your followers
7. Peruse digg, stumble, sphinn, etc.- find great info- twitter individual posts-
8. Blog lists of best related info in top 10 resources lists, twitter that blog post

For your blog post and social bookmarking titles, check with this utility:
http://danzarrella.com/laf-title-check

Let me know how it goes!
Brian