Social Media Meetings

Hello, and thanks for reading my first ever personal blog post.

Now I have made many blog posts in the past, but this is the first blog and post I have made for little ole me.

Yesterday I had a meeting with my business partner and long time friend Silran666, a.k.a. Manny and my new friend and Social Media Guru 365daygirl a.k.a. Apryl.

We talked for almost 3 hours on how social media has worked for other companies, how we are using their stories to mold our efforts, and what we think the future holds for us and how we use social media.

One of the primary things that I took away from that meeting was that it is imperative that you brand your business in such a way that you can't lose that brand. Specifically we were talking about companies and how they hire people to do their social media activities for them and some of the pitfalls that come with that versus those that handle social media directly.

The biggest pitfall to hiring someone to do it for you is that you run an extremely high risk of losing that person and all of the investments in time, funds, resources, etc. that allowed that person to be successful. Basically, when they walk out the door, all or a large portion of your social media following will go with them. Another pitfall of having someone else do it for you is that they may not know what they are doing and will unwittingly sabotage your business from within.

In many ways, doing it yourself has the same pitfalls to a degree. Say you are partners with someone and they break away, you can't split the social media fans as if you were parents in a divorce. Fans will go with the people they love and leave the ones they don't care for. They may even leave your product or brand forever because of the drama involved. The other problem, as I have stated above, is that you can be your own worst enemy.

Lets talk some more about being your own worst enemy. One of the things that Silran666. 365daygirl, and I discussed yesterday is being your own worst enemy and how to handle that. Specifically we talked about a recent post that Silran666 posted and some of the flack he received for making that post.

Here's the short story. Silran666 posted that there was an 8.4 earthquake in China. He had seen it directly from the seismic stations website and believed it to be true. He posted that on Facebook and Twitter to see if anyone else knew anything.

Let the post bashing commence.

Shortly after that post it was published by that station that it was a faulty sensor and that there was no quake. Silran666 took a beating from a few people that he knows because their parents, grandparents, etc were scared. He heard from other friends about how useless his efforts were because "most of the time it's misinformation that causes more bad than good" and many more comments like that.

So, how do we handle that? Simple, with transparency and integrity. In social media, you are naked to the world. Everything you write is basically a global post that anyone with a computer, phone or other form of data capturing device can see and, in most cases, comment on. Being transparent and acknowledging your mistakes with integrity is the first step to being able to survive in this new social media world.

There were many more topics and discussions similar to that yesterday but they will have to wait for another time. Because of that, we decided that we will start having these discussions on a regular basis and record the results as a podcast or something similar.

It was great fun and you should follow @365daygirl and @Silran666 on twitter if you like witty comments, tips on fashion and beauty, and just seeing what's new in the world from two people who seem to have their fingers on the pulse of social media. I should add that we held this meeting at Coffee Connection in Salt Lake City, Ut. You can follow @coffeeconnection on twitter and you can find it in SLC at 1588 South State Street, it's on the west side of the street and parking is in back. Give them a try if you haven't already.

More to come...