Miscellaneous Uses for a Blog

I did and experiment earlier this week. If you read this blog, you were a part of it. No, the experiment won’t cause irratablity or incontience. It won’t make you wake up in the morning wondering where the last 30 years have gone. In fact… it doesn’t effect you at all. It effects me.

Without looking at the previous blog post, tell me what my new company does?

*insert sound of chirping crickets here*

Chances are you blew right through this soliloquy about my company:

We save companies money by assisting them in making decisions that are weather dependent. This is done in a variety of ways including our short and long range weather forecasts specific to their needs. Another side of the business is researching our weather theory called the LRC (Lezak’s Recurring Cycle).

Ok, so maybe a few of you got to the end of it. But, if you are like many people, half of this statement simply got skimmed over, if not the entire paragraph. Why? In this world of interruptive marketing, we have grown accustomed to seeing and hearing brand messages when we don’t want to see them. It doesn’t matter if they are commercial breaks on television, spam messages in your inbox, or even brand placement INSIDE of content you are engaged in, they get ignored. The overwhelming volume of these impersonal and useless mumbo-jumbo has conditioned us to simply ignore them.

Exclusive!
Save money!
Synergy
New and Improved!

Are you serious? These phrases have been so overused, that they become mute. What would be better words/phrases?

Exclusive – You will only see this here
Save money – This is good for your pocketbook
Synergy – This helps you work together
New and Improved – We want to bring you great products

Those are just some examples off the top of my head. But if your communications, mission statement, or elevator pitch sounds like something you got off the old “Dilbert Mission Statement Generator”, nothing but words and phrases designed to make you sound intelligent, you’ve MISSED the point of communication in this day and age. Be human. Communicate as if someone was your friend, not a potential customer.

This is not easy to do if you have spent years in the world of one way communications. When you communicate, expect the response to your communications to be someone talking to you face-to-face. Don’t communicate with the mindset that their sole response is reaching into their pocketbook.

I always love to give examples about the benefits of engaging in social media. Whether it’s Frank from @comcastcares , Dell’s Digital nomads project, the music of Matthew Ebel , or any number of organizations utilizing the power of the conversation to help their companies, they help people think about what social media could do for their organization. The need for companies to listen to the conversations online was a big topic of conversation at last night’s Social Media Club – KC tweet up.

In pops Chris Brogan with what has to be the best post I’ve seen regarding how a company can utilize social media on a daily basis. "What does a day in the life of a social media marketer look like? "  While Chris leaves out some aspects of monitoring social media (there’s no way you could fit all of it into one example), Chris’ post is an EXCELLENT starting point to get you thinking.

What does a day in the life of a social media marketer look like? I’m not a marketer, so if I get some of your terms wrong, forgive me. I thought maybe we could do a walkthrough of a fictitious social media marketer, Yolanda, for a small hotel group (four hotels) in Boston. I picked hotels just because otherwise I’d have picked a software company. Let’s walk through a workflow, and then reconstruct it in bullets at the end.

ChrisBrogan.com – Workflow- Social Media for Marketers

Do YOU monitor and engage in the conversations online for you brand (company or personal brand)? Have you had a company or brand reach out to you that made an impact? Leave a comment with some examples about how you engage!