Transparency is not only preached by Obama

We might have found another way to understand the new Wild West. Called Social Media Marketing, An Hour a Day by Dave Evans, it seems like a great book so far. We’re still in it, but initial take-aways include the idea that your clients are talking about you whether like it or not. If you can discretely facilitate the discussions you have a better opportunity to build trust in your product. The word of the year (maybe two years) is “Transparency”.


Also, the author states that from a consumer’s perspective, marketers are clutter and Social Networks, the answer to the clutter. The marketing message that is pushed by the marketer is now, as well, being pushed by the consumer, and with a bit more credibility I dare say.

We’ll keep you posted as epiphanies prevail.

Who am I?

We figured out that the best way to understand Social Networking was to jump in. So we did. Our first quandary was to figure out who we are? Well, we know who we are but it seemed that we didn’t feel it appropriate for one of us to take the spotlight (and sacrifice our personal profiles) so we became the collective PINC person. We were known enough to be able to build our friends and connections successfully, by calling ourselves the name “PINC” but now it seems we are missing that personal touch. As well, Facebook and LinkedIn now provide space for organizations such as ours which we might have used better in the first place - maybe.

 

There doesn’t seem to be a way safe to change the name we had registered as without creating an entirely new profile. If we do that, we have to start from scratch collecting our valuable friends all over again.

 

Questions:

1. Is it better to participate as a person even though we are an organization?
2. Does anyone know how we might make the change?

What the?

I’m somewhat perplexed by Twitter. I “follow” a variety of people from the big names like New York Times and CNN to the nobodies that might have asked, for reasons I don’t yet understand, to follow me. I kind of get it with the big names. Most often they are offering teases so I will follow their links for the latest news. But some of the others! Sometimes I think I’m on a new planet where I just can’t get a grasp of the communication style. I know that often comments are truncated. I’m also getting that the messages don’t always broadcast the way you think they will. But some are so obscure!

Perhaps the problem is just that the fact that you tweet does not make you a marketing genius. With only 140 characters you had better be concise first and clever second. At least that’s my take on it. Anyone else?

Getting Started

In an effort to avoid the “dinosaur syndrome” this writer is attempting to leverage her many years of print and graphics experience into the new world of Web 2.0 or 2.9 or whatever it is called these days. (Help me.) It’s becoming clear that a connection is to be made and that the mature print industry has a lot to learn, and a lot to leverage with this new way of communication.


The exploration began last year in preparation for PINC’s annual PINCShow conference. We opened up on Facebook and LinkedIn and collected hundreds of friends and connections. Now what? The 2010 edition of the PINCShow is scheduled for May 6 in San Francisco. We’ve been exploring the technology to try and understand how we can best reach our target audience: marketers, designers, photographers, multi-media developers and the like. How do we engage them? How do we sell our event without “selling”? How do we make this a practical exercise with measurable results? How do we do it?


I don’t have the answers but I’ll be looking for them. I’ll share what I’ve learned and hope you will share what you know so this doesn’t take until the technology is obsolete to figure out. Please join me in my travels. It will be fun!