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?