Social Media: A New Way of Communicating and Reaching Your Audience

I don’t know about you, but I have found all this Social Media out there a bit overwhelming and confusing. In fact, today when I went to the Net Lingo Dictionary, it said, “Social Media is not defined yet.” No kidding!

These have been my questions for some time now:

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

• What is Social Media, how does it work and where should I focus my time and attention? 
• What do I really need to know about it?
• How do all the different choices out there such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace etc all work together or do they?
• How can I leverage the different Social Media to bring more attention to my business?
• What kind of time should I really be spending each week blogging and learning new skills that will really help me keep up with the pace of change in the world of Social Media?

The list of my questions goes on and on it seems. Well today, many of my most important questions were finally answered!

MY QUESTIONS GET SOME ANSWERS FINALLY!

This morning I took the most fascinating class on social media with Blaine Millet, Co Founder and President of CEI, Customer Experiences Inc and Clay Loges, Founder and CEO  of Yodio. They explained that “Social Media is an umbrella term for a variety of tools and activities that enhance communication.”

I loved the class and learned so much about how to understand, leverage and link social media such as Twitter, Linked In, Facebook and others. Each of these distinct and different social media are then built around a central communication strategy that links back to one’s blog.

It’s definitely a new way to communicate and reach your audience which is as Blaine and Clay put it: “faster, cheaper and deeper” than traditional marketing methods.

THE GOAL OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The old days of traditional marketing are over it seems. The goal of social media is to “get more attention and build both stronger and more relationship equity.” It is also about “making those relationships faster and deeper.”

The center of the Social Media Universe is The Blog where you control the content and “build  a persona that people want to follow.” The way they explained this was that “People connect to you because it is YOU they want to connect to. So either BE YOU or Be GONE!”

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECT EITHER!

One of the most important things communicated this morning was the fact that you don’t have to be perfect on all of these various tools. This is a hard concept for those of us perfectionists out there. We have a hard time letting go of something until it is polished and perfect.

Blaine and Clay believe that the trend in TV and out on the internet in your blog is to reveal “the story behind the story.” It is this “story behind the story” that is most interesting to your audience and has the potential to totally endear  you and your company to that “opted in” audience.

GET TO THIS CLASS AND LEARN MORE ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA AND HOW IT ALL WORKS!

For those of you who really want an opportunity to unpack all these confusing terms and issues, I urge you to consider taking Blaine and Clay’s class. It’s only a few hours of your time, it’s reasonable in price and well worth the effort to drag yourself out of the office to learn something that might make all this Social Media world a little less overwhelming.

CHANGE IS COMING WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Change is coming. A new way of communicating and reaching your audience through all the various choices of Social Media is here now. We all need to learn to begin to “bridge the gap” between the
way things used to be done and work and how they are evolving and working now. This knowledge will help us all in how we promote and leverage our individual brands using all these Social Media tools!

In fact, I would say Blaine and Clay’s class a really terrific
opportunity to get out in front of this Social Media trend that is
coming whether you like it, understand it, want it to happen or not!

CONTACT BLAINE AND CLAY TO FIND OUT MORE!