Subtle But Powerful Advantage of Social Media
Some people get to visit DC often. I wish I could say I was one of those people, but I can’t. With back to back in-plant assignments at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, the city I have flown into the most in the last few years is Detroit. While I have nothing against Detroit, it’s just not quite the same as our nation’s capital.
Last blog I talked about a presentation I made to Print*Pixels*Plastic, a special interest group of the Print Production Club of Washington made up of the creative and production community. I talked about surviving the recession, how to emerge stronger and innovation.
The innovation portion garnered the greatest interest as I discussed how social media can be an innovative way to market your own services and create a new offering to your marketing services.
Of course as the question and answer period began so did the toughest questions about time commitment and successes. Those who are avid fans of social media will often talk about intermediate time requirements meaning maybe you blog once or twice a week or 15-20 minutes each time and Twitter throughout the day during breaks and quite times.
These avid fans can also quote case histories about success stories. I discussed this perspective and also mentioned that for most people the time commitment is larger than most admit to, perhaps an hour a day, and the successes are fewer.
When asked why I am active, I discussed a more subtle advantage of social media, which is the role of increasing ones presence in the listings of search engines. In other words, as the search engines such as Google start to include social media listings you can get closer to the first page or get higher on the first page of a Google search.
Going back to the publishing analogy that Social Media Marketing is like magazine publishing, we could add that getting first page status on a search engine is like getting a front page ad in a publication.
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Alan Sciulli commented:
Howie was a great speakeer to have at our event in Washington. Unfortunately when it comes to Graphic Arts, no one thinks of Washington DC. When in truth we have some of the more robust inplant companies and full service print facilities on the East Coast. the agency world in DC is still growing. There is a perception that to be in DC you have to political. so you might see where the disconnect lies.
For those of yuo who are interested in learning more about the Graphic Arts commuity in DC, please reasch out to me at alan@productionclubdc.org
PrintFirm commented:
I've been using SMM techniques for a while now and they work very well. It takes a little while for people to trust you, but if you are helpful and willing to keep helping people will visit or shop or whatever your business may be. Linking your twitter account to your blog is great because when you blog, it updates in twitter.
