Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Peter Shankman is the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and Founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc.  A specialist in social networking and viral marketing, Peter is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and worldwide connector.  He is talking about using social media or a facet thereof to spearhead new marketing campaigns and initiatives.  There has to be an understanding that just because it exists does not mean you have to use it.  Peter believes that getting smarter about social networking is imperative.  That we all must learn it’s not just about making something viral, instead it is about making something good. Some illuminating tidbits from Peter’s keynote presentation – Social media does not exist.  What does exist is the ability to screw up to a larger audience in a much shorter period of time. Reality is the person with the biggest network will generally win.  The beauty of the viral nature of social media is that you have to create something more intelligent and harder to copy.  You have to not only come up with new ideas but also find better ways to implement them. The social media shiny objects and new technology sometimes make us forget that there are basics we have to follow. 1st rule – Transparency  – if you screw up, tell people, fix it and move on – tell people what you do, how you do it 2nd rule – Relevance – You have to know how your audience likes to get their information.  If you don’t know, Ask Them! If you are not reaching your audience in the right way, they will go somewhere else and they will tell everyone else. 3rd rule – Brevity – Worship at the art of sending short relevant mobile enabled messages to any audience anywhere – not necessarily a specific product.   Learn to write!  Knowing how to write properly will allow you to craft messages that are relevant and will get your audiences attention. 4th rule – Top of Mind -  Do what you need to so that you stay at the top of people’s minds.   It’s not about you, it is about others. You have to make the effort to reach out to the people in your network.  You have to be involved and you have to involve others. Social Media will become a huge lava lamp.  Everyone you meet in your network will be a blob of oil in the lamp.  Relevance becomes the heat in the lamp that causes various blobs to rise together and then to fall based on the merging of interactions. The day is here when everything you do will be based on trust, relevance and brevity.  At the end of the day, everything we do will be based on our customer service.