Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Today I wanted to share an observation about a common mistake PR and marketing professionals make when focusing efforts in social media. In essence, most companies don’t focus on growing opt-in at the source for their digital communities. Instead they end up spending more time in other people’s platforms.

Working with teams on countless social marketing and PR projects internally, with clients and even random ideas purely for fun has given me an appreciation for keeping everyone motivated and interested in what they’re doing.  In fact it’s tough for me to recall an ultra-successful project that occurred in a situation without a majority of the team motivated and passionate about what they were working on.

You would have to be crazy to completely yield your digital presence to services owned by other people. There are so many reasons you should maintain an independent presence, and most of those who have been active digitally well before the popularization of privately (vs. independently) owned web services know this.

The number stops them in their tracks every time. When I tell people that the New York Times has more than 700,000 fans of their Facebook page, they say something like, “They have THAT MANY?” Yes they do. There’s a whole lot of hullabaloo these days in the social media world about Facebook fan pages – and with good reason.

As a perpetual observer/analyzer of what people share and why, it’s fascinating to me to study content that spreads. As such, I document/bookmark much of the web’s hottest content for my own insight/analysis, but I also share with readers here too.

The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded it to A-list technology blog Techdirt. Mike Masnick been doing a great job of covering the entertainment industry’s (rather entertaining) ongoing misunderstanding of this whole social web thing, so I’m pleased to see him share the story with his community to continue that dialog.