Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Beware those obsessed with time normalization and comparing time efforts to others. There is no blanket right or wrong answer to how much time you should spend for your digital PR and marketing. Those attempting to normalize numbers or seek blanket answers really don’t get it and are looking at the wrong things.

At the close of last year, B.L. Ochman noted there were more than 16,000 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter alone. Yet, among the snake oil, there is more than just a handful of talented individuals. There are even more interested individuals.

I’ve made it no secret how much of a fan I am of Digg and Reddit and how much there is we can learn from these networks. In terms of horizontal sharing communities, they’re especially interesting because the entire community gathers around the same content. What this creates is a tribal culture due to the normalized experience everyone has.

Platform-specific communities can be a challenge to grow. It’s daunting because you’re probably already growing a voice for your brand on something like a self-hosted blog. But if you can spark rapid growth in a network external of your own, it can be a consistent organic referral source to the places you’re really interested in funneling traffic. Essentially, it’s a valuable outpost.

Social media is not new. At this point, you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer (all marketers should understand social media by now). The term – once meaningful – has been overused to the point it has become nothing more than a buzzword in the hands of most. Social is simply what the web does, and as a net native who has watched the abuse of the term social media over the years, I’ve slowly become adverse to its use at all.

But unfortunately we have to use it. Too many businesses and clients are enamored with it, or perhaps feel if they don’t start throwing it around they will be viewed as passé.

You have to love the wiki definition for buzzword:

A buzzword is a term of art or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context by nonspecialists who use the term vaguely or imprecisely. Labelling a term a “buzzword” often perjoratively implies that it is now used pretentiously and inappropriately by individuals with little understanding of its actual meaning who are most interested in impressing others by making their discourse sound more esoteric, obscure, and technical than it otherwise would be.

This definition perfectly describes the largest buzzword of 2009 and 2010: social media.