Experts and Gurus and Evangelists, Oh My!

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick to death of hearing people refer to themselves as “Social Media Guru” and “Social Media Expert”. Enough already. The fact is, that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to actually claim those titles and have them be accurate. Our culture, this technology, and the amazing things people all over the world are doing with it – moves too fast.  One cannot be an expert if your field of expertise changes on a minute-by-minute basis. No can do, lovelies.

I really don’t care for the ‘evangelist’ title either, but at least I get that one and I feel it’s more accurate than others, even if it does conjure up images for me of religious fanatics that travel around in circus tents promising to cure people. Wait, maybe that’s exactly the point. Hm. Look at it this way though – if we’re reading and commenting on blogs, updating our status on Facebook, posting photos to Flickr, uploading videos to YouTube, and twittering like our lives depend on it – aren’t we ALL social media evangelists? I think so, even if it’s in a small way. If we’re doing these things, we obviously believe in these things and feel they’re worth our time to do. We may not be preaching the benefits of these things to conference rooms full of people, but we’re walking the walk and that’s the important part.

We’re not ‘experts’ – not any of us. We do the best we can and try to keep up as much as we’re able, but stuff changes fast these days and even if you know pretty much everything there is to know – someone else is doing something new that you’ve never heard about.

Do we call ourselves experts and gurus and evangelists to look cool? To try to stand out among the ever-growing crowd of people using social media? How much do you stand out when everyone and their uncle starts referring to themselves as an expert? Yeah, not much.

Maybe we should focus a little bit more on just doing our best at the things we really love doing. Not because it gets us a crowd of people following us, or worshipping us, but just because it makes *us* happy. Let’s not try to keep up with the Joneses, or the Brogan’s or the Scoble’s – let’s just do our thing and be all about it. It’s not a competition, peeps. Let’s just all do our best at being good people who love what we do.

This post inspired by the quote I’m about to get tattooed on my arm next month -
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” – Rumi

Educational Marketing with Twitter

I was just reading a post this morning about using twitter as a marketing tool. It talks a bit about how higher education might want to pay more attention to what companies are doing and how they’re using twitter to market their brand and interact with customers.

I must say that I’m feeling pretty good about how twitter is being used at Penn State. I think that we’ve got some pretty great communities coming together and with yesterday’s announcement that Penn State Live is now using twitter to send out news stories, I feel as though maybe we’re moving into the mainstream with things.

That being said, I think we have some work to do with thinking outside the box a bit and considering how we might start to engage people outside the normal groups.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post talking about companies using twitter:

One of the most comprehensive lists of individuals or organizations who use Twitter is Jonathan Kash’s Twitter Brand Index.  This soon-to-be fellow alum from Norwich University’s MBA program has done a great job in compiling hundreds of cross-industry examples of organizations or individuals using Twitter.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Carnival Cruiselines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Air and JetBlue Airlines use it as a way to announce special deals and communicate with travelers.
• Amazon has both Amazon Deals, which offers special deals on a new product every day, and their Book Finder bot.
• Dell has a whole slew of people you can follow, from all various parts of the business.
• Home Depot has someone in their corporate communications office that is “moonlighting on Twitter to help out our customers”
• Wine Enthusiast posts “Twitter only” deals on wine, polls for followers and generally amusing wine-related articles.
• H&R Block has someone on Twitter to engage customers and give tax advice.
• Non-profits such as the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and March of Dimes, post news stories and announcements that are of interest to their users.
• Government agencies are also getting in on the fun – NASA has over 2,000 followers, you can get live updates from both the House and the Senate, and many state and local governments are providing updates as well (including my home state of Vermont!).
• If it’s culture you want, you can get it from a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and the US Holocaust Museum.

Now, here’s some ideas they put forth for educational uses:

Think about how your institution can use the tool beyond syndicating news releases and sports results.  How can you create value for prospective students, current students, parents, and alumni?  Here are a few ideas to get your started:

• Give out an application/interview/campus visit tip of the day
• Offer quirky advise to students who have enrolled and are going to be moving onto campus soon
• Negotiate with your bookstore to offer occasional coupons and specials just for Twitter users

I personally love these ideas. I’ve been toying with some ideas to use twitter for World Campus students and the first idea I had was to use it to announce new sections or additional seats of courses that would be opening the following day. We have a lot of students that are desperate to get into a class that’s full, but if they knew that more seats or an additional section of a course was opening the next day, they’d have a chance to enroll before others. That’s value-added, for sure and would give students a *reason* to follow us.

I’m also considering making “special” announcements over twitter and Facebook so that students following us in those venues will learn about the ‘fun’ things before we use normal means of communication like email or newsletters.

Lots to think about, and I’m sure we can come up with many interesting ways to use twitter. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Ding Dong! Flower Delivery!

I arrived home today to find a large box on my front porch. When I realized it was a flower delivery, my mind raced trying to figure out who on earth would send me flowers. My husband’s a fabulous man, but his flowers generally are delivered in person so chances were good that it wasn’t him.

Who was it? Let’s watch this video and find out:

Oh yes my friends. I received flowers from Twinity. To congratulate me on the purchase of my new apartment. My VIRTUAL apartment. In Twinity. Dear God, that is brilliant. BRILLIANT.

I am loving the “crossover” that I’m seeing more and more between virtual environments and offline marketing. First I saw Circuit City with their iPod Nano giveaway (find it in SL, get one in RL) and now a ‘real life’ gesture perfectly normal for a house-warming being used on a virtual home purchase as well. I really love that idea. I think that we’re seeing a lot more instances of the mixing of online and offline communities, merchandise and marketing. Maybe people are finally starting to understand that all of our online relationships, experiences and communities truly do have a ‘real’ component.

Good job, Twinity. I’m impressed.

Marketing in Virtual Worlds

Clicking through my RSS feeds tonight, I came across this great post in Massively.  It does a great job of talking about marketing in Second Life and how someone really has to spend time in the space to *understand* the space.

“Where are your marketers going wrong in virtual worlds? There’s a bit of a list, but we’ll talk about two particularly relevant ones here. One is mistaking the medium for the market, and the other is failing to understand how people are using the medium.

Mistaking the medium for the market is a pretty obvious one, but that doesn’t make it any less prevalent. It is a classic stereotyping mistake. Take a look at Second Life; “Freaks and geeks” is one of the most common views of the demographic. Another is that it is slanted towards the younger crowd (say, under twenty-fives or even under twenties). Both of those views are, essentially, dead wrong. If you’re operating your marketing strategy based on these views, you’ve shot yourself in the foot from the get-go.”

………………

“What you need to do now is to understand how the users are using the medium. That’s more than just a quick field-trip.

Just as you would do with marketing and product development in the physical world, you need to go and actually use the new media yourself. You need to interact with people, watch people, and find the gaps. If you don’t understand why people are using the medium or how they are using the medium, the odds are good that the only effect your messages will have will be negative.

Find out how people are using the medium, and the sorts of messages they are receptive to in that medium. Look for spaces in which your messages will fit, and how to place them there. Otherwise you’re just blowing your marketing budget on pissing people off.

You won’t absorb a new medium in an hour, or a day — and like more established media (newspapers, magazines, radio, film and television) the position of each medium in the attention-space of the market changes slowly over time, as do the uses that the market puts them to. As with these older, more established media, you have to keep current.

Every medium is a challenge and an opportunity, even the older media. Human interactions with media are constantly evolving and changing, and if you are keeping up, you will be more successful than those who are lagging behind.”

Read the whole post here. Please.