Incentive - April 2008 - (Page 30) PRIMER S o c i a l N e tw o r k i n g f o r N e w b i e s By Carolyn Burns Bass his article was assigned without ever picking up a phone. Incentive magazine Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Juergens sent me a message through Facebook asking if I’d like to write a piece about social media and networking. Let me back up a bit. When my teenage kids found out I’d set up a MySpace page, they thought I was having a mid-life crisis and was out to relive my lost youth. Within a month, I had as many people in my friends list as my 18-year-old son. Once I got MySpace mastered, I joined Facebook. Facebook and MySpace aren’t just for teens and college students anymore. Major corporations have established MySpace pages and have created user groups that feature membership contests and interactive blogs. Facebook, originally created for college students to meet and greet each other, is close on the heels of MySpace, with corporations and major brands creating company profiles and user/fan groups by the hundreds. Social media and Web 2.0 are terms used to refer to Web forums, online networking sites, wikis, blogs and podcasts. The sites are hip, the graphics are bright, the interactivity factors are fun and challenging. Like many trends, is it really a surprise it first took hold with youths? As an entrepreneur and writer, I saw the potential for social media and plugged myself in, despite the age-discrimination from my teenagers. MySpace and Facebook are free, as are the main blog-hosting sites. My only cost in spreading my name and company profile around the global village is my time. One of the initial challenges early T field—and your readers. You develop a readership first by letting your colleagues and friends know of your new media endeavor. Ask them to forward your blog or posts to others. In the course of building your blog or profile page, invite people into your circle, whether they are MySpace or Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, or RSS-feed subscribers. While you’re working on building your social network, be sure to visit and read and comment on the posts of colleagues within your network. Promote Your Business Carolyn Burns Bass is principal of Word*Art Solutions (www .wordartsolutions.com), a business communications consultancy specializing in travel marketing, and is the chapter administrator for SITE-SoCal (www.site-socal.com). She publishes a blog called Ovations (www.ovations.blogspot.com) and has more friends than her son on MySpace. E-mail her at carolyn@wordartsolutions.com adopters found with the Web was driving people to their Web sites. After some companies hired expensive designers to make splashy pages, filled them with loads of text and blinking graphics, they expected people to flock to their sites. It didn’t happen. Just because you build it doesn’t mean people will come. The same is true with any social media platform if you don’t know how to use it. Social media is reciprocal. It’s collaborative. It’s an interactive conversation between you—an expert in your Blogs and most social media platforms are indexed online, which means that a search engine can raise your blog comments. The more posts you have published with your name and URL, the higher your search ranking will be. Before I created my blog in 2005, when I googled my professional name, it appeared on the third or fourth page. After about a month of publishing my blog, plus reading and commenting on other blogs, I discovered my name was bumped to the numberone position and now fills each spot for the next six pages and beyond. Ben Martin, director of communications & new media for the Virginia Association of Realtors, writes a blog for association executives. In his December 22, 2007 post, “The Year Social Media Changed My Life,” Martin provides a month-by-month breakdown of the stellar trajectory his career has taken since he took a determined path in social networking. “After three years of blogging, it really paid off for my bottom line this year. Between the new job and some sideline 30 | Incentive | April 2008 | incentivemag.com http://www.wordartsolutions.com http://www.wordartsolutions.com http://www.site-socal.com http://www.ovations.blogspot.com http://incentivemag.com
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