Whenever I'm chatting to fellow food producers these days it's interesting how often the subject of social media comes up:
Are you on facebook?
Do you twitter, or tweet, or whatever?
Who did your website? It's great/shite/boring/fun.
I saw this thing on youtube......
We all recognise the power of this medium but generally speaking, are struggling to figure out how to engage sucessfully. There are some notable exceptions,take a bow Kieran Murphy of Murphys' Ice-Cream but most of us are dabbling with mixed results.
For what it's worth, here's my take on the whole thing (not really the whole thing, but what I know of), as it pertains to those of us selling Irish produced food in competition with multinational competitors boasting some of the most sophisticated marketing machines known.
Facebook: Highly popular means of keeping in touch, used by millions of peope and an excellent means of building a network. Needs constant upkeep and interesting content and cannot be overtly commercial. No better way to turn off your friends or fans.
Twitter: So easy to use and full of great comments from interesting people. So easy for your message to get lost in the noise. Again, constant, persistent selling is a massive turnoff. Difficult to keep input interesting but great means of reaching people if you get it right.
Youtube: The holy grail of viral marketing if only you can get your content outrageous, shocking, cute, uplifting, educational enough to make people want to share with their network.
Overall I am in awe of the potential of the whole medium and the levelling of the playing field so that the innovative upstart can wipe the floor with the conservative corporate if only they strike the right cord.
Where's that camcorder gone....?
The Oul Social Media Thing
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Hi Diarmuid,
I agree that there is great opportunity with this whole "social media thing". For me too the key is to approach it as a means of networking as apposed to simply trying to flog your product/service. It's about dialog and not monologue.
The difficulty I find in engaging with the various social networks the Irish National Rural Network is involved in is the time it takes. The means through which I engage is important and I find the iPhone an excellent way of keeping in contact with my networks. Although there are many tools out there to allow you to keep your networks "in sync" (e.g. sending your facebook updates out to twitter or visa versa) none of them are perfect. However, with that said here are some tools that help me:Seasmic Desktop: It's originally a twitter app but now also integrates with facebook and allows you to send and receive updates from both. The main drawback for me (which is true for all facebook interfacing apps I have used) is that when you use it to update your facebook page/profile and include a link, the link is embedded as part of your fb update and not attached in the way it would be if you were to attach the link via the fb web site. This means the link cannot be shared by your fb friends/fans which, if it were, would include the text "via Wild Orchard" and a link to your profile/page which in turn helps promote your profile/page.TweetDeck: Similar to Seasmic - it's a matter of preferance.Hootsuite: An online version of Seasmic/Tweetdeck but provides nice stats on shortened urlsBit.ly: This is a url shortener. So instead of sending out a big long url (which consumes precious character space on twitter), bit.ly will shorten the url. The great thing about bit.ly is the stats it provides. So, for example, if I were to tweet 20 bit.ly shortened links I can later see how many were clicked on and try guage what my network find most interesting.Feedburner: Publishing your blog (rss) feed via Feedburner allows you to see who is subscribing to your blog and also allows you to offer email subscription to visitors. Having a quick look at Wild Orchards blog, there is no obvious link to your rss feed.These are just a few of the tools available but the ones I most rely on. You can infer from the tools I use that not only do I try and engage my networks as best and often as I can, I also try and manage them as best I can (collecting stats).Hope this is of use. John