Well after a long battle to determine if I will or will not use certain media I’ve slowly taken the plunge into using it. In any case there are a few tools that many people deem necessary to get traffic. I believe in word of mouth first and foremost. I ran into a dilemma where my immediate contacts didn’t reach enough ears to get recognition or a “viral response”. I’ve done various test from emailing friends and family, colleagues and started to tweet about my musings on the web and discounts and deals I find.
These are all a chain of other peoples findings and well it does nothing for me but register a bleep of interest. Soon I relaunched my site that is SEO optimized, AJAX driven and has some of the latest Open Source techniques. I’m getting higher traffic and better feedback from potential clients. However it also opened up Pandoras box to spam. So as far as social media I used my facebook account to reach my immediate group. What I found odd was that at the time I posted vs the time users are actually using it didn’t yield that many responses. The Social Network is here to stay. It has a certain craft and angle to make it profitable and usable.
Recently I had a creative meeting where the “social” aspect was thrown left and right. Funny thing is my colleague and I both figured that people invest to much time into these “social” tools that they forget about the goal of their sites. These networking tools are diluting the value of services companies and individuals provide. I don’t want to confuse this with teams that are devoted to customers with assigned teams to manage the PR options available through facebook, myspace, blogger etc. I just can’t help wonder as an individual trying to stay on top of technology, do I really have to be on top of every component to stay competitive in my service offerings? I may answer that at another date when I get more information about my findings.
