Social Media Marketing is sort of a buzz phrase these days. Social Media as a whole encompasses a variety of sites like or similar to MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon and there are literally 100s of others. I have a lame myspace profile and an even lamer facebook profile, but in the end, those sites just bored the hell out of me. Why not just call each other or God forbid go meet up somewhere? Hell, I am only 35, but to me MySpace and Facebook seem like a complete fad and waste of time. God gave a real world to explore, why immerse myself in a virtual one?
But my wife got into myspace, so at times, I could sort of see the appeal. But not really. The marketing aspect of myspace and facebook is interesting, but after helping to pioneer embeddable videos and widgets using another site I own, PcPlanets.com, the whole scene just bored me. Which is pretty apparent if you look at the design of PcPlanets.com. The content is updated, but the design is quite dated.
So I’ve been slow to catch on to this whole notion of social media marketing. I’ve never used Digg.com and never bothered with StumbleUpon or Squidoo either, although I’ve seen plenty of mentions of them in the media and on various webmaster forums; but, it just seemed like a waste of time.
When I did finally visit Digg, I totally just took the low road and spammed them with content and articles. Of course that didn’t work. So fast forward another nine months and now I am giving social media marketing another shot, but this time I am going to engage the community only after doing a great deal of research and planning.
Learnings:
1) I need a brand. If I am going to become an active social participant, I need a simple, bold, memorable identity. Which means I need an avatar. After scrolling many of the SU (StumbleUpon) profiles, I found that I investigated the users with best avatars first. In returning, or in visiting other sites, or when just stumbling around, I was able to recall avatars that were clean, bold and identifiable. So it makes sense that if I am to participate online, I need an avatar.
2) I can’t do it alone. My objective is to develop an influencer profile on SU. It’s not going to be easy, it will take months of work. Perhaps I’ll never quite get there, because I am a busy guy. In the end, it is my hope that by really working at contributing to the community and working to network with some of the influencers on SU, that my profile strength will increase and I’ll turn the heads of a few veterans who will DIGG or Stumble some of my stuff.
3) Great content. I’ve got some innovative ideas for blog postings and content relevant to the real estate and vacation rental verticals,as well as some stuff relevant to coding, marketing and rich media. I’ll take my time, work on some solid content, correct grammar and spelling, and overall put out content that has value to others.
In the end, I hope to really focus on writing or obtaining some informative content about regional areas of the world that have high concentrations of vacation rentals. By writing informed material, perhaps sometimes even controversial material, about regional matters, I hope to draw attention, traffic and additional writings from other bloggers, journalists and renters to those areas which in the end will increase my deep internal links, which will increase my search engine rankings.
Thus when it’s all said and done, I will have built up a strong profile filled with like minded individuals with an interest in travel, lodgings and vacation rentals. Hopefully I’ll be stumbling and reviewing other sites daily and submitting some great content for the members of my network to stumble and review. Along the way we’ll all learn a great deal about social media networking, learn a bunch from each other and hopefully drive a ton of long term social media and search engine traffic to our respective sites.
I think it’s going to be a long and hard process. I will publish the results as they come in. Let’s begin.
