Social Media

I work for Washington's AT Progam, we have a blog, facebook page and twitter account. Developing a strategy for social media and making it fit into a larger marketing plan has been a challenge. We started by primarily posting about products that might interest people in a scatter gun approach. Recently we decided to start a new experiment where we will be using our social media to target a (slightly) more specific audience. We decided to try to reach parents and educators. We are currently identifying forums, blogs and other social media sites where we can listen to conversations and find out what topics people are talking about or if there are specific products or functional needs that are continually being addressed. Listening will hopefully inform blog topics for us as well as give us an opportunity to join the conversation, where appropriate, introduce ourselves and hopefully build our own audience from the people we meet. (We first developed some policies for social media use to standardize how we interact on other people's blogs and how we respond to comments on our own). We're in the beginning phase of this experiment so I don’t have any results but it seems to have helped us now that we have a more focused purpose on social media. We will continue to post on topics that seem worthwhile and to promote internal activities but when we have a couple of months worth of blogs written we will announce that one day a week will be devoted to posts on education.

Samantha Murphy
http://watap.org/

Thanks for this posting. I think the importance of targeting when using any medium is important and you are clearly working the same logic with social media. I hope you share your results on this forum when you are ready to. It is an ongoing learning effort as we all work with very new social media.