You can’t win them all

Multimedia overload is common place when working at a brand and digital agency. But it really hit home when I read an article on Open Forum, a community for small businesses. The article was called Doing One Thing and Doing it well. In it, the author basically talks about the benefits of concentrating on doing one part of business real well, better than anyone else. But is this the answer for how to consume media? Should we just utlise every last tweet? upload and share every picture through Flickr or video through YouTube? Well in many ways yes.

It’s incredibly difficult to keep all the bases covered as an individual, and many corporates struggle to build deliver a rounded and consistent brand message. So my advice would be to concentrate on one channel, watch and learn, then spread your wings at a time that is appropriate. Personally it’s my blog and twitter that fit my needs and so they are the channels you’ll find me in most.

Back to the future

Finally I am back on my blog – this post alone is probably more for myself than anyone reading it. It’s a call to arms. Social media is a great thing, see I’ve said it and I truly believe, but now is the time to use it properly.

I’m not going to ramble here about the who, what, where and why of social media – I’ve got far too many other posts to work through for that. But I will give you a starter for what I’ve liked most over the past week.

Hootsuite – using the free or the paid version, both worth their while if you have the need. I use mine mostly on my iphone and it looks and works just as well as it does on my laptop. Give it a go.

Google instant search – I think the possibilities for Google with instant search are numerous – and far too detailed to talk about in this post, but for the time being it’s certainly made my life easier.

Twitter – I’m a little late blogging about this one but the new design of Twitter is working out brilliantly – so much easier to keep up to date and chat across streams.

Anyway that was just a quick update – finally I am back in the swing of things so my updates should be quicker and more fun.

It’s not what you know but who you know.

I think I finally had the lightbulb moment. Social Media is the perfect business tool because it’s actually using very old fashioned techniques to allow people to communicate with one another. Sounds simple but add a couple of big branded social media names in to the conversation and everyone gets in a bit of a tizz.

Social networking or digital networking as a colleague of mine re-named it, is about people with a need talking to other people with a solution, service or product. Its an easier, faster and more effective way of being able to open the lines of communication.  Through Twitter I can see what 10 of my competitors are doing while arranging to meet a new prospective client or keeping up to date with the latest news across the industry.

The only problem at the moment is that many people are still too afraid to enter conversations through social media, they are frightened to network, so at best they broadcast, then wonder why no one wants to listen.

We’ll all get there eventually, maybe we will still need email, maybe Facebook and Twitter will dissolve into history, but the techniques will remain the same, even if the tools evolve.