Yesterday morning I was part of the panel at the IAB Social Media Council’s inaugural ‘Rising Voice in Social Media’ session. The ‘Rising Voice in Social Media’ programme is a five month course designed to to provide junior agency workers and UK marketing managers with a thorough social media induction. More details can be found here.
I gave a short presentation on ‘Six types of social media activity’ based on a party planning analogy Iain previously blogged for the IAB’s Social Media Council. Should you wish to, you can view the presentation I gave here.
Following the session a few people asked me how good an analogy ‘party planning’ is given that parties tend to be a fixed point in time whereas social media activity should – if done right – be an on-going process. After the jump I’ll give you my thoughts on why I think the analogy holds up…
I agree that the analogy isn’t perfect (analogies rarely are) but I would say that one shouldn’t think about, for example, creating a branded blog as being a social media activity. Creating a blog just creates a location where subsequent social media parties can take place. Each blog post constitutes it’s own party and each post should observe the considerations detailed in my presentation:
- You need to promote your blog post
- You need to draw your post to the attention of the ‘cool kids’ (i.e. those people influential in the subject area you’ve blogged about)
- Admittedly the location is taken care of, but don’t forget: you could’ve tweeted or created a Facebook update: you CHOSE to blog this particular story/content
- You need to be a good host by facilitating on going discussion in the comments of the post; responding to questions and feedback
- You need to measure the success the post had: did it generate good discussion? Did it get lots of hits? Would you blog on this subject again?
I guess what this highlights is that, for some, the analogy breaks down when you try to apply the party analogy to both the creation of a social media platform and the specific and individual social media activities you perform on the platform. For what it’s worth, I think i’d always fight for individual social media activities being a better fit for the ‘party planning’ analogy. I think at the level of planning social media locations/platforms some sort of architecture analogy would work better as I believe social media activity is what you do on a platform, not the act of creating a social media location/platform. Sure, sometimes you build a social media location/platform with a very specific social media activity in mind but it doesn’t stop the activity and the platfrom being distinct requiring different planning processes. Am I right to split out social media platform and activity planning processes or do you think they’re one and the same?
Image courtesy of Pink Sherbert Photography.
