Social Media

I'm on social media overload this week. I've been using various tools to network (LinkedIn), catch up with friends (Facebook) and share my reading list (Goodreads). As a marketing and PR professional, though, I'm delving into more and more because social media is clearly becoming an increasingly more important way to reach people. Recent changes to the landscape of traditional media make it even more critical to understand social media's impact on PR and marketing to stay at the top of my game.

It's a struggle, though, to understand what really results in significant ROI or even a meaningful number of impressions. It takes much more time to develop and implement strong social media strategies, mainly because you can't dive in for two weeks and disappear. It's not like buying a schedule on TV or radio or placing a print ad, or even sending out press releases and following up on pitches. You have to start an on-going conversation with your audience; you have to keep up with it, listen and respond. That's why I haven't done too much yet that is work-related. Large for-profit companies are lucky in that they can afford to have staff dedicated to social media. I was at a conference where the director of XBOX marketing shared that they have a full-time staff member dedicated to keeping up their MySpace and Facebook pages. That's it.

No such luck here. I have a great job, but I'd be in trouble if I devoted all of my time to social media. I have to incorporate learning, experimenting and implementing in with all of my other responsibilities. It keeps my job interesting but it's definitely one of the biggest challenges I face right now.