Archive → March, 2010
Social Media “Marketing” is Just PR in a Snazzy Suit
There’s a simple truth to the social media marketing world that people don’t talk about: the term social media “marketing” is something of a lie. More precisely, while there are scammers and spammers aplenty, if you’re using social media as a means to bring in revenue by establishing a dialog between your brand and those who are interested in your product or services, you can’t really call what you’re doing social media “marketing.”
It sounds an awful lot like social media PR to me.
It’s something I have to get off my chest. I run a social media marketing firm, sure. But many of the skills that I use, either in advising clients or in using the various channels, reads like what you should do when you’re being a responsible public relations representative who’s reaching out to a journalist to pitch a story. Everyone’s a potential source of a sudden massive Twitter revolt, so you need to treat everyone you encounter online as if they had the potential to direct the attention of a hundred thousand potential clients at your brand. With that thought in mind, here’s a quick primer on how to convert those traditional PR skills into social media marketing ones.
Yes, this is a new look
I’ve grown weary of the old template (a heavily customized version of the quite excellent Sketchy Theme) and have installed, instead, a template that looked like it had practically been made specifically for OvernightPR called Vermillion. Many thanks to Benoit Burgener for his hard work in making this excellent theme; I suspect that you’ll see me tampering around with the theme a bit in the near future. If you see anything alarming break, please let me know.
In general, I think that you’ll find that the new layout is similar enough to the old one that if you’ve made any use of the site in the past you shouldn’t have any problems. Most of the footer content has been moved to the “Additional Content” pulldown–especially once I replace the “tags” with a lifestream that pulls my Twitter and LinkedIn posts.
New content being posted today, too. Exciting times, I know!