Social Media Content Marketing

  A new social media website wants to encourage us to  follow the advice of our friends instead of complete strangers . With perpetual skepticism, sarcasm approaching warning levels, and being named yet again to  People Magazine 's "Sexiest Curmudgeon of the Year" list, I've somehow accumulated more friends than I really should have. (O.K. so I  may  have substituted the word "messiest" with "sexiest"   in the previous sentence.) And some of my best friends are strangers I have only corresponded with through social media; ones I have never met and not likely I ever will. If you think about it, you didn't really  choose the friends you saw this weekend. More likely, they're your neighbors, your family, work associates, fellow students who sat next to you in Algebra class, or the parents of the other kids on our kid's team. We "promote" these people to friendship status due to their close proximity to our lives, their ti...

Social media and relationships: that's what the new Facebook couples pages is all about. Listing yourself as "In a relationship" is so traumatic that it's probably ended more relationships than Vegas trips and Victoria's Secrets catalogs combined. But now, a page to illustrate the relationship?  ( For more information on this please see "Kiss of Death" .)  Instead let's discuss the business/customer social media "marriage." First, if you believe the adage "Marriage is a two-way street" then I might have due cause to suspend your relationship license.  Or maybe you've never walked down the plank, er I mean, aisle. Marriages — even the most successful ones  — are more often than not comprised of a giver and a taker. And the social media business relationship is no different except the business is always the giver and your customer is always the taker. As the reader/follower/customer, I want, want, want. I don...

Did you see what I did there? I front-loaded the headline with tried and true triggers to make even the most skeptical reader to click and open. Like you just did. Marketers have known for years that people respond to sentiments that imply easy, free, expert or quantitative points. But social media is upping the ante. We live in a 140 character world that will keep getting shortened until mind reading is a downloadable smart phone app. The bad news is that my Magic 8-Ball says "Chances are good" that several people who will repost this very article will do so without ever reading it. And therein lies one of the most prevalent problems that social media for business is facing today. There is such a frenzy by businesses to share post, re-post, tweet and retweet that few stop to read what they share or know why they're sharing it. Often it's rehashed info we just read --and those are the good posts. More often articles are a few paragraphs seasoned wi...