Blog Potomac Speaker – Jeremy Pepper
Filed under: Education and Training, Social Marketing on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
The next presenter was Jeremy Pepper from Boingo with a talk about how Strategy fits into your social media decisions.
Why should you use social media? Don’t just do it. You need to have the strategy in place to determine what you’re going to do with it.
You need to engage with people who are enthusiastic about your company / product / topic. First you need to engage your internal audience in order to get buy-in at all levels.
Q. Coming from an internal perspective how do I wrestle control of content from marketing?
A. Internal education is vitally important to get the conversation on your side. Find out what people are talking about with regard to your company, and get marketing to understand that there needs to be a conversation from your side too. Don’t ignore sites with active communities such as Yelp!
Q. How does social media fit into our marketing and communications platform
A. Creating groups allows our customers to interact, and therefore help each other to connect. There are so many tools out there right now, you need to pick the right tools for your company, it may be that blogs aren’t the right tool for you to use. Investigate and formulate your strategy.
Q. How do you pitch to a blogger?
A. First identify the bloggers, and the influencers. Don’t assume that because someone has 5,000 ‘friends’ on a social network that they are influencers. If they don’t respond, don’t spam.
Q. Using these tools you’re becoming a content creator rather than pushing out stories to other media, your thoughts?
A. The web has always been about communication, we’ve always been content producers and publishers, the difference is just in the distribution of the content. We’re trying now to push out stories with less spin and less buzzwords, but the difference is that we now interact with the customers.
