Social media marketing | Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal

I’ve got a bunch of emails piling up at home that are all things I want to blog about here.

HOWEVER. This one just couldn’t wait.

The message from Gary Vaynerchuk is one that all companies large and small should heed.

(Who is Gary? He apparently gained widespread notoriety as the host of Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast on the subject of wine, according to Wikipedia. Now he touts himself as an internet celebrity).

Anyway, in essence Gary says stop wasting time and start using the tools in the social media world.

And I totally agree.

I hate processes that hold up action. And when information is flying so fast there’s little time for old processes.

In many cases company folks aren’t making the most of stuff because a zillion people need to approve.

Can you imagine if you had to get approval for every tweet you sent out on Twitter? I bet there are some people out there living through that hell…

Reminds me of an earlier post I wrote.

Just do it.

Similar to my earlier post listing some great sites worth visiting, this list of the Twitter power 150 is a great collection of marketing and advertising people on Twitter.

The list was compiled by Armando Alves on a site I recently discovered called A Source of Inspiration which covers digital marketing, creativity and other web stuff.

It even includes some Canadian folks.

There’s an interesting discussion about this list going on over at Six Pixels of Separation.

It happens every year. A host of ‘experts’ offer up their opinion on what’s to come.

I recently wrote a short post on the National Screen Institute website about the future of the media industry. Not that I’m lauding myself as one of the experts by any means. I read a bunch of stuff by others and collected it together for the post.

But today I read another interesting article on the Media in Canada website.

What struck me about this post was the mention about real-time marketing and the need for brands to be dealing with lots of things at once 24/7.

It’s happened for me over the past 18 months. As a website manager my responsibilities are wide and include lots of marketing online. I do more than I can fit into a working day not because I’m any kind of workoholic but because I love what I do.

This means lots of time online whether it be Facebook, Twitter or various industry sites. Not chatting with friends but trying to get NSI’s message out there one way or another (ok, I admit it, or my dog’s: Sadie Shih Tzu.)

The line between work and play has been blurring for a long time but it’s different than the marketing I did five or six years ago when things seemed very print, radio or TV focused and you could sign off on your proof, leave the office and stop thinking about it.

This is not a complaint. Merely an observation.

Which is why I’ve been playing around a lot with Twitter tools like Tweetdeck to help organise some of the information coming at me and make the best use of it.

My inbox is full everyday with bulletins about web design, Photoshop, social marketing, web and tech trends, industry rumours and I still find time to read them all because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to do my job.

There comes a point though when you have to know when to stop. By the sounds of things all these predictions are pointing towards an even greater need to be doing, observing, interacting.

My wish for 2009? More tools like Tweetdeck that help us focus our marketing and organise the noise because I think it’s going to get very loud in here.

Read a great post today in an email update from ZDNet. And it comes with the best headline: how to be less stupid in 2009. Having shared this with one of my work pals I was told that this simply wasn’t possible for him and he plans to spend 2009 becoming more stupid.

I digress.

This is the first time I’ve read anything by its author, Dennis Howlett.

But if this post is anything to go by, I want to read more. He sounds like a straight forward guy. Tells it like it is. My kind of person.

Howlett serves up his thoughts for the year ahead in tech. And he doesn’t mince words. Whether he’s right or not remains to be seen but I like what I’m reading.

If you’re launching a new website that has tight timelines, make sure you manage users’ expectations. One way to do this is to launch your site in beta. Lots of people do this including Google, CNN and Microsoft.

There’s a great article on One Degree. The author (who I think is Clay Mitchell) says, “The beta theme is a potentially powerful tool for online marketers because it acts as a cue to website visitors. Basically it indicates that, while a website is designed to provide a certain type of experience, its present version may not be able to satisfy visitors’ expectations. As with many websites in development, visitors may encounter functionality problems, navigational issues, missing tools, and a whole range of possibilities.”

Today in one of our website meetings we agreed to a longer ’soft launch’ period and a ‘hard launch’ in beta. (For those that don’t know, a soft launch is limited and may include a small group. A hard launch includes the masses.)

It was important that my work folks understand we cannot launch a site and expect that site to work perfectly when we’ve only tested on, say, 300 people. We will never know if it works perfectly until we have a large number (meaning: the regular visitors to our current site).

There is a vast difference. A small number of users on your site in its early incarnation may unearth some problems. A large group of users will allow you to see the site being used on a routine basis.

Take Oprah Winfrey. She’s a chick with a lot of cash. She did a webcast and her site, struggling with the strain of 800,000+ users, crashed. This article from the Huffington Post says that the media empire queen had employed the best dudes in the business to put together and execute her webcast. Importantly the article also says how was Oprah to know the site would crash? Until she had 800,000 hungry fans rushing to hear the word of Winfrey (i.e. putting the site to use under routine conditions) it’s hard to predict what will go wrong.