“Show me your garden, and I shall tell you what you are.” (Alfred Austin)
We’ve all seen the commercials urging us to buy a Chia Pet, the low cost alternative to actually going outdoors to watch something…anything grow. And who amongst us has not lovingly admired our own bear Chia pet and how quickly it sprouted?
My, my, no time at all and you have the whole pet covered in bright green tiny leaves. Oh the happiness and instant green-gratification of my little bear Chia pet. Which just as quickly dies in the next two weeks no matter what the watering, praying, or even a lighting of the Patron Saints of Plants candle.
What’s a Chia Pet have to do with social media? A lot more than you might think. The bigger the corporation, the more the Chia Pet mentality comes into play.
With bottom lines shrinking and pressure to be the next YouTube 50 million views breakthrough, the more the pressure for producing quick growth, beautiful sprouts and bounties of Chia Pet revelers to comment on how wonderful and unique your Chia Pet is over all the others out there.
Here’s the real truth. Social media initiatives are not Chia Pets. They don’t grow that easily, they don’t sprout all over that quickly at the onset, and they aren’t in a perfect shape of a bear, ram or even an Obama. The good news is they also don’t wilt after two weeks never to sprout again. If you plant the seeds correctly your social media initiatives will live on as perennials, one might even say as wildflower perennials.
The challenge lies in getting your team of marketing gardeners to understand that social media has to have time to really take root.
Here are some tips to good rooting:
1. Find the sunniest spot (or the best product attributes), and foster the growth of your wildflower perennials (products, services, software.)
2. Don’t over-fertilize the garden. (No bullshit allowed in this ‘long-tail’ garden.)
3. Don’t overwater it, or protect it too much from the outside community.
4. Don’t put a gate on it that has a combination so only a few can view the highest blooms.
5. Keep your soil fine-tuned (rake out all the marketing speak and keep the soil deep and real.)
6. Open your perennial garden up to anyone and let them offer insight, tips and their seeds along with yours. Let them help water your perennials.
Make your social media initiatives such that people feel as if they’ve absorbed them through the Cosmos (defined as “the biggest tree in existence.”)
Chia Pets, according to the commercial, grow in just two weeks. Social media initiatives take months to plan and months to bloom.
Wildflowers just like strong social media plans take seeding in all types of climates, locations and weather. Social media initiatives take seeding in Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, online communities, forums, and blogs.
Wildflowers bloom despite the wind, rain, sun, and temperature. The California Poppy, The Purple Coneflower or even the Bluebonnet find their way along the highways and byways across the world. Good social media initiatives seed and bloom as well along the World Wide Web-way.
Social media lets us slowly and transparently grow our garden, in this highly over-Webbed world, and proudly see our perennial seeds root by correctly utilizing all the Web 2.0 opportunities that exist.
(Thanks to Sharon Goldinger for her inspiring convos.)
Brian Solis has penned a great post on DailyDog today about using Twitter. He’s a brilliant social strategist so take “tweeter-heed” and read it.
Can you handle the truth? Find out below all that you can do with Web 2.0 without paying thousands of dollars to a 2.0 guru or guruess.
Go here to check out this great riff on the end of marketing and PR.
I’m thrilled to say the upcoming seminar I’m doing for the fantastic Writers League of Texas has sold out. They do have a waiting list though so please go and sign up on that as I hope to do another seminar for them soon. The Writers League of Texas bar none is one of the best groups for you to join and network with to empower your own writing work!
Happy Birthday to Facebook which as of Feb. 4th will be five years old! Wow!
In tech years, that means Facebook is still in its infancy and I can only imagine what will come in the next five years. (As a recovering technology journalist from back in the day, I can fondly remember writing about gmail in beta and all those ubiquitious apps we now use as part of Google.)
So go Facebook go! And I encourage all of you to get on the Facebook bandwagon.
Interesting stats:
15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
24 million pieces of content are shared each month
Thousands of companies are now on Facebook and its growing leaps and bounds.
See Mark Zuckerberg’s special post here.
I’m a giant fan of Melissa Campanelli’s work and her story on ING’s social media usage is fantastic. Read it and learn how you can incorporate a social media strategy as part of your web visibility efforts.
Key quote from the story:
“While it’s difficult to quantify ROI from social media for the bank, Pieterse (head of brand communications, ING Direct) says the real value of social media marketing ultimately lies in building social currency for the brand.”
It’s always good to keep in mind that even though some of these social media initiatives can be hard to measure in the short run, in the long “long tail” run they actually still very much contribute to building online champions, viral forwarders and your Web footprint.
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