Social Media and Me: My Trip to KipCamp
It's been over a year since I posted to this blog. I have done and learned a whole bunch of new web things in that time, but making time to talk about projects when you're in the middle of them is tough.
I've spent the past two days at the Kiplinger Program's KipCamp, an intensive course about social and digital media in communication. I'll be starting the last day of KipCamp in a couple hours and wanted to note a few things I've learned.
1. Old friends miss me. I've have old accounts on both Twitter and Facebook, but never spent time in them. During KipCamp's Twitter lesson, two long-time acquaintances who DO twitter (apparently often) wrote to welcome me back. Then, approximately one minute after logging into Facebook, my best friend from junior high messaged me. We haven't spoken in 20 years and haven't communicated even electronically more than 4 times since. (Maybe my real lesson is social networking is a powerful connector -- something I had resisted acknowledging when I was shunning it as a waste of time.)
2. The point of social media p.r. is less to tell the whole story than to be interesting. Or at least interesting enough that your social network forwards your message to their networks, and so on, and so on... Its strengths are forming a baseline of awareness across a large group. This realization struck when a fellow camper and I were trying to revise a factual "tweet" into something more lively -- neither of us disliked the original version, but we also wouldn't think to forward, or "retweet," it.
3. There's no quick solution to creating an online persona. The people who do it well are adaptive and responsive and probably naturally witty. They pay attention to what works and model what they like in others.
4. Organizations, and even individuals, have online identities whether they create them or not. Products, services, and brands are talked about on social networks. Most individuals are findable either through simple Google searches or searches of the deep web (information databases that haven't previously been widely searchable). If you want a say in what's out there, you have to be out there saying it.
5. Savvy media people build marketing into everything they do. My session of KipCamp is being filmed for a television short on the OHIO network and we're encouraged to tweet about the program to practice what we're learning. (And here I am on my own time blogging about it!) These things record the experience so other people will choose to attend the program. The media experts who run the program know that it's not enough to do great work if no one else knows it.
