Day 8: What’s the Best Social Media?

Day 8: What’s the best social media?:  This is a large topic and I will probably devote several days (not in a row) to this topic over the year.  Yesterday I was at the RECON show in Las Vegas representing one of our clients.  The luncheon speaker was Randi Zuckerberg (sister of Paul, the founder of Facebook).  She gave a presentation on social media and how the consumer is using it.  She has a website that dotcomplicated  that is designed to help you personally manage the many distractions of being “online”. While it is not business focused I think the direction she wants to go with this site will be useful for us in this digital world.  As I type this the big social media sites are Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Also, at this time ED organizations are still trying to figure out how to embrace these sites when they are mostly focused on personal issues.  I have my opinion on each of these sites and I will share those tomorrow.  But, whatever you decide, if you start something, you must be consistent.  Trust me, I know how hard this is.  I struggle with it every day.  I even struggle if this is the best use of my time.  But since our philosophy at SSG is you can’t communicate too much, you should try to make use of all the social media you can.  There are a couple of sites that help you feed the same information to all sites.  But you must be careful as a # doesn’t look good on Facebook and LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is the first site you should focus on.  I have not seen many economic development groups do this but I would create a “company” page for you community.  There is a place to list your products, I would take advantage of your targeted industry study(more on this on a later day) and include information on your sites and buildings in the Product and Services section.  Again, as I mentioned on day 6, your community is a product, so that will make it easier to relate to the information asked about the company.  You should also create a company page for your organization.  You should also make a LinkedIn Group.  You can make a public group and a private group.  The private group would only have your key investors and board members.  This is where you could share administrative info to the board.  The public group could be for discussing a new commercial site plan or a new effort your organization is going to start.  We at Smart Solutions Group have formed a strategic alliance with Shelly Turner.  She is excellent in social media and specializes in helping economic development groups.  She can be found at www.turnermarketingconsulting.com  Next: Still more social media.

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