5. My advice Work through the audience you know Be strategic Organize and allocate time Don’t try to do everything Let others extend the conversation for you
6. Work through your existing networks. You don’t have to think “mass” anymore. Start with the people and organizations that you know, those that are close to you. You can burn a lot of hours trying to figure out how to reach people that will prove to be irrelevant to your mission.
7. Have a content strategy; develop and maintain core content. “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” (Kristina Halvorson, “The Discipline of Content Strategy,” http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy/) Time committed to planning up front will improve your efficiency and reduce the time and labor required to sustain ongoing presence and communication.
15. Create an “editorial calendar.” Organize your time; have a schedule you follow for blogging, microblogging (i.e. posting to Twitter), checking Facebook, etc. Be flexible with your schedule, but respect it. Be disciplined, and don’t get lost in information and conversations.
16. Don't try to be comprehensive. If you're truly and effectively connected, you're in a flow of information that's beyond what you can assimilate and digest. You need strategies for filtering, finding patterns, finding the sense in your information environment. You can't expect to read every Twitter post if you're following hundreds of people. You can't expect everyone who follows you to read everything you say. What you can do is look for opportunities to connect and form meaningful, productive relationships, and gain and use knowledge in effective and productive ways.
17. Create a context for conversation by others. It’s inherent that you need to be conversational in social media, but you have only limited time for conversation. To scale conversations about your organization, let your networks buzz about you, leverage their conversations. Let your fans create a conversation in your behalf.
Social media is the next evolutionary step, from few to many mass media (scarce production, massive consumption) to many to many (everybody has the means of production and consumption). It's really a historical first, this global connectedness and open market for ideas.Our assumptions about how to build presence, what we think of as marketing communication and PR, were grown in the era of mass media where we could reach fairly large audiences through few channels, but it was expensive. Channels were scarce.Now there are many channels, we're more fragmented. Channels with large audiences may still be scarce, but they're also less relevant since mindshare is so fragmented. But the bigger deal is that they're not targets anymore, not statistics, but people. You have to talk to them.Real conversations don't necessarily scale, so the business of being conversational in social media and having effective reach is labor intensive and time intensive. And it's hard to find another effective way to market.
Conversation Prism: many ways to have conversations, many places to hang out online.
