Last week we attended and sponsored the Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit. Mark blogged about it wondering why more HR technology, work-life, EAP, training and wellness vendors (and HR professionals) are not focusing more on this space and the implications of an aging workforce.
The business of aging is booming, haven't you heard?
Mark spoke to a group of suppliers in the space at the event about marketing and PR best practices including a segment on social media marketing, being part of the online conversation.
Someone in the audience asked if there were any online services that allowed you to push your "conversations" out to multiple distribution points - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
I turned around and said with a smile, "Oh, our firm can help you with that."
Crickets chirped. Pins dropped with deafening clarity. A hot breeze blew by me.
Okay, so that didn't play well, but there are two services out there that do this automatically (with a little set up work) - Ping.fm (which I'm using) and Pixelpipe (which I haven't used yet).
But someone else in the audience last week brought up a great point that I'll emphasize here:
Your social media marketing "conversations" can and should be contextual and aren't always for every social networking audience.
For example, this blog post was submitted through Ping.fm because I wanted my entire "professional" social media collective to see it.
Same thing when we release new content, like a white paper or an artcle - or when I come across another interesting HR marketplace news post, blog post, white paper or another article.
But if I was letting my social media marketing hair down, which I often do for those who know me, I probably wouldn't include every network I belong to. Maybe it'll be a fun work-related message to my personal and professional friends in Facebook, or it'll just be an obscure Tweet for the Twitterverse.
Or maybe it's something very specific to a group, like a Ning network you belong to (like RecruitingBlogs.com).
Point being you want to be conversational, transparent and real, as non-promotional as possible, sharing your organization's content (content marketing is where it's at), sharing other's content, commenting on other's content, and so on.
It takes time to effectively use social media - I may spend up to an hour a day managing it all, sometimes more.
But it's worth it for you and your organization to invest the time and to do it right and generate more visibility, traffic, leads and improved SEO. It really is.
Now I'm checking out audioBoo. Could be some impromptu interviews at SHRM 2009! See you in New Orleans!
Labels: business of aging, marketing and PR, social media marketing, social networking
