Does Social Media Make You a Creative Communicator - or A Horrible Writer?

I just read these two articles (link, link) from the New York Times; the two have the common theme of strong communication abilities as key to executive success. While these two articles are about a year old, they were still published during the rise of social media both as a prominent business tool, and as a social tool for individuals, and yet neither mention the platform. What I want to know is, does using social media help, or hinder, someone's chance of become a c-suite or other top-level executive, does it hurt your communication skills because of bad grammar, or does it make you more creative?


If you look at instant messaging and texting, you can tell it has had anything but a positive effect on people. I'll admit that I write terribly, in barely intelligible segments (I refuse to call them sentences) when I do either. Along with this, Twitter definitely does nothing positive for grammar and sentence structure.


On the other hand, Twitter seems to help make us creative writers... I have never worker harder making and keeping content short and to the point then when I was trying to get a stubbornly long sentence into 140 characters. Blogging, while informal, also seems like it could have positive benefits, especially for those people who have not written a lot. The great thing about blogging is that it actually gets you writing, and writing (hopefully) often. Brandon Sanderson made a comment about the fact that it took him a long time to really settle his writing style, which is something I hope blogging will do for me... give me a medium where I can find and perfect my own writing style (I cannot find his blog post on it, if I find it, I will link it).


So what do you think... does social media content writing help, or hurt, your communications ability?

You Can't Buy Lists for Social Media

I think one of the best things about social media is that you cannot buy marketing lists. I personally don't like the idea of buying direct mailing lists at all, but I understand that there is a time and place for it. With social media though, it is just not possible to purchase a list, content truly is king.

Unless you are famous and have that going for you social media makes you start at the bottom and build your way up by having value-adding content and intriguing posts (I can say this with confidence because I'm to new to actively participating in social media to know where this actually applies to me). Adding value is the one theme you see in almost all PR blogs about successful social media strategies which makes me think that all the other tips and tricks are icing on the cake. Sure, writing a social media article with an eye towards SEO will increase your searchability and using hash tags on twitter will allow your tweets to be seen by more users, but this doesn't matter unless you have a solid and strong base of content that matters.

What does this mean for companies whose content cannot be generated by marketing? In higher education high-value content comes from faculty, most of whom will have little direct contact with marketing. In this case, what is marketing supposed to do? Piggy-back faculty whitepapers and articles? rewrite this information in a more marketing-friendly manner?

So what do you think? Can a company be competitive and truly benefit from social media without all the extras?

Community Equity (from PR-Squared)

I just read this article on the PR² blog, and I think David Alston makes some great points. Specifically in social media, there are a lot of movements out there to decide what really qualifies as meaningful metrics. Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor talks about overall influence and community involvement as the two metrics he watches most, and I think from a measurement standpoint he may be right.

Community equity, though, might just be the background idea needed to really push companies towards what is important in social media - building and maintaining reputation through value-adding content and community involvement. It is obvious when talking with some people that they do not see social media as what it is, but as just another marketing channel to reach more viewers. While the end goal of a marketing department may be just that, it will not work unless there is give and take, back and forth... you must add value to get value on social media platforms. Followers can tell when you're not actively engaged in the discussion at hand; if you tout your brand, spit out marketing material, and don't participate in the discussions going on, your followers will notice and not see your content as sincere.

One of the best lines in Alston's article, in my opinion, is 'It becomes evident that community building goes in the investment column while buying media buy goes in the expense side.' Customer loyalty is a big issue for marketing and sales, especially when what you selling is seen as a commodity... by building a following that feels like a community both sides benefit - the company with increased loyalty, and the consumer with a better, more fulfilling customer experience.

I have to say, community equity seems like a great idea that I am going to continue to follow... Is it a quantifiable metric? I would want to tie this in some way to organic social media growth; for example, if I am using a lead-capture page from twitter, I would ask the question 'Was Twitter your first interaction with the brand?' While you would be enhancing brand through interacting with customers, interaction with potential customers is really a sign of building community equity as it shows that word of mouth is having a positive effect on the brand.

Who is Peter Rabbit, er Bretton?

I am. A Maine-grown man who attends Emmanuel College, I am a senior Business Management major with a minor in Mathematics. I have worked in marketing for about one year, with Harvard School of Public Health Center for Continuing Professional Education (CCPE) since January '09, and with 451 Marketing since January 2010.

My experience at CCPE has given me exposure to online marketing in most forms including cost-per-click marketing through Google Adwords, Email creation, list segmenting and optimizing, copy writing and research for listservs, and website creation. We recently released a social media campaign which I designed and lead which includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

My offline marketing experience has been almost entirely with copy editing.

The greatest part of my time has gone to tracking and analyzing marketing initiatives including media channel effectiveness, email content and subject line effectiveness, program rating, and website traffic. Although I have not yet worked with search engine optimization, SEO is an interest of mine that I should have exposure to within the next six months.

So, why did I start this blog? This will serve partly as my online portfolio, showing my copy writing skills, and hosting information I find which I feel is relevant to the marketing community. Simple enough, right?