Mitch Joel has asked me and a bunch of smart bloggers to share our best practices in social media. Here’s my contribution:
Try A Lot of Little Things
Word of mouth and social media aren’t like regular advertising: you need lots of people to participate. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. You never know.
But the key difference is that (unlike advertising), you don’t need to spend any money until after people start participating. You can try a bunch of things, see what works, and they invest in the winners.
So try everything. Do a ton of things, do them cheap, and have fun experimenting.
You job:
- Every week do one super simple social media project.
- Keep it cheap. Spend less than 2 hours on it.
- If it works, invest in making it huge.
Some things to try:
- Invite bloggers to link to your blog (like Mitch is doing here)
- Have a super-cheap video contest
- Send out some cool gifts
- Add reviews to your site
- Create a fantastic tell-a-friend form
- Make it easy to share your web pages:
Share your great ideas below by commenting.
P.S. Mitch is giving away 4 free copies of my book: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
I love your idea about quickly doing a lot of little, cheap things, then throwing resources into the ones that work.
In fact, it lines up very nicely with a concept I’ve been advocating for a while now, pitching to the DoD of all places. The concept goes by the acronym (of course!) FIST, which stands for Fast, Inexpensive, Simple and Tiny.
The basic idea is that a skeleton crew with a shoestring budget and a cannonball schedule can do some pretty cool stuff, once the complexification of bureaucratic meddling is removed (and by going Tiny, you stay beneath the radar of the Big Bad Bureaucracy).
If anyone is interested in reading more, they can download a free PDF of my “FIST Handbook” at http://www.lulu.com/RoguePress.