Dave Fleet has an excellent post this morning on 8 Questions to Ask Your "Social Media Expert", building on Ike Pigott's on finding useful Twitter "experts". Dave is offering a guide to "weeding-out the pundits from the practitioners," so I figured I'd answer his questions for Amplify's Internet practice.
1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?
Sure. We're working with a religious organization to promote education about and understanding of other faiths, using Facebook and YouTube among other avenues.
2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?
We research an issue area, finding influential and interesting bloggers who would care about our topic (usually they've written about something related in the past). Often we already have relationships with some bloggers who fit those criteria. Whether we know a blogger or not, we write offering information and say we hope they'll consider blogging about it.
3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?
Google Alerts, Twitter search, comments from clients and friends at other organizations (offline conversations count too). We're investigating several social media monitoring services but haven't made choices yet.
4. Where can I find you online?
Our website, our other blog Disruptive Women in Health Care, Facebook. Our staff is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and lots of other places as well.
5. Can you write my blog for me?
We do blog training and work with our clients so they can easily keep something fresh on their blogs - create publication calendars, set up Delicious so they have a recent news feed, etc. Writing a blog is a valuable process as well as a way to promote your work (listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin), and having someone else write it makes no sense.
6. How do you measure results?
Usually number of actions taken - advocacy lends itself better to hard numbers than marketing generally does.
7. How would you define social media?
People interacting online. I'm waiting for a better way to say "and I include mobile services in that too," but no one's invented a good word yet.
8. Can you just pretend to be me online?
No. See (5) for some of the reasons. We actually don't have people ask us this, so either we're just lucky or most advocates want to convey messages themselves.
All right, now go look at Dave's post and see if I got the right answers!
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