First, for a little introduction of myself: I am the new digital engagement “specialist” on the staff at Bouvier Kelly. The word specialist is in quotes because I am not sure that anyone can be a specialist in something that seems to be developing, growing, changing every day. So here comes my first confession.
I am a lot like most of you. Everyday, we learn some more about social media. So there is no “textbook,” no golden strategy on how to be successful. But there are ideas and that is what I hope to bring to the table as part of BKI’s “Conversation Mapping.”
Prior to coming over to BKI, I spent close to 20 years in college sports as a media relations person. For most of that time, the biggest challenge in the job was keeping up with changing technology… from the start of desktop publishing to implementing digital photography to all of us having web sites and live stats to the explosion of live streaming and on-demand video and… social media.
In the last two years, social media became a big part of what we did. I won’t tell you that we didn’t have our own skeptics in the beginning. Just like many other professionals, we sat back at first and said “people don’t really want all of this stuff.”
Then we got on board. We tweeted all the time from games. It was on our Blackberries so that we could do it at anytime. Every press release we did, it went to our Twitter through the RSS feed. And if it went to the Twitter, it fed the Facebook status, too. I often tweeted the schedule of games first thing in the morning.
Constant communication. A thirst for knowledge. Engagement with the followers, fans and friends of your brand. Those are the things that I learned that drive social media and should be incorporated into the communications plan of today.
So as we go forward, I will share some of those ideas through our blogs, emails and our Twitter (@bouvierkelly). And in the spirit of technology, I will continue to cultivate new ones, too.
If you get to know me, you might even hear a good sports story or two.
