What I've learned from my Social Media-Marketing class.

As I may have mentioned at the beginning of the blog I have began this blog as an assignment for my Social Media and Marketing class.  I feel that this course has taught me a great deal about having a vast online presence. By working on multiple social media sites I’ve learned how to manage content on multiple social media platform while making my brand known.  I’ve learned that there are way more forms of social media than what I knew before the class started.  If I could take one thing from this class it would be the ability to function on multiple social media sites.  I enjoyed building my sites and letting my person be known to the world.  I want to work in social media and this class has enhanced my drive to want to work in that field.  I liked the social media-marketing campaign my group did.  It involved working in music marketing, which is a field of social media marketing I would like to work in as a musician myself.  It allowed me to work with other creative people and determine ideas for accomplishing our goals for the campaign.  Another thing I enjoyed about this class was learning how different social media sites could be used for business.  I want to work social media for a business and I think this class provided great information on how to work social media sites for businesses.  To conclude, this class should me more of social media that I want to explore and learn about.  I also want to say that I will continue this blog and create new blogs related to other topics I’m interested in.  Social media is taking over the world in a positive way and I want to be a part of it.

Find Me On Other Social Media Sites

Google+

https://plus.google.com/109879419571370477577/posts?partnerid=gplp0

LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sam-telford/61/2a8/650

Twitter

https://twitter.com/telford_sam

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/user/sammyt4650

Pinterest

http://pinterest.com/sammyt465/

Pinterest, Visually Expressing Your Brand

Pinterest has been growing exponentially over the years.  Users pin pictures that are relevant to boards to express themselves.  Pinterest has been a great source for companies and individuals to express their personal brand.  Clothing businesses such as J.C. Penny use Pinterest to show their customers pictures of new clothes they have at their stores.  By using pictures, businesses are able to give a visual look to their company and their products.  Individuals use Pinterest to find pictures of things they enjoy.  People who enjoy cooking pin pictures of food they enjoy cooking.  I pin pictures related to my love for art, music, television, film, and mobile technology.  These five hobbies reflect my personal brand and what I enjoy.  As a bassist and drummer I have pictures of musicians that are influential to my playing style.  I pin these pictures for people to see who influences me.  As you can see from below these are the boards I have currently on my Pinterest account.  Pinterest is a fun site to visually express your brand.  I highly recommend getting a Pinterest account if you don't have one yet.   Let me know what you think about Pinterest and how it reflects your personal brand.  Follow me on Pinterest by following the link below. 

http://pinterest.com/sammyt465/ 

NeverWake Social Media Campaign Update

I thought I’d share with all an update on my group “140 Characters” and how we are coming along with our social media-marketing campaign for increasing the audience for NeverWake, a band that features our member James.  We talked about the goals we wanted to achieve in a short amount of time, our target market, a SWOT analysis, our challenges, what kind of content we want to present in our campaign, and creative ideas to achieve our goals.  Our objective in this campaign is to increase the number of fans on across the band’s various social media platforms.  The band currently has 86,000 fans across the various social media sites.  The goal is to aim for 100,000 fans by the end of April.  Another goal of ours is to build on the large international market the band already has.  After our SWOT analysis we determined the strengths of our campaign is the originality and synergistic image across every social media site.  A couple weaknesses we found would be the problem of growing revenue and having an established a consistently growing fan base. We found that an increased number of niche markets would be an opportunity for us.  Our main threats would be music piracy and the growing number of uprising bands.  We nailed down our target market as male and females ages 12-24 in the U.S. 

We came up with some great creative ideas to reach our goals and increase engagement with our audience.  We thought about having an Ask Me Anything with James on Twitter.  We would tweet the times he would be on Twitter to talk to so we can engage with our audience.  Our second and third ideas involve the established NeverWake audience participating in a contest to win a prize.  One of the contest ideas involved the audience taking a NeverWake song and making a creative video to go along with it.  The band will pick their top three favorites and then the audience will decide on their favorite video by tweeting the band or responding to posts on Facebook.  The winner will receive autographs from every member of the band.  The second contest idea involved the use of Instagram.  The idea of the contest is to have people submit their best picture of NeverWake.  These could include live pictures of the band; pictures of the person wearing a NeverWake t-shirt in a cool location, or a picture of them doing something cool with the album cover art.  The band will pick their top three favorites and then submit them for voting on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  The winner in this contest will win autographs from the band members.

Dan the Man With a Plan For Your Future Brand

Dan Schawbel is a prominent figurehead on developing, building, and maintaining a personal brand.  The New York Times referred to him as the "personal brand guru".  A lot of what I know about personal branding comes from Mr. Schawbel and is wonderful book Me 2.0, Revised and Updated Edition: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.  In this book Schawbel provides organized, thoughtful, and helpful steps and methods to starting and harnessing your personal brand.  In a world that seems to revolve around social media and having your person out for the world to see, it's important to understand how to control and manage your brand for your future careers.  As a reader there was a lot of information that I didn't know regarding my personal brand.  Schawbel's 4 steps to building your personal brand go as follows: Discover Your Brand, Create Your Brand, Communicate Your Brand, and Maintain Your Brand.  I myself worked to improve my various social media sites to reflect my overall brand.  I highly recommend picking up this book to help find what your brand is or to improve on your current brand.  I also recommend following Mr. Schawbel on Twitter for lots of great information and insight.  Look out for Dan Schawbel's newest book called Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success, which is due out September 3rd, 2013.

As always leave comments and let me know what you think.

Blog Along The Way

Hello, today I want to share about blogging.  Believe it or not blogging is a form of social media and just like any social media you can use it to express your brand depending on what you like. There is blogging about movies, video games, cooking, fashion, gardening, music, and any topic you can think of.  Blogging is a free service that allows people to write and express themselves.  

Blogs can be used for multiple uses. Most businesses work to maintain an updated blog to communicate news with their audience related to all things related to the company. People enjoy using blogs as a personal diary to their everyday life.  Some people create blogs to write about a particular topic that they are very passionate about.  Sometimes these passionate blogs can be found and can result in positive results.

A student in my social media class showed us a blog his friend did related to all things related to the American band, My Chemical Romance.  She was a devoted fan of the band and reported on everything going on in the band.  You could tell from her layout and her different posts, that she had put a great deal of effort and time into her blog. Her blog become so big that the band heard about it and invited her to meet the band and do an interview, just from writing about a band that she loved so much.

Now you might think “How can I get my blog to be so well known that a band finds it and contacts me”, well it’s not that easy.  You want to find a particular subject that you’re passionate about and then try to develop a niche topic related to your subject matter.  Let’s say you enjoy watching movies. Great, except movies are a very broad topic, you should try to narrow your topic from all movies. Let’s say you’re a fan of independent and comedy movies, then that should be your blog topic: Independent Comedies.

After you determine your topic, you should find a creative title that will stick out in a search engine.  Once you start writing and making particular tags in your blogs, you should have no problem attracting a large enough audience to your blog. I hope my advice has helped you begin considering a niche topic for your next blog. Please leave comments and let me hear from you about your blogs.