Comments for Michael Durwin

Comment on Social Media Success Takes Forever by admin

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:14:53 +0000

Sporadic involvement is worse than no involvement. Imagine a customer’s frustration that your company doesn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. No that bad right, they can always try your website. Now think how frustrating it would be to a customer to try to contact you through your social media presence and to get no response. You’ve made the effort to be there but you’re ignoring them. Social media is constant. Social media is persistent. Social media is NOW.

Comment on Social Media Success Takes Forever by admin

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:22:21 +0000

Hi Mike,
I’m always up for beverages, other than coffee, but I don’t mind drinking them in the morning. Drop me an email after the 16th. I’ll be at SXSW and speaking at the XPX Summit until then: mdurwin@gmail.com.

Comment on Social Media Success Takes Forever by Leslie Mark

Leslie Mark — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:05:38 +0000

I get two consistent messages when I read and learn about social media: It’s about building relationships and sharing useful information. I am the marketing person for a small company which means I do everything from outside sales, to print media, direct mail and any facet of online presence. I decided a while back to just jump in and put myself and our company out there in the social media world. I think as company that serves the local community, face to face relationships are where I need to spend the bulk of my time connecting. I know that by not making a larger time commitment to social media that it will take longer to build relationships, but I hope that my sporadic involvement isn’t worse for us than no involvement at all.

Comment on Social Media Success Takes Forever by Michael Troiano

Michael Troiano — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:26:55 +0000

Clients struggle with the sustained effort required to make this stuff work. Helping them focus on the durability of the asset once it does is a good approach, but it too takes some time to prove.

Dig the blog, would like to learn more about Rangl.me. Let me know if you’re up for coffee sometime.

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by admin

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:22:03 +0000

Chris Brogan wrote a blog loosely along the same lines today. You might find it interesting:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/custom-is-everything-do-you-agree

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by Tim Hamby

Tim Hamby — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:13:14 +0000

Michael,

Great post. The only “formula” is that there is no formula. We live in a long-tailed world of individuals who are flooded with more messages and choices than ever before. Marketing is all about engaging people and communities around an offering. As a result, it is complex and co-evolving, and only as uniform as our relationships are with one another. The good news is that while “best practices” have splintered, we’re increasingly being provided with an ever-growing arsenal of creative ways to connect with our targets. I think like you, that’s not cause to lament, but to celebrate.

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by admin

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:36:34 +0000

Carri,
I think the very nature of Social Media precludes it from standards. You mention that there aren’t best practices yet, however, Social Media has been around as long as email.

I disagree that tactics such as SEO and Email have best practices. There isn’t even a best practice of WHEN to send an email! I get HTML and non-HTML emails, which is adhering to best practices? As for SEO, put 10 SEO experts in a room and you’ll get 12 answers to each question. If brands were still focused on broadcasting their message at users, this post would be irrelevant, but since marketing is no so hyper-focused, and on-on-one, how can you define standards? Would you market to myself and my brothers the same way? We’re all Durwin’s, we all grew up together, we’re all white, middle-class, and online.

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by Carri Bugbee

Carri Bugbee — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:27:56 +0000

Micheal, you bring up some great points. I often talk about wanting to develop best practices for social media, but I think of it as a constant exploratory process. The platforms are all nascent so there are no tried and true tactics – yet. But for digital marketing tools and practices that are more mature, such as search optimization and email outreach, there are definitely some best practices. Granted, those are always evolving as well, but there are fewer uncertainties than there are with social media marketing.

I think all marketers should strive to develop best practices (which may be category-specific since there are so many digital moving pieces these days) because this is what businesses need. The only thing marketers have to sell is a reasonable certainty that if they do X, then Y will happen.

I think my most important (and exciting) job as a marketer is to get inside people’s heads to figure out the X and Y; i.e., what do prospects care about and what will they will respond to? And this should be the basis of best practices – not the functionality of tools and platforms. But the only way to gain an understanding of what might work among all the new online media options is to live, eat, sleep and breathe the culture. And that is a daunting task few marketers have, as of yet, been willing to take on.

@CarriBugbee
Social Profiles: http://www.CarriBugbee.com

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by admin

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:20:48 +0000

REALLY good point. If you follow a standard how do you stand out?
I see now that this could have been a much shorter post!

Comment on Why Best Practices Are Not by rodica

rodica — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:17:44 +0000

It’s interesting – I always thought of best practices as the lowest common denominator – “this is the minimum everyone does”. I like to read them and then adjust them to my brand.

Which brings me to your question “How do you do it when your brand is not like other brands?” – isn’t that the whole point of doing marketing? Your brand HAS to be different from others, by definition. Marketing’s job is to tell a compelling story and through that, make the brand stand out. In essence, marketing’s job is to create a purple cow (Seth Godin’s term, not mine) :) You will never create a purple cow by just following best practices.