Social Media Buzz - ivanpw
I’ve never been a big believer in SEO, Social Media Marketing, or any of those other voodoo marketing buzzwords. In fact, I’ve always laughed heartily every time someone has brought up SEO in our office or spoken about using Twitter as a way to gain business. I’m a strong believer in Twitter being a place where people talk about random things that they happen to be interested in, with other people who are also interested engaging in a loud-hailer conversations.
In my mind, companies have zero business whatsoever using a medium like twitter to attempt to pitch themselves.
Of course, there are exceptions to this – the tiny business who goes out of its way to help out people having problems that fall within their area of expertise and such. There’s nothing that annoys me more than businesses who use twitter to spam irrelevant garbage.
The thing is, with a project like this, unless you actually go out and engage with people, the chances of anyone stumbling across the project and being interested in it is infinitesimally small. Sure, we’re on google, and we’re on youtube. But really, there’s a certain degree of needle in haystack, and sitting on your hands and hoping that people stumble across your site and take interest. With that in mind, and the fact that we’re going to be doing another trip soon, I thought perhaps I’d attempt to go in search of people who I found interesting and thought might find OneLastTrip interesting too.
Obviously, we win in a key area – we’re not trying to sell anything. There’s no hidden agenda. Even so, going through twitter looking for people to randomly add felt a little dirty. Azemute always wondered whether people would actually be interested too, so, I was a little nervous about what the response would be.
A week or so later, and we’re up to 372 followers. My personal account – that I’ve had since 2007 – only has 66 followers, but perhaps I don’t post anything particularly interesting. The response we’ve received has been amazing, and, unsurprisingly the feel-good factor that came with seeing people – not just the ones you’d expect like petrol-heads – like the concept and want to see more of it has served to egg us on even further. More ideas for trips have come out of the last two weeks than we’ve had in the past 4 months, and we think you’ll like some of those ideas… they’re a little on the crazier than usual side. It’s incredible, and I want to say a big thank you to everyone who likes what we’re doing, and even to those who are just waiting for us to get stuck on the top of a mountain somewhere during a hail storm!
I guess my perception has changed slightly when it comes to social networks, but, it isn’t a paradigm shift; it’s a fantastic tool for anyone who isn’t selling something, and just wants people who would be interested in what they’re doing to be aided in the discovery. Something else I’ve learned in the past few weeks of browsing twitter, is that there are many orders of magnitude more spam accounts than I ever would have believed, and in fact, an uncountable number of actual businesses with accounts that just post irrelevant links to webpages that are full of advertising. If you can avoid that though, and make contact with those really special people who care about what is on their twitter feed, it’s an incredible thing.
With that all in mind, we now have a Facebook page. Neither Azemute nor I are particularly knowledgeable when it comes to Facebook, but, a page does in fact exist… so feel free to like it, or whatever it is that people do on Facebook; the link is over on the right.
