MediaLeaf Technologies

My recent experience in working on the social media campaign for NewsgroupDirect has led me to think of the entire process as a series of stages, not unlike the human life-cycle. First comes infancy, where you’re just figuring out what you need to be doing and how to do it. Then comes adolescence, when you just start to come into your own. Finally, the adult stage is a mature social media campaign that is successful and strong enough to pull it’s own weight. The whole cycle is simply a learning process. You see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate from there.

Infancy

The newbie social media marketer is much like an infant. You learn what you need to do to survive. NewsgroupDirect has had a social media presence for a while now, but it hasn’t been terribly effective. The campaign did the job of communicating news and promotions to followers, but it didn’t really do much to reach out and actually connect with the community. We put out lots of content, like our fairly popular “newsgroup of the day” posts, but that was more like yelling at an inattentive crowd than actually having a conversation.

Infancy can be summarized as a “you first” approach. The campaign is primarily interested in pushing content to users, hoping that they will then reciprocate with a purchase, visit, retweet, etc.

Adolescence

This is the stage where I feel the NewsgroupDirect campaign is at now. We have matured enough to know what we need to do and how to do it. We now use social media more for user engagement and conversation than simply as a news outlet. Since the transition we have noticed much more response from the communities on Facebook and Twitter than before. It feels as though we are moving in the right direction and our community is growing. We keep up interest through promotions and teasers. We have also began reaching out to potential customers with special offers or by answering usenet-related questions that they post.

Adolescence is when you “get it”. One day a light-bulb goes off and you change the focus of your campaign to conversation.

Adulthood

We haven’t reached this point yet, but I feel that we definitely will. My vision of adulthood is a thriving community of engaged customers and newsgroup fans. Hopefully, this thriving community will include at least a few evangelists – users who are so excited about our products that they will help spread our message to the rest of the community. Many of the most successful companies in the web app space have thriving communities of followers and evangelists. Those communities are absolutely invaluable for feedback, new product launches, and word-of-mouth marketing.