So That's Life?

For over 25 years, the only significance of Summer vacation has been reduced traffic and wondering which Summer program to enroll my daughter into. However, after two semesters of graduate school, the opportunity to let everything academic fall by the wayside was just too tempting. For my regular readers (yes, both of you), I apologize for the hiatus. For the casual readers (yeah, the other three), welcome to my continuing exploration of the modern world.

I was reading a post by Jared Kuroiwa of KGMB about how he planned and implemented a Facebook strategy for increasing traffic on his site. No, he didn’t load up on ads for MLM promises of instant wealth, quick weight loss gimmicks, or swimsuit models. What he did was lay out a plan for building on his existing base of Twitter followers to promote a link on the KGMB site where readers could become a Facebook fan. Just as importantly, he realized that, for many people, use of Twitter and Facebook are mutually exclusive. To address this disconnect, Jared recruited his entire newsroom staff to send requests for their Facebook friends to become “fans” of the KGMB Facebook account.

This might not seem like an especially novel idea since telling your friends and co-workers about things that you like is as old as the proverbial water cooler. However, in the world of social media, the concept of utilizing a network of people to increase traffic to a website is. Most proponents of Twitter, Facebook, etc., will sell their soul for one more Twitter follower or and an additional Facebook friend. In this case, Jared relied on a handful of co-workers to utilize their network of friends and the relationships that they have built to spread the word. In my opinion, this is definitely a more effective strategy.

Now you might be wondering why I’d care about this. There are two reasons, 1) school has just started and I am taking a class on organization communication and 2) I will be participating in a political campaign where social media is going to be utilized. In the coming months, I plan to write about how to effectively communicate a message both within an organization and to the general public. As always, I value any feedback that you can provide.