On days like today when I am made painfully aware of the fact that I have far too many projects on my plate and far too little time to get to them all. I sure do wish that my brand communications could all be handled with just one channel. But what fun would that be?


One day last week, our company, Haro Bicycles (Masi Bicycles is a division of Haro), had a meeting to discuss an overall Social Media strategy. That was the first meeting on the topic of Social Media in the company's history. As you can imagine, I was nearly hyperventilating with excitement being the SM cheerleader that I am. It should not go unnoticed that it has taken me more than 4 years of constantly talking about Social Media for us to finally have a meeting on the topic and discuss some corporate strategies... ME!That's like John Elway having to tell the coach, "maybe I should throw the football." Well... you know what I mean.
One of the things that happened during the course of the meeting though was a discussion about all the various channels of Social Media and how they fit each of the brands we have- Haro BMX, Haro MTB/ Adult and Masi. All three are very distinctly different brands/ categories with very different target consumers and communication needs. As the conversation unfolded, our boss asked the three of us largely responsible for the SM strategies for our brands to create a matrix of the various channels and how much time we felt would be needed per week to effectively utilize them. On the face of the question, the answer seemed pretty easy... but then I began digging deeper into it and began to get dizzy doing the Social Media Calculus in my head. (I've never liked math, even if it applies to SM.)
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the concept and am not sure if I really have an answer to his questions that I feel is "right". However, it has caused me to look at many of the things I do and try to figure out why I do what I do. The best thing to come out of the bubbling brain matter is that I have looked at things a lot more than I have in awhile.
What began for me as just blogging and going to other blogs, has turned into Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, a little YouTube, a company website driven by a blog, various online forums and various other side projects that ultimately somehow relate to an overall SM presence. Some of the things I do, like the bike-related marketing website I began and hardly ever update, do not immediately tie back in to my brand building for Masi. BUT... they do all overlap in creating who I am in the SM world and where people can find me and then re-link me back to the Masi brand. Seems a little disconnected, I know, but it all ties back to Masi in the end because I am the defacto voice of the brand and people find us wherever we are.
Over the nearly 5 years I have been working in Social Media- and by "working in", I mean doing it every day- I have plugged into numerous different SM applications. Each of them presenting pulses and minuses and requiring a bit of different strategy. I began with blogging and visiting other blogs, leaving comments and building community by being a part of the community itself. The Masiguy blog remains my primary source of communication and relationship building for the Masi brand. but I now also spend a lot of time on both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter reaches many of the same people the blog reaches, but it also taps into a new community that is not exclusively cyclists. Facebook has accomplished the same thing, though I have also developed a Masi page on Facebook to allow the community to have a common place to come and connect to each other. I still venture out into the blogosphere to participate as a member of the community as much as I can, though I admit that it is less than I would like now. Thankfully, my Google Alerts keeps me posted on the various conversations taking place about the Masi brand so I hunt less and just go straight to the places I need to be.
Ultimately, though it does require juggling a lot of things all the time, I have had to develop a strategy of using the various spaces for specific forms of communication. With the blogs I write, I can get much more in-depth in my communications when I have the time. Facebook and Twitter allow me to have a much more direct and one to one relationship with people, so they both have proven to be very effective for answering direct questions more efficiently. Strategies vary from brand to brand and even vary greatly within the walls of our company and our various brands. But one thing is constant for us all- we have multiple channels of communication now and we monitor and nurture all of them. Effective communication and brand building requires it.
So stay tuned... you'll find me out there somewhere.