I received some good comments from Rob Laughter @roblaughter from my guest post on triangleb2b.com on the Triangle AMA case study. Rob asked me about what went wrong and did anything not go according to plan.
Well that made me think about the plan or lack thereof. A big part of my strategy was to get the chapter to move beyond the web site and create some conversations online between members, marketing professionals and chapter board members. Both Twitter and LinkedIn allowed that opportunity to move beyond email.
But what was the plan? That’s a great question and to be honest we did not have one other than, “we need a blog!” I think many organizations and companies tend to follow what the read and hear about in the business press.
As the newsletter editor I knew that a blog would give me greater flexibility in tagging content and generating feedback than a traditional web page. But other technical features like RSS feeds became a life saver in that I could post once and publish many. I’m a sucker for automation but if you’ve been a one person marketing department all your career you know why!
As far as Rob’s question regarding did anything go wrong. Yes, several times I posted to the chapter’s Twitter account by accident on TweetDeck. I had to go and delete the tweet but some feeds like LinkedIn are slow to update and the erroneous post stayed on LinkedIn for a few days. I also discovered that when I updated the blog layout it erased some of the widgets I had created. Now when creating a new layout I tend to make copies of all the widgets’ code to replicate in the new layout. Of course this would have been nice to know at 11:30 at night when I decided to change the layout!
I saw a great article the other day on social media and how you should not over think it too much as the lifespan of a tweet or blog post is short. The author did not advocate making errors but stressed the fact that overanalysis may lead to no social media publishing at all. I think that was the attitude I had, try it and see if it sticks.
Another question Rob posed was am I prepared if something goes wrong? I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
