Social media – How do I do it? (Marketing Magazine)

Recently I was invited to speak at two different conferences about social media in a corporate workplace.

At both conferences I spoke alongside other speakers and in both instances my fellow speakers talked about social media ‘facts’ and hyped the audience about ‘what they are missing out on’ but none of them actually spoke about how to do it or what is involved.

We all know the facts about social media. Let me give some right now, just to annoy you with the same old same old…Australian social media audience is estimated at 9.9 millions users, if Facebook was a country it would be the third largest country in the world after China and India, nearly 40% of Australians are now interacting with companies via social networking sites, 59% of Australians have a Facebook profile, etc, etc, etc...

Greg Tingle...


Nice article. I agree with a lot of it. Onya Marketing Magazine for giving it a guernsey.

At my company, Media Man International, we adopted a crawl, walk and run approach.

We've been at the social media thing for over 5 years, half the time we've been established, and Google owned Blogger was our first leap into the water, and it still serves us today.

It was rather like "on the job" training some days, but we didn't get fired or start a negative bushfire, so we did pretty well.

As a media and website portal development company, we are privileged to own and operate dozens of massive websites, and having some unique content and dynamic, interesting campaigns, has never been a problem. We cover of a dozen different business verticals - from entertainment to gaming, property, community and charity, technology, travel and tourism, politics and media analysis.

Our massive website portal network, complimented by social media powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogger, also appears to help us expand on our reach, maintaining our Hitwise top ten (entertainment and personality) status.

The global strategy has worked well for us, and Google and its social media services, as well as Facebook, continue to work a charm. Twitter is of course fantastic for getting a snappy message to a large audience in a hurry, often directing them to an interesting page in a hurry. The service I don't like is Digg, so I fired them!

Some of our news media campaigns also get boosted further by being listed on the Facebook and Twitter accounts of media powerhouses like News Limited, Fairfax Media and the ABC.

Oh, I should mention that I find some aspects of social media a bit like "ambush marketing", a technique that I borrowed a few ideas from the likes of MOH's Kym Illman, Virgin's Richard Branson and 888 and Crown Limited's Shane Warne, but I think we do the online "ambush marketing" better than all of them, but Illman remains king for traditional ambushing!

Before you ask, my prime Twitter account is http://www.twitter.com/mediamanint Our globalgamingcom Twitter is also a hit, and yes, we also have a mediamanmarketi Twitter, just to have all based covered.

Am I glad I got on the social media bandwagon? Yes, and good on Marketing Magazine for also catching the fever.

Greg Tingle
Founder and Director
Media Man International
http://www.mediamanint.com