Think Before You Act

In the book The New Influencers, Gillin talks about a point that I felt was very important.  He says that strategy needs to drive technology.  I think all too often the reverse order happens.  All too quickly organizations and companies are looking to jump onto the newest and most hip technology in order to reach their customers, but sometimes this will not fit the bill. Think about a company like the Walking Company.  This is a shoe chain  that is mainly directed at middle-aged people.  Therefore, if this company was to jump on the twitter bandwagon to try to get recognition they would probably fail.  While some middle-aged people are on twitter, most are not.  The message of tweets from the Walking Company would be completely lost.  Instead, the Walking Company should look at different forms of social media to reach their customers.  Perhaps a class reunion website would be a better place to advertise.

Another topic that Gillin discusses is del.icio.us.  He says that this is the most powerful search engine site.  Having never really taken the time to explore this site, I decided to give it a go. It seems very navigable to me and like it would be a very helpful tool for social media experts.  The key to this site is tagging.  I understand now the importance of tagging in the social media world.  If you want to get noticed by important figures in the social media world, you need to tag properly so that they can track you down quickly on a site like del.icio.us.  While, I probably don't think this site is the most powerful search engine for me, I can see why it is so important to social media as a whole.