During the 2nd semester of BDW all of the students are asked to break into teams and build a startup. The students at BDW are extremely lucky because we are given the tools and resources needed to accelerate the usual startup process. For instance, each company is assigned a team mentor and let me tell you, these aren’t random people mentoring us. These are people like partner and chief digital officer of MADE Movement, Deutsch LA, Ogilvy & Mather, and the creative director of AKQA.
On top of THAT each team is assigned a CEO mentor, a design mentor, a development mentor and finally, a social media mentor. I am the design lead within my team and I have also decided to tackle social media. Business-wise I don’t have much experience doing social media marketing, so I saw this as an excellent learning opportunity. Here are some of the insights I have learned thus far:
1. Identify Where the Conversation is:
- For example – if you have a sneaker company, don’t expect people to tweet about the shoes. When “Sally” gets back from a long run she is likely going to talk about how great she feels afterwards, not how well her shoes held up. Look for the trends and plug-in. For a sneaker company this may include training methods or injuries.
2. Content Must be Created on the Correct Platform:
- Don’t merely create content, optimize it! Know who your audience is and reach out to them on the platform they are using most.
- Stay on top of trends. Right now, Vine is the new big thing. Make a video of your product and tweet it out. Excite your followers.
3. It’s Not About Frequency, it’s About Consistency:
- Be consistant in creating logical and perhaps useful posts. Don’t blast people with tweets just to have your name out their, instead consistently tweet about things your users want to know about.
4. It’s Not the Who, it’s the Why:
- Don’t worry about who has recently unfollowed you, worry about why they unfollowed you. What had you been doing up until that point? What changed?
5. Use Your Own Account to Repost:
- You should (hopefully) be personally passionate about the product you are working on, so use your own account to repost and retweet information from your company account. This will also help reach new people!
6. Emotional Attachment to Content:
- Did you know the most shared content on the internet are “how-to’s”?? Scientific articles (specifically) are the most retweeted content out there. — People have an intrinsic desire to learn and share knowledge.
- People also love content that remind them of things, (childhood, travels, etc.)
- Friends perceptions/take on the world are also great — “this is a representation of me, so I’m going to share it with my friends” — understand who “your peeps” are and BE ONE OF THEM.
- Know your peeps from the inside out (who are they? what are they dealing with? *Personas!)
7. Find Where the Crowds Are and Participate:
- Comment on people’s posts and tweets. ENGAGE with them!
Awesome first day of mentoring. Learned a lot. Thank you James Clark of Room 214!
sweatersyum.wordpress.com 