Social Media: A Case for Adult Supervision in Internet Marketing

I’m extraordinarily lucky to have two small and wonderful boys: a three year old who recently dunked my aging Blackberry Curve in his apple juice “just to see” (I was secretly pleased and await my Nexus One with joy) and a 15 month old rascal whose newfound mobility reminds me why it’s good to have kids at a young age.

The crossover to Internet marketing isn’t as hard as you might think.  In fact, it comes down to babysitting – or as I like to call it during my ‘day job’: adult supervision.

Social media, like most aspects of a successful Internet marketing campaign, is about three things:

• pacing (e.g. a schedule)
• relevance (e.g. attention span)
• strategy (e.g. mature decision making!)

Without those three elements, you’re pretty much sunk, even with the best SEO keywords or targeted landing page in the world.

Part of my job at Dinkum Interactive is to help guide our clients along the path that we’ve mutually decided upon.  This means stepping up and helping to get a blog entry written, an article produced, a facebook event posted, or an email newsletter Tweeted.

At Dinkum we are strong proponents of what we call “adult supervision” when it comes to Internet Marketing activities like social media.  Instead of doing it for our clients (something I don’t recommend for a variety of reasons), we help to monitor our clients’ activities and online behavior – essentially, social media babysitting!   If you’re a client, you’ll catch us reminding you before there is a problem and watching out for the opportunities and trouble spots that lie ahead.  We’ll proactively suggest blog topics to you and your staff, point out LinkedIn conversations in which you might participate, or feed relevant news or blogger musings we stumble across for distribution on your Twitter page.

The reason we believe in this approach is simple: we use it ourselves.  I’m currently being supervised by our own Social Media expert Marilyn Moran – just this past weekend she pointed out a few LinkedIn conversations I was able to dive into, and she gave me a heads up today that my last blog entry was over a week old.  With two kids, a busy work schedule, and keyboard fatigue I’m sure glad someone is watching out for me, and helping our company execute on our Social Media strategy.

Who is watching out for you?

Jacob Smith is a Senior Project Manager and Web Strategist with Dinkum Interactive and has led over 150 high-level consulting and website development projects over the last 10 years. He is active in both the internet and cultural communities, and served on the board of Philly Car Share, a nonprofit and one of the largest car sharing organization in the United States until helping engineer its sale to Enterprise Holdings in the summer of 2011. Originally from Southern California, Jacob and his wife, Meghan, now live in Center City Philadelphia with their young sons Rory and Duncan.