Social Media Presentation

In my entrepreneurial marketing class the other day, we had a guest speaker. His name was Steve Chandler and he runs his own online ad agency called Chandlerthink.com. He gave a very cleaver and informative social media presentation with some eye popping statistics.  The most interesting things in my opinion were his catchy sayings. For example, with social media and advertising in general, Chandler states that you must “fish where the fish are.” Today, there are many skeptics out there, thinking social media is a fad and is not worth the time or effort to use efficiently. However, the numbers do not lie. With over 400 million people on Facebook, over 50 million tweets per day, and roughly 100,000 YouTube video uploads per day, it is clear that the fish are swimming in the social media stream of today’s society.  Advertisers must recognize this and adapt.  Chandler explained that being successful at social media is not a simple thing though. Advertisers must be real with people. Chandlers discussed how profiles on Facebook are like people’s personal “me time” and that time should not be interrupted by annoying scheme’s and ploys by advertisers. He recommends being interactive. Chandler stated that he lives by posing the question, “WWBRD?” That stands for “What Would Bonnie rate Do?” Bonnie Rait sings the song, “Let’s give them something to talk about.” Chandler says that is exactly what advertisers need to do when trying to connect to consumers using social media tools. Chandlers gave a personal example of a client his company has. They created a Facebook page for the client and initially posted bland non-interactive comments. This got the Facebook page hardly any additional followers. For the first six months, their new followers looked like this: 1) low 90s 2) low 90s 3) 0 4) 500s 5) over 1,000 6) over 14,000. Clearly Steve Chandler and his colleagues figured out something around month 4. They began interacting with their followers more by posing questions regarding favorite personal memories and opinions on various topics. The followers soon started flooding in. This is just another example of how advertising today is moving toward non-traditional media and today’s consumers are much more educated when it comes to a company’s attempts to be real with them.