My trip from MySpace to Facebook and Google+ with some Pins

Posted on October 10, 2012

I have been doing a lot of thinking about my life and social media.  I remember the first network I joined when I was in high school. AIM or AOL Instant Messenger was the big thing. There was also Yahoo messenger and many more that didn’t get as much attention. Then came sharing sites like Napster and Morpheus where we could share music files for free from person to person.  Next were more full-scale social networks, I was a MySpace user and still have an account.

My first step into paid work with social was as the Director of Finance for a US Congressional campaign. At that point Facebook was very new and MySpace was the rage. There was also this little video site called YouTube that had not gotten very big yet.

 

Well in those early years of social people didn’t like to get advertisements or anything political. I remember a page comment for the campaign I was representing on MySpace. “You have gone to far, MySpace is not a place for politics” warp ahead to 2012 where Facebook is a public company (I got some on IPO day 1) and social is one of the best places to connect to customers. I had my hand in the ruin of social yes I was one of the first people who brought a political campaign into the social web.

Well little did I know but I would become a stay at home dad for a couple of years and get hired as the Director of Communications for a commercial roofing company. Wow had the social world changed. Facebook was king, Napster was gone and a little bird called twitter had begun to catch peoples ear.

I forgot to mention that I signed up for that little company called YouTube as a member and now have over 1,000,000 views on my channel.

Well my first jump into social in 2009 was to join every social network I could get my hands on. I joined twitter and Friendster and bebo and many many more. I linked them all together or as much as I could through ping.fm I even created my own social networking site on ning.  I remember joining social media breakfast and Fallon presenting a new app they use in house called Skimmer. I tried tweet deck and really started to get into apps for consuming social and publishing.

 

Next I got the company I worked for up on Google, we were not just high ,we were on the top constantly. The main product we sold was Duro-Last and if you looked for them in the state of Minnesota we came up first. High above any paid search. This was a big deal because they are a national company and spend lots of money on PPC and ad campaigns. I believe they even pay 3^rd party groups like Vocus to get more web presence. Anyway, at the national sales seminar my second year in I got called up on stage in front of 1500 sales people as the twitter guy.  As long as I was with the company that title never went away.

Well I got more and more into twitter but I kept my eye on all the other new networks. I signed up with google+ and Pinterest and checked out many that were to unsuccessful to name.

 

I was able to keep the company I worked for at the top of the Google search for the whole time I worked with them and without paying any money to Google. I really believe in organic search and SEO being built into the content you push. More than that it has to be something people like and want to and are willing to share.

I was recently at a meeting with people who use social for marketing and I realized how on target they are  and how much people who don’t believe in social are off the mark.  I love twitter for what it can do for a brand but I will be honest I also love it for all the free junk you can win.

I use Klout to see where I stand with all my fellow posters and tweeters and they give me lots of cool stuff. In the last year I have been sent a whole case of gum, organic shampoo, high end pencils, Red Bull, Starbucks drinks, A box of fair trade food and much more. I have also won a bunch of gift cards and tickets and a twins T-shirt from twitter.

If anyone thinks the power of social is not in the people. They should sign up for twitter and tweet at the company of their choice with a question or comment.  I would guess most of them would reply within a few hours. I would say that’s a lot better than sitting on your cell phone waiting for an hour to talk to a human.

 

All in all I think social is the best place for brands to connect to their customers and to interact.  I will be sticking with it although I see more and more ads pop up in my Facebook feed and more and more friends take a break from it. Well see, I may need to start setting coffee dates with my friends instead of sharing photos online.