Mysterious Self-promotion Through Social Media

So now I'm working with a great musician, Terry W. He is a very nice person, and more importantly, he is such a talented artist. For Terry, one big problem for him is that the public haven't seen his talent. I searched "self-promotion for musicians". What I've found were mostly done by Terry, except he haven't upload his album on YouTube and other free online music websites.

Musicians treasure their work, for sure. However, people now are very used to listening to free music or downloading music for free. As Terry said, nowadays, musicians can hardly earn money from selling CDs. They make living by holding concerts.

Well, how can an independent musician who got less than 100 followers on Twitter promote himself/herself through social media? Some people say the number of followers doesn't mean anything. I respectfully disagree. At least you need followers to see your posts in other to convey your messages to the public.

Yes, "there is no such as thing as a general public." Let's see who is the target audience. Terry said those who likes his peers are his target audiences. Now, how to get these audiences' attention then? You can tweet them about the musician you want to promote, but that will be spamming for those who follows you. Or you can send them messages, but unless they follow you back, you can't.

Self-promotion through social media? It is still a question for me.

Saving Money or Spending More Money?

"Hey, what are you going to do on the Thanksgiving break?" My American friend Roxanne asked me.
"I'm going to have the Thanksgiving Dinner with a local family... Nothing else." I replied.
"You know, if you don't have any plan, you can go shopping and experience the American consumerism."
Suddenly, "Black Friday" jumped out from my mind. "You know what, Roxanne, I've already experienced it."

In the past few months, I purchased tons of clothes, shoes and facial cares. I didn't need to go to Carousel Center and the fact is, I didn't even want to -- everything I bought was from the Internet with considerable  discounts.

You may ask how I got all the information about the sale? From ads?
Honestly, I don't like ads because they always come to you when you don't want them to disrupt your favorite TV show. The interesting thing is, now, many ads don't come to you, instead, you follow them.

This is how "ads" on social media work:

• Many brands or "info agents" have their social media Webpages to let you to follow them. 
• They offer you bewildering discount information and tell you to "save money". 
• Then you buy the items that you never think you will buy if you don't follow those brands or info agents on social media. 
• You feel so happy that you bought them at such "low prices", thinking those who do not know the coupon codes will spend more money than you did.
• You are now obsess with those ads.

Social media change the way you see ads by:

• creating your loyalty to brands you are interested in
• providing discount information you want to know
• having conversations with you

Those brands and info agents are like "friends" of yours on your social media Webpage. They act as opinion leaders who select "valuable info"for you rather than those regular ads whose target is no more than sell products to you.

Ads, whether on social media or anywhere else, are always trying selling products to you. However, when they come to social media, their tone and wording changed. Ads become more humanized and closer to the customers.

When regular ads tell you to save money when you are watching TV shows, you know they want money from your pocket. But when social media ads tells you to save money, you really think they mean it. Because they are following you like real world friends. And you listen to what your "friends" tell you.

Everyone, Happy Thanksgiving!

Social media for internal communications

Some people said online that the smartest thing about Facebook and Twitter is not how effectively they work; rather, it is they fitting in our life so well that people don’t even feel strange when they use them.

Now, we have thousands of social networking web sites and related applications, many of which are for everyone, whereas some of them are more exclusive than the other. Applications such as Yammer, is an application for enterprise internal communications. It allows employees to update their status, including what news they are reading, what project they are working on, what questions they have and what kind of topic they want to discuss.

This kind of internal communication tools seem to be very similar to other social media in general. However, they are more exclusive because the network is determined by net users’ Internet domain.

But people may still wonder – what’s the point of using these tools for internal communications when everyone is using some more popular or inclusive social media like Facebook and Twitter?

One reason that I come up with is many companies do not allow employees to use social media such as Facebook or Twitter on the companies’ computers, because it will be very distracting to use these while working, especially most of the contents are irrelevant with work.

Nonetheless, a company may still need internal interactivities. Therefore, an exclusive tool is the best choice.

The above is just one example of an exclusive communication tool for internal use. Many other social media applications are not necessarily designed for internal use only, but still facilitate communications within an organization.

Digsby, Skype, wikis, podcasts, Slideshare and many others have their specific functions that foster conversations, help distribute information and encourage interactivities amongst employees in an organization. People don’t have to go to their colleagues’ desk say, “hi, I just saw a great piece of news,” or “look at my slideshow, how is it?” Nor do they need to email one by one anything they want to share with others. When they upload a slideshow or share a link through social media, others are able to see them.

Despite the fact that social media enable information to distribute fast and employees to interact, there are some factors that may hinder the communications.

Firstly, there are so many social media tools for people to use. They are not effective unless people who use them make them effectively. And that will cost a great deal of time and energy. Some people may have already felt an overwhelming impact of social media or simply emails on their daily life. The use of social media may cause stress and thus ineffective use of these tools.

Moreover, while handling a heavy job workload, an employee may feel social media giving too much information. People need to scan and find what is most important information that relevant to what they are working on. This process can sometimes be very distracting.

When searching for social media tools on the Internet, some introduction will inform people that how many of Fortune 500 (what is this?) companies are using the particular application. They seem to tell others that by using this tool, your company is going to be successful as these Fortune 500 giants.

But is that really the case?

Perhaps a company may need to experience itself to know the answer.

Social media, thoughts after the presentation

This is the second week of fall semester in Newhouse! Philip R. Johnson gave us a presentation about social media in public relations. Here are my thoughts about what he present.

There are many insightful points in the presentation. Firstly, understanding the situation of an organization is more important than using social media that are popular at the moment. Many organizations are using social media as a platform to communicate with the public. However, this tendency does not suggest that social media are always good for every organization. An organization should think about contents, frequency of posting, crisis management when something goes wrong in social media and all kinds of situations that it will confront when using social media at the very beginning.

Secondly, I strongly agree with "the big principle"--focus on relationships, not the technologies. Recently, an well-known Chinese English teacher Li Yang has accused of domestic violence. His wife posts pictures and micro-blogs through  Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter (click here to see his wife's Weibo). Li Yang has  Weibo account as well (click here to see Li Yang's Weibo). However, facing tons of comments about the violence following his regular micro-blogs, he replies nothing and gives no comment about the accusation.

This is not merely a personal crises. As the founder of Li Yang Crazy English, his silence jeopardizes his company. This is an example of how relationship is not well managed when using social media. While social media offer great opportunities for the public to understand an organization or a person, they also allow the public spread negative information widely and fast.

Furthermore, personally, I agree with the statement "relational schema favors benefits of mutual/accurate exchanges of real self-experiences." My favorite GRE teacher Luo Yonghao is a public figure, the founder of Laoluo English School . His micro-blogs are quite different from many other well-known English teachers such as Li Yang and Yu Minhong.

Luo's blog is quite personal, with all the micro-blogs written by himself expressing his own thoughts about anything he finds interesting. He also reply others' comments time to time. Whereas Li and Yu's micro-blogs are always written with the style of chicken soup for the soul. They are less personal and not written by themselves. Few comments following get replied.

It is a common situation that people pay more attention on the CEO or founders of organizations rather than the organizations themselves. Because people are more willing to talk to a person than an organization especially people don't even know who is behalf on it. However, still, many people seem like micro-blogs that share no real self-experiences in China.

I'm not sure whether this situation differs from cultures. One phenomenon in Chinese social media is many people love the style of "chicken soup for the soul". Celebrities are followed and liked by thousands of fans, even though no comments are replied. Probably it is because celebrities are people and organizations are not. However, sometimes the boundary between webpages of a person and webpages of organizations is not quite clear.

In addition,  I do not totally agree with "shorter posts, higher frequency" strategy. This strategy can be very annoying if the frequency is too high. People do not want to see a full screen of tweets from only one organization. When I meet this situation, I will unfollow this organization's twitter in order to leave some space for tweets from others.

Finally, in respect of full truth, Internet users may want to know that, but sometimes, the full truth may be related to someone else' privacy or other rights. Therefore I think people need to fully consider consequences before telling full truth.



Overall, many principles are quite helpful to understand how to use social media. However, it must take great effort to follow these rules for long-term management.