Using Twitter and Facebook to Market Your Creative Services

by Lisa Heselton

Being the enlightened individual I am, I decided to expand my horizons and attend a session that wasn't directly relevant to programming or prototyping (the equivalent of a guy forcing himself to watch a chick flick end to end for the sole purpose of ensuring that he still has feelings). In this instance, the session I had the distinct privilege of sitting in on was called "Using Twitter and Facebook to Market Your Creative Services", presented by Lisa Heselton (aka @kavka on twitter!)

First off, let me just say that Lisa (if you're reading this), nobody enunciates as well as you do! :) Your consonants are crisper than crisp, your vowels are formed to perfection, and your delivery...that of a true seasoned professional! :)

The overall purpose of this presentation, as I interpreted it, was to gather the collective wisdom and experience of all attendees and share it communally, with Lisa expertly guiding the discussions and contributing a large helping of her own knowledge. She set the stage with a brief introduction to what social media is and a high level view of how it is relative to creative professionals. She then graciously invested a good portion of session time to allowing each and every attendee a few minutes of floor time, introducing themselves, sharing how they currently use social media, and what it is they came to the session hoping to learn. With everyone's position clearly revealed, people began an orderly interactive discussion of their experiences and observations with and of social media, asking their questions of the group as a whole. Under Lisa's guiding hand, everyone walked away having their questions answered and armed with a large collection of fresh ideas and resources.

Personally, being only a casual user of social media and not having any creative services to market, I came away with a major epiphany; an analogy of extreme accuracy that I'd like to thank Lisa for helping to impart to me. The analogy is this: Successfully using social media is EXACTLY like successfully participating in a cocktail party composed of some familiar individuals and many new ones. Just as you would never go this party planning on doing nothing more than speaking your opinion with no intention or interest in listening to responses, you should NEVER allow yourself to utilize social media as a billboard. After all, you're not dropping flyers on the windshields of cars here; you are talking to real people whose need to be engaged in a two way dialog demands your greatest reverence. Just as you would never go to a party with the sole intention of trying to sell the other party goers some product, so should you never take social media for granted and treat it as a captured audience of potential customers. On the contrary, what you SHOULD do is to introduce yourself to the group and to individuals; let people know something about you, personally, regardless of whether or not you would like to generate some business. Everybody can smell a disinterested car salesman from a mile away. Likewise, it takes no special skills to be able to mentally compile a person's collection of tweets and read between those lines to know the true level of their sincerity. Now, it IS okay to talk about your services at a party, but everyone would agree that there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

I could go on and on with this analogy, and so can you. But I am now convinced that anybody is able to clear up 99% of the mystery of how to properly and successfully utilize social media if they look at it in PRECISELY the same way as they would utilize a casual cocktail party. It's not at ALL a huge mystery! Social media is simply a new way to hold a global, ongoing cocktail party, and if you are part of any social media outlet...then dude/dudette...you're just a person at a party. Have fun with it, but remember proper party etiquette.

Thanks Lisa Heselton! You really rocked this one. ;)