My social media journey - Week 1

 Andy Hatcher of The Mapp will be charting his Social Media journey, week by week .

(Andy is the MD of The MAPP which provides simple visual planning solutions.)

Whether ’tis nobler to be liked or to be shared?

It was with some trepidation that as summer arrived in the UK, my company finally crossed the border from the country called pre-revenue into the land that lies beyond (which I suspect is called no-revenue). The second iteration of our online service had finally been built to that magical point of minimum viability and could now be allowed out of quarantine to our slavering public.

The last time I did anything like launch a new product (Reuters in the 1990s), the state of the art involved press releases, printed brochures and expensive launch events, but even I realised that marketing this new service was going to take something different and a large part of the ‘different’ was going to be social media. I had taken some part in the process already - I realised I had been on linked in since 2003 for instance - but the majority of my experience had been extracted from reading about others (not least Ann Hawkins) who had fully embraced and evangelised about the whole idea.

Listen to Andy’s interview on Show 20 

A couple of books later and I think I felt I could probably do about the equivalent of ordering a beer in Italian

So I set about creating myself a social media plan of action that was going to allow me to catapault my new service from obscurity to Internet spotlight. The jargon was perhaps the first barrier, everything from personas, inbound, Twitter lists, DMs (they used to be sturdy shoes), unfollows and plus ones.

So where to start?

All roads seemed to lead to, or perhaps more accurately from, content and, more precisely, useful, engaging and valuable content.

As an ex-journalist that was never going to be a problem until, after having completed my first piece, I was advised it was “just too long, no one will stay engaged to the end”. Ummmm.

Chastened, brutally edited and posted on my website blog, the next question seemed to be to choose the channels through which my lucky readers were going to consume my ue&v content - oh yes. The initial choices were clear.
Twitter - indecipherable short messages full of @s and #s, Facebook - the land of my teenage daughter, Linked in - I was, Google Plus - important but no one seems to know why, and Pinterest - a complete photographic mystery.
The journey had started and my first week ended with one more new conundrum to solve. My long suffering advisor asked me, with a completely straight face, whether, when people read my blog, did I want them to like me or share me?

I wasn’t really sure but that can be for next week. Now back to the real stuff…what really is the point of private boards on Pinterest?

Follow the progress of The Mapp on Twitter @The_MAPP and @MAPPStartUp