My social media journey - Week 2 - The Social Media Show

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

(Andy is the MD of The MAPP Ltd., a company that provides simple visual planning solutions)

Getting Found, Getting Lost and Getting Hacked!

Listen to Andy’s interview on Show 20

With week one behind me and a report that showed that I had had a total of 41 visitors and one free account sign up I was feeling very happy that things could definitely be worse - and then I woke up on Monday to find that our Twitter account had been hacked. The hacker seemed to think that our account represented a great way to sell Canadian pharmaceuticals which was a new one on me. Does anyone really ever click those links? I truly hope not!

So having been found by someone undesirable, the rest of the week was focused on how to find those I really want to connect with. And assuming I can produce fascinating content, surely others will clearly be unable to resist and flock to it in droves. But where are they, these hordes of potential readers and with luck subscribers? Are they deliberately hiding from me and my wonderful content?

Well it seems once again that the game has changed and people now choose what and when they read rather than just sitting there being broadcast at.

We decided that Twitter was the place to start and, on advice, invested in a Hootsuite licence in order to manage our social media world. Hootsuite is a little daunting at first sight, but once it is set up it starts to make some sense and even better begins to demonstrate that despite all the initial confusion there is a world there that can be made sense of. Hootsuite announced the occasion of somebody actually retweeting something of mine which was a little surprising as, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. Reassured that it was a good sign, I then got completely lost in the detail of how to thank someone and sent a direct message with thanks to someone completely unknown to me.

Getting lost in the social media maze, as it still seems, is an occupational hazard for someone who likes order and reason. An engineer by training, I look for the system diagram of course, where does the process start and end, what routes does data go down and how is it processed, measured and managed. Try as I might I can’t find one - no one else looks surprised but me. So in the end you have to just close your eyes and dive in, make mistakes and learn.

The big decision this week was to choose a blogging theme that can show that we have some useful knowledge in our specialist area of planning. We ended up with creating a list of the ‘The 10 Greatest Plans The World Has Ever Seen’ and with a quick survey to develop a suitable list the first one was on its way.

So from a starting point of being hacked, through a long process of getting lost, the week ended with a light of encouragement and something tangible with we might just get found.