8 Spokes on a Social Media Dial

By on October 29, 2011 in Blog Coach, Dialing 8, Marketing, Social Media with 0 Comments

If you’re among the camp that’s thinking there’s just too much social media – you may be in the majority. If one more tool or update comes out next week . . .

Before you pull out all your hair or start deleting your accounts, let’s look at things a bit differently. (And I agree, there’s a whole lotta tools out there and it can get confusing, but we’re gonna calm this storm, okay?)

I’m of the belief that your blog is the hub and foundation of your social media toolset. Ideally, it’s on a domain and space on the web that you own. And if you’re smart, that content you’re producing elsewhere is either also being published in your blog posts or being backed up.  So, the blog is your centerpiece.

Everything else is part of the dial. And to keep things simple, eight spokes on the dial:

  1. Streams – Includes Twitter, Facebook, some of what Google Plus does, a bit of LinkedIn, Blip.fm, etc
  2. Video & Audio - YouTube (yours and your favorites), UStream or LiveStream, SlideShare, Blog Talk Rado, etc
  3. Images – Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, Fotobabble, some of what Google Plus does
  4. Networks - Most of LinkedIn stuff, Ning, Active Rain, some of what GooglePlus does w/ Circles
  5. SoLoMo – your Mobile app, Foursquare and other LBS, Groupon, some of what Google Plus does
  6. Resources – Delicious, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Google +1, RSS subscriptions, Your Kindle page
  7. Bio/Hire – Your about page and your profile pages on Facebook and Google+, etc., a Hire You menu or page
  8. Products – Your ebooks, whitepapers, newsletter, Speakers media kit, membership site, books, etc.

First, a bird’s eye view:

8 Spokes on the Social Media Dial

Those are the eight spokes. Of course the Streams are going to get most of your attention, and then time investment drops as you go clockwise around the dial. If one were to invest disciplined chunks of time in each of these spokes, success is much closer and we get to keep our hair.

 This is a map of your social media play – but it’s not the terrain. This is the side view of the dial.

We’ll look at the terrain of these spokes and how they stack up in the next post.

Dialing 8 – Staying Strong and Lasting Long in Social Media

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About Mike Sansone: Conversation Conductor & Social Mediatician: Amplify Reach, Relationships, and Revenues for Small, Rural and Independent Business. Blogging & Social Media as Conversation Stations.

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