Yesterday’s Twitter outage as a result of a denial of service attack was a keen reminder not to put all your social media eggs in one basket. Just like in financial a balanced portfolio is going to perform better in the long term. And social media is a long term marketing activity.
Now you are thinking, but wait, didn’t she say a few days ago that I shouldn’t try to do everything at once? Why, yes I did! I was referring to once you have planned your online strategy and want to begin executing, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can begin in one platform until you are comfortable and then keeping adding to your portfolio.
But in reality, you should have an online marketing strategy that includes social media in the mix. Your strategy should not be tied specifically to a platform, i.e. a Twitter strategy, a Facebook strategy, but rather you should have a social media strategy based on goals and objectives you are trying to achieve, and then decide the tools.
There are a lot of tools out there, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking (Digg, Delicious, etc) as well as FriendFeed, and many others. Every person and/or company will have a core set they work with and potentially a secondary set they utilize as well. That way, if you have an incident like yesterday’s outage, you have options. It was interesting for me to see how much more activity was on Facebook and LinkedIn yesterday!
And do not forget old fashion email and telephone, in the end it is all about communication and conversation, so from time to time step away from the computer and talk to someone over the phone or heck, meet in person!
