Last week I gave a presentation to the Vancouver chapter of Construction Specifications Canada. It was called “Twitter? LinkedIn? How to Use Social Media Professionally.” The room was filled with architects, engineers, landscapers, contractors, and one or two marketers: an animated, serious, and friendly crowd. One attendee wrote me afterwards to say that the mood in the room went from skepticism (“does our business really need social media?”) to enthusiasm (“look at all the ways we can find and engage clients!”), to trembling (“the enormity of commitment to social media that is possible and available seemed scary”) (a rare, admirably correct use of the word “enormity,” by the way). Many attendees told me they left with a better idea of how to approach this field and how to be selective in terms of which social media platforms to focus on.
I explained how eight social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, and blogs – were being successfully utilized in my audience’s industries. As a handout I provided CMO.com‘s 2013 Guide to the Social Media Landscape, which compares the first six platforms above in terms of their effectiveness across four categories: customer communication, brand awareness, driving traffic to one’s website, and search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a handy-dandy PDF:
According to its website, CMO.com is “Adobe’s content site created to provide digital marketing news and insight for senior marketing executives around the globe. Its aim is to help CMOs stay informed and save time so they can more effectively lead their companies in the digital world. The editors daily review relevant content from more than 150 leading content sources, including major business, advertising, social media, and marketing-industry publications and Web sites. We scour posts from thought leaders and influential bloggers. Plus, we publish articles by experts—Adobe’s own, as well as those from around the industry—agency leaders, and other CMOs that you won’t find anywhere else.”
It’s a marvelous site that, in addition to news, provides slideshows, event listings, lucid infographics, interviews, case studies, and product evaluations.
I tell my marketing students they need to check into CMO.com at least twice a week: “You will be paid to be the one person in the room who is on top of everything. Reading CMO.com is one way to help make sure that’s the case.”
