I’d like to take a brief departure from the usual technical blog post and delve into a topic that we don’t often address with you directly: marketing. Now I know what you’re thinking, but please keep reading. I think you’ll be surprised.
A little over a year ago, I was working on a telecoms event – The Cable Show – the largest cable/MSO event in the U.S. I had already gone the traditional route that us marketing types follow: secured a sponsorship, posted the event to our website,
ecitele.com, and sent the requisite email invitations. But I wanted to do more, to reach more people. Around this same time, I kept hearing a lot about a little application called
Twitter, and I grew curious as to how I could leverage this new tool to reach a broader audience. (For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to send 140 character updates, or ‘tweets,’ to a public timeline where they can be seen by all those who use Twitter, and specifically by those who follow you.)
So on March 4, 2009, I embarked on the great new frontier know as social media. I created an account for
ECI Telecom on Twitter and issued the company’s first tweet – about The Cable Show. It was a simple invitation urging people to come to our booth at the show, but it ushered in an entirely new way for us to communicate with our customers, prospects, analysts and the industry at large. Now, rather than the usual one-way dialog, or broadcast, form of marketing, two-way conversations were not only possible, but simple and easy – and often, if not always, more desirable. Although that first tweet didn’t result in waves of people descending on our booth, it did help us get our feet wet with social media.
Over the months, we began to evolve from the basic ‘come see us in our booth’ or contest offers to sharing more meaningful information and educational content. Today, you’ll often find us live tweeting from major industry events and conferences, sharing interesting tidbits of information as we come across them. We’re also regularly sharing noteworthy articles, analysts’ tweets and other bits of data like photos and videos. And it doesn’t stop there…you can also find ECI on all the popular social networking sites, including
Facebook,
LinkedIn,
YouTube,
Flickr,
Wikipedia and here on this blog, 1NetAvenue.
But there’s been something missing from this equation, and it’s you. The bottom line is: we want to hear from you! Whether it’s email, the social platforms, or this blog, we want to know…
• How you prefer to receive information from us
• Which topics are of most interest
• Which social networks you use the most
• …and more
You can help us by completing this very brief
survey (it’s only six questions and should take just a few minutes). We’ll use the results to fine-tune what we’re doing in our social media efforts so that we can bring you the information and materials that matter most to you – and, hopefully, pave the way for deeper, more meaningful conversations between us all.
Because after all, social media is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t just for marketers.
Colleen Seery