The words "social media" typically scare the hell out of business owners. Either you don't have the time, you don't understand it, or it's just beneath you – perceived as something your teenage kids do instead of focusing on their homework. If you're one of those brave souls looking to make moves in the world of social media, or simply learn more about it, the Social Fresh conference held on Monday, February 8 at the Doubletree Westshore in Tampa was an ideal place to begin. Individual presentations, group panels and small roundtable sessions ran from 9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. and included some heavy-hitting speakers from companies like Best Buy, General Motors, MTV, USAToday and a keynote from Social Media Group's Maggie Fox.
Fox's keynote was primarily about the scalability of social media forms. She presented three types of known media – owned, paid and earned – and an easy-to-remember scalability formula, "Earned + Paid x Owned = Scaled Social Media." Some good background on this concept – and some visuals – can be found here (courtesy of Dave Fleet). The model allows businesses to leverage content (owned); advertising (paid) and reviews, articles and awards (earned) to achieve a true social media mix.
For small business owners, the creation of content is rarely a top priority, what with the daily tasks of running the actual business. However, Fox (and plenty of others over the course of the day) asserted that all companies are now media companies, and should start thinking like one.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2010.