Becoming Social Media expert

By a strange series of coincidences, I turned out to be called the “social media guy” at the office. Now its part of my job to socialmedia-ize company stuff.

Although from some developer’s perspective this seems laughable and to others might sound ephimeral, pointless or just dead easy simple, the new tasks assigned to me have taken a big chunk of my day job time, analyzing strategies, browsing content, finding and posting content, and all this that involves getting a brand out there and start building a community.

So I guess what you need to learn to become a “social media expert” is:

– know all the social media tools available and what they are for
– provide useful content out there to build your brand’s reputation
– learn to connect social media services to publish things everywhere without taking you too much time or drive you crazy using tools like NetworkedBlogs or Hootsuite and the like.
– observe and learn from others. If you’re new in the social game, you’ve got to first observe how others do it, research and analyze which approach works for your particular case and goals and test them out.
– listen and monitor the community you are forming up around your brand. You can get very valuable input from the community, and that’s the whole point of the “social media”: to get close with your audience.

I guess this is like a “community manager” of a sort. Its going to be interesting how this new role is going to play in my life and what path it leads to. Its certainly a strange weird job to have. Maybe its another cycle, the social media thing is laughable just the same as blogging was laughable in the early 2000’s years.

Just hope that it won’t “dry” up my brain and become the real dummy these books are directed for, since I’ve been taken a bit away from real development work.

I’m both excited and worried on this new role. I’ll learn the best I can from it. I find it funny and entertaining.