14 May Ramblings: The Royal Wedding and the Social Media Swamp

Just a quick post and thinking back to when I sat down with a pile of ‘catch up’ work on the day of the Royal      Wedding.

I intended to plough through the work with Kate and Wills on in the background but, as much of the world        found, I became quite submerged with the processions and glimpse into our British heritage once again. It      was even quite emotional, in a patriotic kind of way.

Anyway, my laptop was on for the purposes of work but I thought I’d follow the #royalwedding trend on          Twitter and my friends on Facebook and what did I find?

Well, the Twitter stream was flowing too fast to read and there were multiple conversations branching out from different friend’s status updates that I was simply confused with choice and what to follow!

Now I want to get the point across that I was watching the wedding on my own in my living room. Despite this, I was with my friends as we chatted over Facebook, giving a running commentary about anyone and everyone’s attire. And this is precisely what the ‘king of social’, Facebook’s, objective has always been; to connect friends across the world with the same likes and interests.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling a little swamped with the choice I had; the TV, my laptop, my phone. We all know these mediums are becoming more and more fused everyday but it does emphasis the need for quality and not quantity.

Quality not quantity is something I refer to many times when delivering workshops or in training sessions. Just because social media is an effective and cost effective route to market doesn’t mean users need to saturate their feeds with 100’s of 1000’s of connections; where’s the quality and the relationship?

Technology offers immense choice and functionality to consumers. Inevitably human nature doesn’t want to miss out on anything so we try and consume as much as we can. In a roundabout way this also highlights to need to plan and focus in order to gain a positive and focused outcome in both pleasure and business.

Always remember to plan before launching any business or marketing strategy. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. How much clout, cost, credibility and control will your idea have

2. What is it you are planing – product or service – and why is it important to your customers

3. How are your customers going to know about it

These are only brief points to think about but nevertheless very important. And this is where I went wrong in watching the Royal Wedding. I hadn’t planned to focus on the wedding, I had planned to work and the wedding interrupted me because my focus wasn’t there!

Hopefully you may be able to relate to this situation, isn’t that what rambling is all about?