Social Media DJ for Corporations

When I starting spinning up my internal dialogue and musings on the social media/networking facility in corporate communications, relationships, marketing and branding, I came up with the metaphor that helped me personally frame the way I think that organization's should approach the subject: A social media DJ. As I was expanding my footprint beyond the basic networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc., I recognized that although the core of my message has threads across all of these spaces, that I was definitely tailoring it contingent upon the venue. I started reflecting (reminiscing) that what I was doing was in terms of picking and choosing content and ordering depending upon the network, was akin to creating mix tapes in college and today burning CD's from playlists in my ITunes library. I was using the same fundamental content or songs, to create new footprints (playlists) that would appeal to different audiences. Rather than exposing myself to claims that I suffer from a form of multiple-personality disorder, I posit that because I am presenting similar content just in different ways, I am actually acting out a virtual DJ role: looking at my life's personal and professional song list and ordering and styling it for each context.

For those you who have been the victims of my evangelism for my metaphor (and might still be raising their eyebrows), I challenge you to review your own profiles across your networks and ask yourselves if they are completely dissimilar or whether they reflect a core message that has just been spun in slightly different ways? From there, I challenge you to reflect on corporate messaging and whether or not the true objective is for marketing and sales to "play" the same songs but edit the length, fade-ins and outs, and order to fit the sales cycle, prospect profile, and particular solutions you are pitching.

I believe that we can quite quickly come to the conclusion that the viral nature of social networks, the facile way that they enable us to quickly select content from a library and "templatize" for a Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blog, comment on a blog, etc. are precisely the role of a DJ with Web 2.0 expertise.

Have you come full-circle with me? Rock on colleagues, rock on.