‘What Do We Do in Social?’

While I have spent much of the past few years practicing the art of local SEO for enterprises, when I saw ”The Social Network” had garnered eight Oscar nominations, I started to think there might be something to this whole social media thing after all. As goes Hollywood, so goes the world, right?

In fact over the past two years, “what do we do in social?” has been a recurring theme among my clients. While social channels have been sprouting up across the Web, it is still unclear for many businesses how to use them effectively.

The idea behind the Social Local Media advisory service is to help you discern how all of the tweeting, poking, following, friending, status updating, sharing, liking and checking in affects local media. Our intent is not to add to the social media information overload you are likely already experiencing. We will strive to distill our analyses down to actionable information you can use to make decisions for your business. While this will be a work in progress, initially here is what I plan to offer you on these pages:

— Reviews/overviews of services that make innovative use of social local media. We’ll be looking for the next Facebook of local as well as the best vendors for services that can help your business go social.

— Interviews with social local thought leaders who can offer valuable “nuggets” that you can appropriate for your own strategies. The emphasis will be on “how/why did you do that?” vs. “why is your service awesome?”

— Case studies of actual social local media programs. The past few years of social media experimentation have generated a lot of learning. We will tap into companies that are successfully playing in the social local arena and see if we can get them to fork over a secret or two.

— News analysis. Each week we’ll wrap up what we think were the most significant events in the field and try to give you some food for thought to get your game on for Monday.

Since this is a blog, we hope this discussion will be as interactive as possible so feel free to comment away. Let Jed and me know what’s of interest to you and we’ll cover it. And if you’re a company doing interesting things in this space we definitely want to hear from you, so please feel free to ping us. That said, if you want us to talk about your business on these pages, please be willing to provide us with something interesting to say about you beyond a press release. For more thoughts on that see this post.

I’ll be getting started this week with coverage of Opus Research’s C3 Conference. If you are there and want to connect feel free to poke me, follow me, like me or whatever turns you on.