Imagine yourself stuck on cliff (your website) on the side of a mountain (the web). On one side is a wide open sea (traditional media). On the other side, a fast-moving river (social media). You have a stack of index cards and a marker.
You need to get someone to notice you. Planes sometimes fly overhead, large ships navigate in the sea, and many different types of people use the river: fishermen, kayakers, tubers, etc. How are you going to make the best use of your index cards to get noticed?
- You could lay them out on your cliff to spell HELP and hope passing planes (web surfers) see it. (Message on website)
- You could write HELP on the cards and throw them into the sea, hoping a ship picks one up. (Press release)
- You could write on the cards and throw them into the river, hoping one of the many river users sees one. (Social media strategy)
If you could pick only one option, #3 would most likely get you noticed the soonest. Ideally, you should be doing all three, portioning your cards to get the best results for your message. But the person who will most likely climb that mountain to help you down will be someone from the river. Make sure you respond appropriately when that happens.
In the early 1980s, traditional media often ran stories touting the death of skateboarding. I, as a die-hard skater, did not appreciate those articles. By 1983, I had a network of skater friends in a dozen states. We traded hand-made, photocopied ‘zines through the mail. We met at each other’s hand-built backyard ramps during the summer. We had a bona fide social network.
As a social network without the internet, it’s simple to retrace how our network was built. Our central node was the annual pro-am skateboarding contest held each summer at Kona Skatepark in Jacksonville, Florida. It was the only east coast opportunity for us to meet the pro skaters that we saw in the pages of Thrasher Magazine each month.
More importantly, we meet each other. In 1983, the same year that Transworld Skateboarding Magazine began publication, each major metropolitan area in the non-coastal east boasted maybe 5-10 hardcore skateboarders. In the summer of 1983, there were about a dozen skate ‘zines published: Squid Meat from Dayton, OH, Rolling Papers from Oak Ridge, TN, The Monthly Shredder from Huntington, WV, to name a few.
We built the network by traveling thousands of miles each year to skate each other’s ramps, hold contests, and hang out with like-minded individuals. We built it. We shared it. No one owned it. Out of it came a lesson in social media that is relevant today as PR professionals seek to understand the occasional backlash against their incursion into social media.
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