I write for my association’s blog (I’ll just call it the Association of Really Cool People—ARCP for short). Last week I had a post ready to go when my boss chimed in with something like, “Let’s find a way to highlight ARCP more in this post with a quote from a really cool person.”
From a traditional marketing/communications standpoint, that was a reasonable request, but as a participant in the social media world, I had to bang my head on the keyboard a few times before respectfully disagreeing. It doesn’t work that way. Plus it’s cumbersome to hunt down relevant, valid quotes from really cool people when you’re trying to publish a timely post.
Here’s how it works for me: When I write posts I’m always thinking of ways to plug ARCP, but I’m careful to do it in an authentic way. If it’s too obvious that I’m saying “ARCP is the greatest,” readers get turned off. There’s less tolerance for it in the blogosphere verses an ARCP publication or press release.
Also, by covering current events that people are talking about on blogs, twitter, facebook, etc., we show people what we’re interested in and we bring them to our blog to discuss it—which indirectly, but powerfully promotes ARCP. For example, we discuss Beyonce baby and an MSNBC blogger who also follows us on Twitter may see it and say, “wow, I didn’t realize ARCP had anything to do with cool kids. I thought they were only about cool adults.” When you think about it, it’s sort of like subliminal advertising.
