The New Media Planner

This year, I plan on doing some things a little differently. I’ve decided, first and foremost, to create a list of Social Media resolutions that I’m going to try to focus on in 2010. And like most new years resolutions, don’t hold me to these.

1) I resolve to be more responsive:

It’s become quite easy to build an audience. Some Tweeters even have this down to a science. However, once you get to a certain level, it becomes almost impossible to respond to everyone. You know how annoying this can be, though…if you take the time to reach out to someone, you expect the common courtesy of a response. This is just unsustainable.

However, my plan to be more responsive dovetails nicely in to my next resolution, which is…

2) I resolve to value quality over quantity

It used to be that you needed thousands of followers on Twitter in order to have any sort of credibility. 2009 taught us that this is not always the case. I am reminded of a couple of bloggers in the north that, between them, had over 25,000 followers. They decided to have a Tweetup, and only were able to activate 4 or 5 people. What is the value in that? We all are guilty of following people we could care less about. I’m going to try to cull that list.

In being more selective about my audience and about whom I pay attention to, I hope to be a more active and more responsive member of the social community.

3) I resolve to build a brand, but not limit myself to the brand.

Miss Rogue had a great blog post before the end of the year. In this post, she talked about how everything she was doing was on brand, including writing the book she was working on. She was remiss, however, that she had become so predictable because she’d done such a great job of “living the brand.”

I took this to heart, because first, I haven’t begun building a brand. I’m so inconsistent in writing my thoughts down that I haven’t decided what I want to do. However, I’ve also taken her advice to heart. While it’s important to build a brand through strategy, it’s also important to continue to be relevant to your users, even if that means morphing your brand over time.

4) I resolve to contribute to the social media knowledgebase

Many of the articles I read on social media are high level (like this one). They usually offer some theoretical strategy for building an audience, or bringing a brand to success. However, I have yet to find any articles that really contain some substance or meat.

I aim to change that in 2010. I’ve actually had the pleasure of working on some social media campaigns for some big brands, and I want to begin sharing the knowledge that I’ve acquired. I think these types of posts are what are going to help social media stay relevant and top of mind for the New Year.