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SOCIAL MEDIA
restrict this) and the main goal generally is to gain readers who then receive your new posts either by email or RSS feeds. Common blogging platforms are Blogger and Wordpress.
settings, clubs, membership associations, universities, courses – basically any group with a common interest.
So while your social networks could be built around your friends, they could also be built around one or more groups of people. For example, those who regularly attend your exercise classes, or your one-to-one clients, or you could form a network on behalf of the club/s at which you work.
But why? Well the point of these social media tools is that they are specifically designed to let you share, and when you share with your friends (or contacts) not only do they see your information but generally speaking so do your friends’ friends and so on. This causes a huge ripple effect to spread through hundreds and maybe even thousands of people you don’t know, some of whom may be potential customers. Instead of you talking to your mate, who may or may not talk to his mate i.e. the traditional word of mouth route, through social media you have access to many, many more people.
Some common platforms you might use A platform in the social networking sense is generally a website which you log into, to network i.e. interact with other people. These sites are all ‘hosted’ online so you don’t need to download any software onto your computer to access them.
Social networking sites e.g. Facebook/Bebo/MySpace/Ning – are free-access social networking websites where you find friends and then link to them. At the same time you can share things you’re doing through your own page. You can see what your friends are doing and they can see what you’re doing. You can join special interest groups or create groups of your own, like your personal training clients, or your group exercise ‘faithfuls’.
Blogs – are effectively web diaries. People create them about everything and anything! Some people write specifically about a topic area they are passionate about, others might write about a personal journey. Blogs are generally public (although you can
“Your social networks could be built around your friends, groups of people who attend your exercise classes or your one-to-one clients”
Microblogging – Twitter is the most commonly cited example and is still in my opinion, despite some bad press, one of the most powerful marketing/sharing tools in the ‘social media’ toolkit. It got off to a self-confessed wrong start by asking people to tweet (i.e. post a comment) about what they were doing that minute. Unsurprisingly this resulted in a platform full of day-to-day irrelevance! But increasingly it’s finding its feet. The idea is SMS on acid! Find something interesting, condense into down to 140 characters and generally include a weblink for more information (using a URL shortener to cut down characters). Find a bit of research that would be interesting to your clients or something they might be interested in, summarise it, and ‘tweet’ about it. Happy client, happy days!
Media-specific sharing sites Photosharing – sites like Flickr or Picassa. Create an account, upload your photos and choose who you want to share them with. Great for holiday snaps and family get-togethers but plenty of work-related uses too, like pictures of exercises that people struggle with, photos of your club or facilities, photos of you that help them build a better rapport with you and give you things to talk about – there are lots of applications.
Video – YouTube and Vimeo – same principle as photosharing sites but using videos. You could create videos of exercises, sample videos of classes so people can view a class (or an instructor) before signing up. You could video interviews with peers on subjects which might be interesting to clients, you could answer FAQs or post videos of new club facilities or renovations, the sky’s the limit!
Music – iTunes is one good example particularly with the sharing of playlists and the Genius function which matches songs you like to songs that other people with shared likes, also like. Last.fm is an internet radio station which allows you to create playlists around artists you like and customise it by clicking a ‘love this song’ or ‘ban this song’ button while you’re listening. Using your preferences, matched with the information being constantly gathered from other users with similar tastes, it generates music which becomes more and more refined to your taste. Great for sharing motivational songs or playlists.
Bookmarks/news/information – sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Delicious to name but a few, let you share news, information, even web bookmarks.
For more information click the following link to take you to a presentation I made at last year’s FIA Conference – it also contains a range of ideas to get you started. http://bit.ly/sportexFIA09
THE AUTHOR
Tor Davies is a self-confessed web-enthusiast who is passionate about the collaborative power of the internet! She is also the founder of sportEX and the publisher of the current
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