Social Media Ninja (in training)

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-08-16 13:41:45  As CEO of a media company, I thought it would be a good idea to learn more about social media and how to utilize it.  I’m not an old fogey by any stretch of the imagination, but I really didn’t fully embrace the Twitter community or blogosphere until recently.  This is surprising because I always considered myself an early adopter of new technologies back in my younger days.  I’ve had the same Yahoo email since 1996 and Gmail since 2005 for personal stuff.  I signed up for Facebook (or “The Facebook” as some of my older relatives refer to it) after Skip Walter suggested that I check it out in 2007 at an EDRM meeting.  I recall Skip prophesying that it would crush MySpace because you could install apps inside the site.But then the hyper-drive evolution of technology quickly passed me right by after that time.  It seemed liked everyone had an iPhone and was connected to the blogosphere.  Twitter came out and messages were racing around the world.  It was all I could do to keep up with the eDiscoverylaw.com and eDiscoveryjournal.com RSS feed.  I basically hit information overload…too much…too fast…and too little details.   I didn’t know where to turn for help, so I basically shut down for a few years.  I was busy with my projects and expert gigs anyway.When I came onboard with eDiscoveryJournal, I knew immediately that I had to take my head out of the sand and embrace the new world.  I really didn’t know where to start, so I began with Barry and Greg who told me how they use social media and provided me with an idea of their vision where the eDiscoveryJournal would fit in that world.  Barry told me about some of his analyst friends (not in the eDiscovery/email archive space) that use Twitter as a business tool to help stay in contact with their clients and share information about trends in their particular industry.  What a novel concept…I thought Twitter was all about telling people that you were doing some mundane teenager activity that no one really cared about except your BFF.I was lucky enough to reconnect with Ari Kaplan about a month ago to catch up on things.  I met Ari many years ago at an eDiscovery conference and was immediately impressed with his knowledge, experience, and most of all, his energy.  Ari told me that he recently finished a book and was traveling to promote it.  He said the title was “Reinventing Professional Services: Building Your Business in the Digital Marketplace”.  I about jumped out of my seat with excitement and Ari was gracious enough to send me a copy for me to read.  After reading his book, I was reinvigorated to re-engage my network and use the new technology that was literally at my fingertips.I immediately jumped on Twitter which I had signed up on a few years ago, but never really used…I had 3 followers (I’m @jsnvelasco).  I figured out how to find people and use their networks to expand mine.  I found a nifty tool called Twinbox that embeds Twitter in your Outlook so that messages can be viewed in the same place as my Outlook and RSS feeds.  I started using the #LI command to connect the tweets to my LinkedIn account.  I attended a couple of webinars on social media marketing from a company in Austin called Spredfast where Keith Zoellner (formally of StoredIQ) is the CTO/EVP.  Within the first week, I increased my network to about 20 followers and then to about 60 the following week.  I am now following close to 200 others in the eDiscovery and social media space.  The feedback has been great and has already resulted in a couple of opportunities.I was chatting on the phone with a colleague and my son overheard me talking about my new found respect for social media.  I jokingly said that I’m a “social media ninja” now and he ran into his room to draw me a picture of his perception of a social media ninja with a Dell laptop in hand. I laughed heartily and decided that this would be a great thing to share.But all is not perfect in the social media world…more on that next time!!  Again thanks to Ari for a copy of his book and the inspiration to embrace this new world.