Stephan Miller

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Organic is used a lot on the internet. So let me explain how I am applying it to social media marketing.

How do you learn social media marketing? That was a question I asked myself a few months ago. It was a new animal to tackle. I had blogged and used SEO, now it was time to learn something new. But was it?

I joined StumbleUpon in 2004 when the marketer’s on the site could be counted on one hand. Did I market my sites? Not really. I just thumbed up sites and pages I liked. It was simple and natural. No ulterior motives. That combined with the fact that StumbleUpon is a bit addictive helped me become a top Stumbler for months at a time.

After a while, I scolded myself though. “This is not getting work done.” So I went back to doing work online instead of playing. Back to the SEO that I knew and that made me a lot of money when combined with affiliate programs. I took that route for a couple of years until I popped my head back up to realize that I was falling behind.

During that period of burying my head in the sand, blogs exploded, videos exploded and social networks exploded. And I didn’t know much about any of them. When I got to the social media marketing part of my self-created curriculum, I forgot about my past StumbleUpon experience.

What did I do instead? I started looking for hot stories. I subscribed to the feeds of blogs that were consistently showing up on the hot pages of social networks. I would open 4 tabs at the same type. In each tab, a different flavor of meme trackers. This was all to teach me what a good story was. I had some success with this method. But I was adding nothing and my comments were worthless, for the most part, because most of the stories didn’t really interest me.

I had become a machine, processing stories and comparing then to hot stories I had seen before. A little calculator was going in my head figuring out the odds of a story becoming hot and me being the one to find it. Stop!!!

And then I started thinking. If all of the following are covered:

• You write about a topic you enjoy.
• You research a topic you are passionate about.
• You read blogs on that topic.

Then there is no need to worry about how you use social media. Just learn the mechanics and use it. Just use it. After reading post after post on how to use social media, I was back to that point where I first tried StumbleUpon, was finding new sites I had never imagined before and wasn’t thinking about how it was effecting the traffic to my sites. Drop your ulterior motives and like things for the sake of liking them. That and maybe read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” every now and then and you should be alright. Articles on the topic can help, but for the most part, they are just telling you what you already know. The medium is different. The people, the same.