How I Got Into Social Media Part 2

In my first post I talked about how working in online advertising opened my ideas to all types of opportunities for promoting products and services online.  I created a social networking site called www.mydrinkingclub.com.  Continually researched other social networking platforms including:

Free Hosted (Ning)

Free: Open Source (Joomla, Drupal)

Free (Dolphin)

Paid (PHP Fox, KickApps, Boonex)

I realized there was no perfect platform out there and ending up using a “Myspace in the box” solution called PHPFox.  After my short lived social networking site I decided to move on.  I continued surfing the internet reading blogs about social media and emerging my self in the many sites out there.

In the fall of 07 I had the opportunity to work for a start up called neturalSpace.com.  Located at the Portland State Business Accelerator, an incubator for start-ups.  neutralSpace wanted to use wiki technology to create a city guide, which quickly changed when I was hired on as the Director of Marketing & Business Development because of my familiarity with the competition that was out there.  We shifted our model to be based around social networking in the calendar/cityguide space with a twist on what was already out there.  I spent a great deal of time researching “Web 2.0” sites and found a useful website called the GO2Web20 directory.  It was my goal to check out all of the sites on the directory.  After weeks of researching hundreds of sites I realized that was not realistic.  So I started searching tags that were relevant to our project.  This was extremely helpful and narrowed down my searches.

Around February of 2008 I started to use Twitter, but like many people did not get it at first and moved on to the next gazillion social networking site to check out.  While at neutralSpace I dabbled (or tried to) in website development, using the cms Drupal and learning a crash course in interaction design from a talented website developer, Jeffrey Dalton.  After working for the start up for around 10 months I found myself without a job.  We did not have a product developed yet, so I really had nothing to market or to sale.  Fortunately enough I landed a marketing consulting gig with the wiki company AboutUs.  There I got to know Ray King, Ward Cunningham and the rest of the talented crew much better.  It was a great experience and Ray King is a visionary and really cares about his employees.  I was hired to help out with marketing, sales and branding.  There I researched new products/services they could sell and develop.  I also worked on the team in re-branding their Deluxe Article Writing Service, which is now called SpotlightUs.

A few months before that I started twittering for the Green Dragon & using social media to promote one of my favorite places at the time to drink beer.  While using twitter to monitor conversations on Twitter I realized what a valuable tool Twitter is for restaurants.  One of the promotions that I ran was buy 1 get 1 free lunch which resulted in one of their busiest lunches ever.  I continued to work with the Green Dragon on a limited basis because of budget and their understanding of the power of social media.  If only I was given full authority to implement all of my ideas, it would have been a wonderful experiment of how small businesses can succeed with social media.  Nonetheless it was still a small success and a fun experiment.  Fast forward to November, my contract with AboutUs ran out and the Green Dragon was purchased.  I tried to start an online marketing company with someone, but it did not work out.  So all of a sudden I had a lot of free time on my hand.  What to do now?  Read How I Got Into Social Media Part 3 coming soon.