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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.