The engineer in me is starting to feel schizophrenic as a marketer

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in social media | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

If you follow me at all, you know I’m a technologist who practices social media full time as my job. But since social media is normally run by PR/Marketing departments, I now find myself now the lone engineer in the communications organization at one of America’s largest corporations. I like my job and the people I work with, but sometimes I find myself in situations that make me feel a little schizophrenic.

This is probably a good time to remind everyone that I speak for myself on this blog, I’m not speaking for Dell. I just work there.

I’ve been struggling with a few months on how to explain the storage/cloud community that exists on Twitter, why enterprise technologists use Twitter/Blogs/Podcasts to share ideas, why attending meetups with names like #storagebeers and vMUGs are part of communicating to people interested in our technologies, and why understanding the importance of things like bacon and banana bread are vital to our success in social media.

We sponsored part of Storage Tech Field Day last week, and it was just a great event. We set up the normal things you would expect from social media professionals to report on our activities: we set up a Radian6 listening post, we captured the conversations, we will share the videos Stephen Foskett has posted of our presentations, I will write a wrap-up blog post.

But…… it’s not enough. It’s not going to capture the amazing conversations we had with folks at the dinner we went to Thursday night. It won’t explain the camaraderie between the delegates and the rest of the storage community who followed as the event was live broadcast. It won’t make people who aren’t techies, who aren’t part of the storage community, feel what we felt.

It won’t tell the story. 

And that story, and the relationship between us as story tellers and our audience as actors, is important to the business. That’s where the promise of social media lies. Not in our reach, not our post views. The promise is in storytelling with the input and participation of our audiences.

Thanks to a great conversation over nommy Thai food and adult beverages with Sarah Vela I think I at least have a way to explain what I think the problem is. But this introduction is already too long, so I think I’ll start another post….stay tuned.

Update: post is here.

2 Responses to The engineer in me is starting to feel schizophrenic as a marketer

  1. Pingback: G's view of the world - What comic book movies can teach us about social media for B2B marketing

  2. Pingback: Storage Field Day 1: The Links

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