You Can Learn Something About Social Media Marketing Just By Sitting Down And Shutting Up.

By Lon S. Cohen

Fern Cohen is woman with ALS. She was a teacher of foreign languages and ESL when she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. She lost her ability to speak very quickly. But rather than “sit down and shut up” like she says in her writing and which is the very name of her blog, she has learned to communicate through writing. When I first got to the ALS Association people told me about Fern and how she’d be a good person to reach out to because she was already a blogger. I started reading her stuff and then invited her to write on our blog for us. This never really materialized and I hadn’t been in contact with Fern for months.

I’m very active on Twitter and evangelize its usefulness all the time. Well, Fern also happens to be on Twitter. We chatted back and forth sometimes in comments to each other through my @ALSofGNY account. In an article I wrote about the top people I follow on Twitter (I called them Twitter Profs because I learned so much from them), I listed Fern as one of them. You can read my article on Mashable.com here. From this article Fern started receiving more and more followers and some close attention from her audience–all well deserved. I turned this into an “offer she couldn’t refuse” so to speak and again invited her to write a post for our ALS Association blog. I guess this time she felt she owed me one and I was ecstatic to get my first ever blog post from Fern Cohen on Peg Tubes, which you can read here. Then she followed that up with an even better post about why she blogs and Twitters, which best explained what I had been saying for a long time about PALS (People with ALS) using Social Media all along. Read her post here. But even better was when she sent me her third post recently on visiting people with illness, titled “What Do I Do? What Do I Say?” It was the best one so far, worthy of a publication much more popular, well read and professional than the little blog I run for our chapter. Yet, with every post she writes for us, it’s as if she’s writing for the New York Times.

Nowadays, everyone is trying to figure out how best to capture this lightning in a bottle that is Social Media. Brands are struggling to advertise within this sphere and marketers struggle with ROI, measurements, tracking and engaging customers in interesting and unobtrusive ways with Social Networking. Other people look at Social Media and think it’s just narcissistic or petty, a fad for the techies and teenagers. For anyone who wants to understand how a person can capture the essence of what makes Social Media special just go and read Fern’s blog post on why she does it. It gives you an understanding about how important it is to some people and how very vital it can be.

Perhaps you can learn something from this about how you want to approach your Social Media plan. Do you want to just blast out spam messages to the public until everyone blocks you or your account gets frozen? Or do you want to take your time and find a niche where you can make a difference. I’m lucky in that my company is a non-profit in the business of helping people. It’s a no-brainer for me to go out and use our Social Media accounts to try to help people and make a difference. But, there’s no guarantee that’s ever going to happen. I have been lucky more than once to engage on Social Media with people who really feel that the connection has made a great impact on their lives.

Now this is a Social Media Marketing blog. Not everyone who reads this is going to be able to touch lives in a way that other brands might. But when developing your strategy perhaps this is a good place to start. Not how am I going to project my message to my customers but how am I going to make their lives a little better, put some value into what I am offering and connect with people who may really benefit from it. Are you a bank? Despite all the terrible news, people really, really need banks for loans, savings accounts and investment. There’s so much opportunity to affect people there. Are you a computer software or hardware maker? Then what you really do is make products to solve problems and make people work better and smarter. Are you a cell phone company? Well, then you already know a lot about the importance of connecting people and keeping lines of communication open.

The bottom line is if you’re even thinking about getting into Social Media marketing then start off by watching, listening and learning. Think more about the social part of the equation and less about the Media Marketing part. Or if you need a lesson in how to overcome obstacles in a unique and interesting way. Read about Fern Cohen and how she wouldn’t let a little thing like ALS make her “sit down and shut up.”

Photo: Self portrait by Fern Cohen.