Social Media and Marketing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/miley-cyrus-twerking-cultural-appropriation

I'm sure you are all wondering why the Miley photo is at the top of this post in a knitting blog.

Social media is a topic for all of us in the online world. It's difficult to get a handle on as so many people choose to engage in very different ways across the available platforms. An article that I recently read suggested that I need to be active on more than 7 platforms if I'm going to reach my marketing goals.I'm not sure that leaves me any time to design and knit but that's the subject of a different post.

The discussion about Miley twerking in the mainstream media was fascinating. Is this really news? Was it just a slow news day? What the heck is going on? 

I've linked at the bottom to one of The Onion's fake opinion pieces. Essentially it's all about main stream news organizations creating ad revenue by getting viewers to go to their websites and click. Then they direct you to a video or slide show to keep you on the site as long as possible. Why is that....to increase the ad revenues even more. 

Oddly one of the things I notice in the online knitting world, is people are getting very focused on the same stats. I get questions about the stats on my blog and how that relates to sales. The answer is I have no idea because I sell on Ravelry and Patternfish and there is no way for me to link those sales to followers or page views on my blog. I do know that patterns sales are continually increasing at the same time as my blog readership increases but there is no direct proof that the two are related.  

Correlation does not imply causation, yet I see an almost frantic amount of linking,liking, friending, following etc. going on across all of the platforms. When I ask questions I get the sense that this is being done with a "just in case" mentality because none of us are really sure of what the implications are and which platforms will be a deciding factor for success in the online world.


From Wikipedia:

The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news. Since 2007, the organization publishes satirical news audio and video online, as the "Onion News Network". 
The Onion's articles comment on current events, both real and fictional.



http://www.theonion.com/articles/let-me-explain-why-miley-cyrus-vma-performance-was,33632/