I moved to the Ulster area a little over a year ago, and Kingston specifically[currently working over at the 721 Media Center] just this year. Coming up from the city requires some rethinking of designs and such, and when talking to people in this area I tend to run into those who have either tried “social media” and found it a failure because it doesn’t provide the same level of benefit, or those who are against “social media” because they are against the internet in general[prizing actual physical human interaction over interaction over a network].

So I mull and think about what social networking really is, and how it can help and what aspects are irrelevant for a rural area.

But up here, you won’t get that sort of traffic[for example, the berkshires.org website has something like 10,000 subscribers]. Generally, ad-revenue wise you still need that same 500 dollars to even be worth the time sending. So selling can be difficult and has to move towards “are we your target market” – out of 100,000 people interested in travel in the northeast, you might get 10,000 good hits, so the 500 spend was ok. So the people who should be paying for ads on a newsletter about the Berkshires are the people who specifically want to reach 10k of people interested IN the Berkshires.

It can certainly work, and there is no reason not to pursue it, I just feel that the terminology has to shift to reflect that your dealing with a focused community – where advertising for Starbucks might not be appropriate, but for the local Williams Lumber IS appropriate.

I find, for this area at least, that talking about “social” media is a turn off for many simply because they view it negatively based on preconceived notion. Shift the topic to “community” media, just a wording change and an emphasis on what one actually wants to build – and it brings it into focus.

http://www.richardbyrom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/setting-up-word-2007-for-blogging-using-the-metaweblog-api/

My own version of word is too downlevel to try it out, so I have yet to test the process.

This makes social networking a very good fit for places like NYC and a very bad fit for, oh, say Ulster County. When your cool iphone gadget that tells people about all the nearby wineries based on the GPS in the phone suddenly stops working just as one is driving past the ulster county wineries…well, social media is not a help there.

There is also the marketing aspect of social media. There are people who make good money posting articles to their blog, and running ads down the side for income. The trick is, these people have to have at the very least citywide, and preferably worldwide appeal. They make fractions of a cent per viewer, so they need hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers to make money.

Wheras is rural areas, again such as Ulster, what you have is hundreds, maybe thousands for an audience. As such, marketing must shift focus completely from “social” to “community”. For rural regions the key is rebranding social media as “Community media” – people understand what that means. They automatically know that a community is a small group of people of like minds, not thousands of people where a small fraction may find something appealing.

Would someone at your firm be interested in doing a Q&A with the KingstonCitizens.org blog? Let me know.

Best,
Arthur

So, a combination of press releases posted to high impact sites, PPC campaigns to help manage web traffic and get the client’s message out, appropriate blog posts, executive video interviews and other techniques should be used. Often this has to come together in a hurry.