How To Succeed in Social Marketing Without Really Trying by Ophelia Chong

I fell into Social Marketing, I didn’t even know I was doing it until I started seeing the results of my playing around on Flickr and Twitter. I joined Flickr in 2006 and Twitter in  2007, both of which I used as an outlet for my art and writing during the time that I was creating my fourth career as a lay-about artist with internet access and caffeine.

Twitter opened the world to me and allowed me to meet people I would’ve never met offline, some of those online friendships went offline and into career opportunities. Flickr brought my illustration and letterpress work out into a virtual gallery that publishers and galleries could view; by keywording my work properly, they found my work easily through Flickr search. Since 2006, my artwork has been published in over 10 books and shown in nine galleries; and I have been writing commentary for KCET since 2009. All of this was done without any print promotion, eblasts or cold calls. It was done by learning how to keyword, how to interact with a virtual audience and how to use the tools available to anyone with an attention span.

Fifth Career

Now I teach the “Marketing and Self-Promotion” class at the Art Center College of Design to photography students. I have spoken to graduating students at USC, Spotlight Gifted Students at the Music Center, and also via virtual Skype seminars for the ASPP.  The most recent seminar was at the Palm Springs Photo Festival in March.

Opportunity Calling

The phone rang at 11:45 pm on Sunday night. Luckily for me (and them) I was up watching the 543rd rerun of my favorite Law and Order. It was a slightly panicked call asking me to fill in for the speaker who was supposed to lead the seminar in 15 hours. I said “yes, okay”, without really asking what I was supposed to talk about other than Social Marketing. I was going to wing it. The next morning I checked the website and looked at what I was supposed to actually do. “Oh oh”, was my first thought. I had to fill an hour and forty five minutes with great ideas on how to market your business via the internet. But then the other half of my brain kicked in and said “you love talking, you’ll be fine”.

And that is where I met Alyssa Pizer.

She sat up front, with pens, a pad of paper and her Blackberry. She reminded me of the eager student on the first day of school, she looked like she was going to either give me an apple or hurl it at me. She kept me on my toes by asking questions that made the time fly and before I knew it, it was 4:30pm. We talked after and found common ground in how we love a great deal and I loved her way of telling it the way it is.

And here we are.

That day, Alyssa hired me to help her with her marketing. Over six weeks we worked together on her online and offline marketing plan, with the help of her amazing assistant Haven.

While her talented website team launched AlyssaPizer.com, we worked on her blog, eblasts, twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.  With this interconnected constellation of links and keywording, anyone searching for Alyssa Pizer and her photographers will be able to find her. Simply put the internet works for you when you give people multiple ways to find you.