My Journey Through Social Media Websites(Bear with me)

A few months back, between a time of when I was laid off to a time of "screw it, let's go travel the world," I got a job at CarFinance.com. I interviewed for a copywriter position, and successfully landed the job. For months, everyday, I would produce articles to be featured on the website. Two hundred and fifty articles later, I scored the social media position. That was a little bit over a month ago. And this is where my journey begins...

Since freshmen year in college, I have had a Facebook page (6 years ago and sadly, climbing). That was the only criteria I could manage to come up with that qualified me for the position. I definitely grew up with social media as my companion- Hotmail, AIM, Wikipedia.org, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and now Twitter. And honestly, I was ready to try something new. To study an art form that is brand new to most, and terrifying to others.

Again, I didn't jump into the social media world blindly, I did some reading. "Twitter Power 2.0," "Crush It!", and "Trusting Agents" are great books I can recommend. But be advised, much of what you learn on social media is not always in the books. For instance, "How do you respond if someone says something harshly about you?" "How do you respond if someone says something harshly about YOUR COMPANY?" "What do you do when your information gets marked as spam, but you are just trying to get your brand name out there?" Books won't help you deal with individual cases, but experience will.

With the social media sites and profiles, I decided to hire a third party designer, a person recommended by Joel Comm, SocialIdentities.com. Within three weeks, we had our Twitter page, Facebook page, and our Youtube design completed.

Now comes the hard part, the Launch.

Ek! The launch-- what to say? how to act? who to be? how to represent the company? Questions that are hard to answer for any social media specialist. The one trend that I have noticed with this whole Twitter, Facebook, etc age is that nobody has any idea of what they are doing. Sure, some companies have millions and millions of fans, but are they actually buying the product? Is there any way to measure social media and the money earned from it?

Most likely, no. Interacting with people takes time, building relationships, and creating a great customer service takes even more time. Before I started the launch, I decided right then and there that I was going to be me, me within the context of the company. That means thoughts, ideas that were personal would sometimes be featured as well as many more posts from the company. I think it is very important to humanize social media, and I have noticed that I myself gravitate to companies that have a human representative over those that just display their logo.

So all that information brings me to today, the contest that celebrates our launch of Social Media (commonly shortened to "SM"). Contests in Facebook and Twitter fall into many categories, most popular that I have seen is raffle drawings (retweet, fan us, or follow us to enter a drawing to win), other contests ask more of the person with submitting photos and videos to share.

For my first contest, I decided to go the route of rewarding everyone. Key chains and t-shirts are outdated in my opinion, so I thought what would people want that is somewhat easy and inexpensive for us to provide in bulk? $.99 music download was the answer.

I have always been a fan of music, too frugal to pay 99 cents for some, and too scared to download illegally; this contest would definitely be something I am interested in and others too.

To participate, contestants must follow us on Twitter and @CarFinanceCom (our Twitter account), a one word description of their last car buying experience. I decided to go this route to make it more interesting and creative. The idea of people writing me the most unique, nonsensical words tantalized me. Let's see how people's minds of Twitter work.

It has been almost a week, and I have seen little return. I am beginning to believe that people prefer drawings for huge ridiculous prizes (iPad, iPhone, etc). This doesn't make sense to me, since I would prefer the guaranteed win over a one in a thousand chance.

So basically, this whole contest experience has taught me to think big prize and lots of promoting. Hope this helps everyone out there who runs social media contests as well. Good luck!