As we develop our new MADskills social media trainer certification program, we’ll be sharing materials that we think might be helpful for the community at large.
At SMEXbeirut, we focus on the strategic use of social media, that is, leveraging blogs, Facebook, and other Internet- and mobile-based tools and applications for achieving a predetermined goal. And after knowing your goal, we tell training participants, you need to define your audience(s). This is always a sticking point, because more often than not we hear, we want to reach the “general public.”
We’ve struggled repeatedly to explain why this doesn’t work on the Web the way it might work with broadcast media like radio and television, but targeting the right audience is more of an art than a science, so it’s hard to prove how it works until you try it yourself. So we kept saying, just trust us, until we figured out how to explain it in terms everyone can understand:

Developing a strong social media presence is like throwing a great party. Social media isn’t an object, like a magazine, it’s an event. Proof: You’d never invite the general public to a barbecue at your house, would you?

The more we thought about it, the more we liked the metaphor, and turned it into a handout to introduce how to think about social media strategically. We’re sharing it here, and would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments (Arabic version coming soon):
Social Media is an Event