People are too afraid to be weird when it comes to social media

He came, he sawed, he conked her!

Yes, if there was one overriding message from last night’s San Francisco Blog Club Meetup at Fort Mason, it was dare to be snarky, witty, and just plain weird when you’re using social media to promote and share your content. The ubiquitous Murray Newlands, organizer of the Journalists’ Secrets to Sharable Content: CBS, SF Gate, Techwire & Others, put together another stellar line-up, including Techwire Columnist and former FCC and CPUC Commissioner, Rachelle Chong, Storify Cofounder & former journalist, Burt Herman, SFGate Social Lead, Jeff Elder, CBS San Francisco Editor and SF Gate columnist, Beth Spotswood, and Technorati Associate Editor Andre F. Bourque.

Unique, original content is the currency of social media

Burt Herman made it clear that the easiest way to fail at social media marketing/communications is to be too derivative. It’s the material that has the strongest emotional content that will cause content to go viral. Rachelle chimed in saying how most of the content she writes for her audience is fairly mundane but it’s the “quirky stuff” she posts that causes Web traffic to spike at Techwire. Case in point was a “speed dating” article Rachelle wrote back in May detailing the matchmaking efforts of the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation that organized a get together of fifty small businesses who met up with fifty tech companies based in San Francisco for the sake of helping the small business community thrive as new customers.