Social Media Engineers are Fanning Out Across the Neighborhood

An insurance company sent a pair of young experts to our cafe this morning. It was about social media.  Heidi Warner is a Social Media Engineer, and in this spirit, she shows business owners how to publish blogs, keep up their facebooks, tweet, and many other of 2011’s tricks. She suggested that we register with Digg, so that they’ll list our new content, and register all of the blogs we publish with Reddit.

She also suggested a contest asking people to vote on which photo they like the best and offering a big prize from the cafe to the winner. “People can vote yes by liking the photo!” she said.  Soon you have many more pages where all of these photos live, and it’s all part of a larger strategy to get your name out there on web pages and help move you higher in search results.

I asked him what the punch line was. Why are you giving me all of this free information and time? Well, he said, “we do sell insurance.  But our goal is to help local businesses be more successful.”