Week 13 Overview: The Social Strip

Just this las week the APOC class had the pleasure of hearing two local online community heroes, Alf Lamont (Director of Marketing and Development for the Comedy Store) and Majorie Kase (Co-founder of MarKyr Media), discuss how "The Social Strip" came to be what it is today. Here are some key points I gleaned from their discussion:

• Coopetition is better than competition. The big game changer in reviving the Strip came when businesses started engaging with, linking to, and collaborating with one another via social media tools. Examples: Tweet Crawl and The Sunset Strip Music Festival. 
• Be consistent. Work towards keeping your online personality/voice consistent with your business. People are more comfortable when things are predictable and consistent. According to Alf, bridging the gap between your business's online and offline personality can be one of the hardest things to do, so take the time to really analyze the business before going online. 
• When using social media as a customer service tool, be transparent and sincere. Quickly address issues customers may have and work towards resolving them. 
• Get the boss on board. Prove to the CEO or owner that social media works. You can use another online success story as an example. 
• Qualify your followers. This helps filter out spammers and adds value to your follower base.

Alf and Majorie provided some great insight into what goes into creating and maintaining a business's online presence. It will be interesting to see where The Social Strip goes from here and what kind of innovative new ideas they come out with to engage and draw people to the Strip. Their story serves as a great local example of how powerful and effective social media tools can be to a business community.

Related Articles:
Mashable: How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter [INTERVIEW] by Barb Dybwad
New York Times: Reviving the Roxy: Can the Strip Follow? by Tricia Romano