Lesson: Social Media & Branding with Crystal Lee

Step #6 Management: Determine how to choose social media managers, interns, and tools

Here at the Miss California organization, up to four people manage that account and its necessary because one person's full-time job dedicated to social media still isn't as effective as four people dedicating an hour a day sporadically, 15 minutes here or 5 minutes here. When you are at the post office waiting in line, responding to some tweets. You get out of it what you put into it and the more investment you have, the more engagement you have. The more quickly that snowball effect happens and that's how we have been able to accrue followers without purchasing any of them and having genuine conversations that will last for a long time.

I use Google Calendar as my main tool. Luckily enough this year, I am not too inundated with meetings back to back to need something that does it automatically for me. But I know at some point I will. There is an app called Buffer that I do use with Twitter and it really helps me set up the articles that I do want to push out at the beginning of the day so that I can continue throughout the rest of my day not needing to constantly go back to my phone, checking the time to see if it's been two hours since my last post. Not that it's that formulaic but I think being on one's toes is important because you never know when your viewers, you never know when your audience is really tuning in so you have to expect it to be always.

I have about probably about an hour a day, accumulated altogether. I do five minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the day, in the middle of lunch time but there are times when I don't want to touch my phone for two days. That's when I am really glad I have our social media team at Miss California because then they carry the slack. I was a late adopter to social media so I think that there will always be a part of me that isn't going to love social media more than anything else. That was a really roundabout way of saying I think social media will one day transform to be very different from what it is now. I think social media is going to become more social and less media, in a sense that we are not going to be constrained to devices.

I went to CES this year, the Consumer Electronic Show and there were all these wearable devices. It was fascinating and very exciting. But the main problem with all these wearable devices is you already have a phone and iPad and two laptops, why is adding a smart watch or adding a fitness pedometer going to add value to your life? It's just another thing to think about. It's another thing occupying your bandwidth, another thing to charge, another thing to sync into your phone and that's just not a seamless experience.

I think social media will start to become a seamless experience once things like wearable devices start adopting functionality of cellphones and the functionality of laptops. I don't know if we will ever have a watch that can substitute for a full keyboard but look at how we have moved from keyboard to touchscreens. In fact, Keaton actually enlightened me to this. It's very different doing this and this, and we are already going from this to this. Maybe it's not far off when we go from this to just thinking it, right? A girl can dream.