What is social media? Is it a conversation? Is it web PR? Is it YouTube or Facebook? If you work in this industry you have your own ideas on how to describe social media, but if you’re one of our potential customers it may be a bit more of a mystery. This is where I usually go into my description of what it means to leverage human assets.

Everyone has people, customers are people and employees are people. These “human assets” have talents that should be tapped into for social media. You’ve probably done this to some extent by asking your customers for referrals and then posting them on your website or touting your employees’ education/background. While this may have been a good start, we need to go a step further and leverage specific talents for the sake of social media. For instance, Pop Labs employs a search marketing specialist by the name of Charles Lewis (aka The SEO Rapper, M0 Serious, Poetic Prophet, Chuck). Chuck has the ability to rhyme, to flow—if you will, and has turned this ability into a way to get virally marketed content viewed online, resulting in branding himself and Pop Labs as experts in our industry. Chuck has developed very good content on topics such as link building, design coding, and conversion closing, to name a few. The important part to remember is that he’s transferred this content into something that people actually want to pay attention to: rap videos delivered through YouTube. Probably not the best for every target audience, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

While Pop Labs could have deposited this very same content onto our company website as its very own page or maybe even into this blog, we looked to take it a step further by getting creative and leveraging Chuck’s talent as a rap artist to produce something entertaining and fun that was appropriate for our goal: brand Pop Labs and get exposure from other well-known entities. Sometimes you just have to throw it out there, but you have to be prepared for the feedback you’re going to get… the good and the bad. Transparency is crucial for social media… which is why Chuck not only delivers these rhymes, but he writes them as well—not a hired gun.

Not every company has an aspiring rap artist to utilize and that’s okay. What you DO have is experiences and relationships and other talents that set YOU apart from everyone else, from your competitors. Once you have those figured out, the creative way in which to deliver your message should start to become clear. Good luck!