Great Moments in Social Media

Social media has been hyped as a new communications, Web 2.0, a new way for people to connect and communicate. For book sellers like myself, it has also been hyped as a way to sell books by giving you a closer relationship with your consumers than had ever before been possible. I always thought that this was overselling it a little bit. However, I ran into an experience that showed me the power of social media.Last week, I finally sat down and watched the first episode of Republic of Doyle, a CBC comedy about a father-son private investigator firm in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador (I have a couple of co-workers from NL so I promised them that I would give it a try). I thought it was pretty good so I posted a tweet about it. Here was the reaction:  Needless to say, my question was "Who is Allan Hawco and why is he contacting me?" After some research, I realized with a shock that this was star of the TV show "Republic of Doyle" mentioning me on Twitter. Neat! So of course, I had to follow him and I felt more encouraged to watch more episodes. This was the power of social media in action. I don't know if it was an automatic response to the hashtag #republicofdoyle but even so it is still brilliant. @allanhawco is using twitter very effectively to build his audience. Of course I have to watch more episodes now, I know the guy.When I release (finally) Evermore: Call of the Nocturne, I will learn from Allan Hawco's example to build me audience. This is the power of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, it allows you to build your audience through social connections outside of the (very expensive) traditional methods of advertisement.Thank you @allanhawco for a topical lesson. And for the rest of you, check out "Republic of Doyle". It is a pretty good show.