photo credit:nostri-imago via flickr
I Love Theme Parks
If I haven’t said it before,I’ll say it now,I love theme parks. Once you walk through the gates,you escape to far away lands like Jurassic Park,Harry Potter’s world or an African jungle. I guess part of me still believes in magic.
Theme park designers go to extremes to make you believe you’ve crossed over into their world. From the building details to the gum on the New York Street (and no where else mind you),nothing is over looked. The coolest part for me are the animatronic creatures.
Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life
The theme park robots have come a long way from the waving It’s A Small World dolls. Enter Jurassic Park and you’re greeted by life sized dinosaurs munching on their lunch (which sometimes threatens to be you).
Those dinosaurs didn’t just show up one day. They were carefully crafted to perform their movements to appear as realistic as possible. A lot of thought and precision goes into their design. Also they don’t just get put into place and left there,there are daily checks,scheduled maintenance and upgrades to their systems as new technology becomes available.
What We Can Learn From Dinosaurs
We can learn a lot from these dinosaurs in how we use automation in our social media strategy.
- Not everything is automated. That’s probably the first thing you notice in the theme parks,very little is automated. There are real people to interact with and live performers. Even the details in the walk to the rides are carefully crafted to be part of the story. This makes the moving dinosaurs have more impact. In your LinkedIn strategy don’t automate everything either. You need to be present and pay attention. LinkedIn is about building relationships. You can’t automate that.
- Dinosaurs don’t live in It’s A Small World. Each world in a theme park is separate and unique. Each social media platform you participate in is separate and unique. Automating responses to other platforms without thought is like sending a dinosaur into It’s a Wonderful World. It just doesn’t make sense. Posting from Twitter to LinkedIn is doing the same thing. It just doesn’t make sense.
- Automate to save time. There isn’t one dinosaur controller for each dinosaur pulling strings like a puppet. They are on an automated schedule. Automation in social media can save you time by posting important items at times when your readers will be online. Automation doesn’t mean you can walk away. You still need to be available to respond to your readers,just like the dinosaur controller watches over the dinosaurs to make sure all is going smoothly.
They key to effective social media automation is have a strategy or a plan and think of your audience. That’s what the dinosaur designers do. They want to create a unique experience for their guests. Automation plays a part in the process,but it is not the only thing that creates the experience.
Look at your social media activity. Are you creating an experience for your readers? How are you using automation? Spend a day in your own Jurassic Park. Would you come back?
Jen Vondenbrink is a business life coach who helps small businesses put the systems in place to grow while still finding time to enjoy life. She 
