ResearchGoddess

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

What Chris had to say about Keith: “He’s got a big heart, a strong eye for using media tools to build relationships, and a sense of how brand sensitivity and corporate culture interact with the new social space.”

Keith has quite an interesting background. He started attending Medaille College to study business, but life had some other, more important things in store at that time. With a child on the way, Keith said he ended up finishing at the ‘School of Life’. He worked as a chef for a few years, but was deeply interested in the arts. That’s how his love of social media started – he had been making wood sculptures for his house and decided to start blogging about it at www.magicwoodworks.com. This led to doing some livestreaming of carving sessions, during which he used the interaction to take cues from the audience. Keith was able to take this experience and convert to a career as a Community Manager at Best Buy. Shortly thereafter, he set out on his own and now runs Keith Burtis Consulting.

Why Keith believes Chris recommended him: He has known Chris since the first podcamp, about six years ago. He was one of the original helpers. Keith said that Chris has been a mentor of his, and from him he learned to never approach a network or person with a greedy, one-sided agenda. By blogging, he is learning through the things he writes, the comments he gets back. Chris knows that he’s the type of guy who’s doing it right and that it’s not quid pro quo with him.

What Keith has to say about social media: People want to be connected. They don’t care about products any more, they care about the process around it, the service, the interaction. By keeping people up to date, it keeps them interested. If you’re going to get involved in social media, get involved before you need it. Some bigger companies are trying to grab onto the tail end of this, and it’s not easy to do. For Keith, it’s about adding value to the system so you will ultimately get value back. He puts value in all the time – the thing for him is that the more he adds, the more he gets out of it anyhow. He believes that a lot of people  still worry too much about their number of followers/friends, yet they’ve never really gotten anything out of it except for an ego boost. What’s important is encouraging other people in this space who are doing great work.

Keith’s thoughts on the future of social media: Keith believes that Twitter and Facebook are the “everybody’s there” places right now. Deeper conversations do happen, but companies will begin to learn how to leverage these tools to build intimate one-on-one relationships with their customers and fans. Whether they move in this direction or not, it’s where the value is. While there is value in numbers, where you’ll get the most bang for your buck is whittling things down with focus on project-specific items.

Some people who’ve influenced Keith:

• CC Chapman – Keith said he took a similar career path as Chapman. From him, he learned to do what you’re passionate about, and hope it converts for you.
• John Meadows – a great friend to Keith who has been there for him on the tech side. If something got broken on his blog, John would help out.
• Steve Saylor – podcast-audio bookwriter. Keith mentored Steve from a business standpoint, but they ended up mentoring each other.

Connect with Keith on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog