A few months ago I started an online tutoring business. I have to use the term business lightly since it really never took off.
My idea was that students often don’t need an entire hour with a tutor, they just need help with that one problem to get them over the hump. So instead of purchasing a sit down with a face to face tutor, they would purchase 30 or 60 minute blocks and the unused minutes would role over until they needed me next.
So let’s start with what went right. I purchased a domain name and got a site up. MeganTheMathTutor.com. OK, not the most exciting domain name but hey, it’s self explanatory. Besides, if you are desperately trying to get through your math homework do you want a fancy name or do you simply want someone who can get you through the homework and help you pass the test?
I’m no web-page designer but I liked the page. It looked nice but here is the first thing I did wrong, it’s stagnant. I didn’t blog on it. I didn’t give people a reason to come back to it and search engines only saw an informational page that was old.
Now on to Social Media.I’ve been playing in the social media space for a long time. I have accounts with the usual’s, MySpace, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. but I am most active on twitter.
Twitter is a microblogging platform that asked the question “What are you doing?” and users answer in 140 characters or less. But they also do a lot of celebrating fun things that are happening or venting about their frustrations.
I have an active twitter account @PodcastJunky. I didn’t want to muck it up with a bunch of math tutoring stuff so I started a new account @MeganTheTutor. And that’s where I really started to go wrong, way wrong.
Nothing wrong with having two accounts. For example, Paul J. Barrie, Jr.has @pauljbarriejr for his personal day to day tweets and WTTM for his wildly popular Disney fan podcast Window to the Magic. People follow one or both of his accounts depending on their interest.
The problem was the way I treated these two accounts. My PodcastJunky account was started just for fun and I followed podcasters to start with and then started following the interesting people they were having conversations with. I took a different approach with my second account.
On @MeganTheTutor I set up a twitter search looking for students struggling with math, It worked like a charm. During afternoon and early evening I was seeing a new tweet at least every few minutes.
All those students, all frustrated with math and here I am, a math tutor with no students. So I started offering to help. Each time I saw a tweet of frustration over math homework I would offer free help, a free sample of my services.
All that was good but my approach was bad. All I did was to offer help so my twitter stream looked like this:
Even worse, I started getting lazy and cutting and pasting the same message offering to help. This was the ultimate in STUPID and I knew better. Fortunately I only did that for about 10 tweets before snapping out of my cranial-rectal inversion.
I had taken the Social out of Social Media.
When I started talking with people, commenting on their non math tweets, I finally got discussions going. But it was a slow road. It takes time to build a community, and it should take time. Just because we live in an instant world doesn’t mean that relationships can be built instantly.
The tutoring account has been put on hold for a while. My husband being laid off meant that a trickle of tutoring money wasn’t going to cut it. Time needed to go towards finding regular income. But when I return, here are some things I promise to do differently:
- I promise to stop being a jerk and start having REAL conversations on twitter.
- I promise to blog about interesting math stuff. (yes, there are too interesting things about math)
- I promise I will make useful and appropriate comments on other peoples blogs.
- I promise to put the social back into that part of my social media world.
