While reddit is the elephant in the room of social media marketing, it’s too powerful, influential, and amazing to ignore. Even though social media is a disruptive medium, rules be damned, you had better follow every single reddit rule very carefully—this is especially true when it comes to hosting an Ask Me Anything or celebrity I Am A … Ask Me Anything on reddit.
The IAmA (as in I am a _____, Ask Me Anything) Community is a place on Reddit where a new kind of crowdsourced interview can happen, which is an Ask Me Anything. There are two levels: IAmAs, which are scheduled and promoted generally supporting celebrities and notables, and AMAs, a general forum for “everyone else.” In addition, quite a lot of topics have their own AMAs, so there are many opportunities for anyone to become a vocal part of the reddit community in a very meaningful and accepting way.
The interviewee begins the process by starting a post, describing who they are and what they do. Then commenters from across the internet leave questions and can vote on other questions according to which they would like to see answered.
The most important part is the proof. Proof generally includes a photo that both includes a reference to reddit and the IAmA. Some include the reddit account username as well.
While reddit IAmAs are conducted on the asynchronous reddit message boards, it’s treated more like chat. That said, the interviewee should be willing to commit to at least a couple hours through to all day. There are generally several waves of attention: people who scheduled their day around the event, those people who happen to be on reddit, and people who discover the IAmA event secondarily, either by having the event end up on the front page of reddit or through secondary channels such as via social media.
The interviewee can go through and reply to the questions they find interesting, and easily see those questions the internet is dying to have the answer to.
Because the internet is asking the questions, they’re going to be a mix of serious and lighthearted, and you’ll find yourself sharing all kinds of things you won’t find in a normal interview. Embrace the cult of personality. This isn’t a press conference.
Reddit doesn’t respond very well to shameless self-promotion. As a result, the topic of the Reddit AMA/IAmA should be as general as possible.
In order to do a proper IAmA (I am a) AMA instead of just a reddit AMA, you must first submit a request to Reddit and then schedule the event on the Reddit IAmA calendar.
You will need to create a list of potential questions so that you can familiarize himself with them before the IAMA.
In general, unless there’s any sort of negative ambush that happens, there will be three sorts of people asking questions: someone who wants to show off their own knowledge, someone who wants to make a good impression, and actual denizens of reddit who actually want to know something.
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