Social media strategist will Facebook for food

Social media manager Dominick Bonny catches up with some work at Caffé Mela - the first business that hired him to manage its Facebook and Twitter accounts. A year afterwards his startup, he's the online communicator for about 10 Wenatchee Valley businesses or institutions, including Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort, the Wenatchee Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Wenatchee AppleSox.

WENATCHEE - Darren Reynolds has his fingers in coffee, music and business. That leaves very few fingers for updating his Twitter stream or sharing events on Facebook.

"There's enough return on those interactions to have those outlets utilized," said Reynolds, the first business owner to contract with Bonny's one-man Strategically Social agency. "Nevertheless I do not have enough time."

Same story with Mission Ridge Ski and Board Resort, found on Twitter's 140-character microblogging service at @skimissionridge, which hired Bonny to tweet its snowfall updates and event schedules; Iwa Sushi and Grill, where he updates menu specials on Facebook; and the Wenatchee AppleSox, where he tweets team news and fan-friendly baseball factoids.

Since launching his business just over a year ago, Bonny has become the full-time online voice for about 10 Wenatchee Valley institutions and businesses. If you read a tweet or status update in 2011 from the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center, the Wenatchee School District's Wenatchee Learns outreach program or the Inner Circle Gym, chances are it was written and posted by Bonny.

The Yakima Valley native launched Strategically Social afterwards leaving a four-month stint as a reporter at the Wenatchee Business Journal. When he arrived in Wenatchee and began monitoring which businesses made full use of social media, he found the landscape "pretty barren" - like as not because many business owners hadn't grasped their clients' use of Facebook and Twitter.

"I've gone from having to actually spell out the idea of social media as a viable method of communication, and now a year later, whenever I say what I do and hand them my card, they say, 'Oh, I've been thinking a lot about that,' " Bonny said.

There's a big potential audience for a business promoting itself on social platforms. The accounts Bonny wrangles boast near 2,400 Twitter followers total and more than 9,800 Facebook likes. Mission Ridge dominates his client list on both channels, with 608 Twitter followers and 3,697 likes on Facebook.

For tweets to Mission Ridge's followers, Bonny formats his status updates in hipper, looser language. Wenatchee museum events, tracked by 190 Twitter users, get noted with full sentences, correct grammar and precise detail - what Bonny calls "writing for that older audience who get annoyed by 'Internet writing.' "