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Four tactics to take corporate social media to the next level

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In most companies, social media lives in marketing and/or corporate communications. That’s fine for brand and corporate efforts, but if your company’s social media activities are restricted to just those two functions, you’re not getting everything out of social media that you could be.

Social media and the corporation

Photo credit: Dell (which has successfully used social media for more than just marketing and public relations).

Companies should think about social media at two levels:

  • The brand level, which typically involves tactics such as corporate Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, corporate blogs and formal social media campaigns.
  • The employee level, which requires empowering as many of your employees as possible to engage with the outside world using social media tools with the goal of doing their jobs better.

If your company has on-staff recruiters, a sales force, R&D specialists and customer service staffers who are not using social media, chances are they’re not as effective as they could be.

So how do you go about implementing something like this? Here are four steps I’d start with:

  1. Write (or, if needed, revise) your social-media policy so it is simple and clear for employees to follow, and not only protects your company, but also encourages employees to tap social media tools to do their jobs better.
  2. Deliver training in social media for employees in sales, business development, human resources, customer service, R&D and other nonmarketing, non-PR functions.
  3. Provide ongoing support for employees using social media in their professional capacity. That could include everything from arranging for professional photographs for LinkedIn and with other social media profiles to paying for social media apps for employees’ smart phones. You might even think about retaining a social media coach to work with individuals.
  4. Develop a formal process to help new employees understand how they can (and should) use social media. Chances are they won’t have gotten this training in their last job.

If you have other ideas about companies can move their social media activities to the next level, I’d love to hear them. Please leave a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Social media

Why you should attend ConvergeSouth

September 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Blogs and social media are great, but you can often learn more, meet more people and have a richer experience attending conferences, seminars and other events in person. There’s a big difference between skimming a blog post in your RSS reader and the immersive, interactive experience of a conference.

That’s why, if you’re interested in social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and doing business online, you should attend ConvergeSouth 2010. (Disclaimer: I am one of the volunteers helping to put the conference together. I’m involved because I’ve attended several past ConvergeSouth conferences and I think it’s a great conference.)

So far, this year’s line-up of speakers includes:

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, networking, Online marketing, Personal branding, SEO, Social media Tagged With: , , , ,

Six tips for getting more out of conferences

March 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Don't just sit there. Make sure you get the most out of attending a conference or seminar. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/211097)

I recently attended Ragan’s Social Media for Communicators conference in Atlanta (which was excellent — the folks at Ragan did a great job finding speakers and putting on a great event). For 2½ days about 500 of us met at Coca-Cola headquarters and heard first-hand how some of the country’s best known companies are using social media.

In addition to getting a lot of good ideas about social media, I also came away with some thoughts — some new, some old — about ways to get more out of a conference or seminar.

1. If it is a social media event or if people will be tweeting about it, find out the hashtag (or designate one if no one else will) ahead of time. Bonus: start tweeting before the event to make yourself known to other attendees and meet them before you actually arrive.

2. Find other ways to organize attendees online. I started a Twitter list of conference attendees. After the Ragan conference, a fan page for conference attendees was started on Facebook and another attendee started a LinkedIn group.

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Filed Under: Business, Career, networking, Productivity Tagged With:

Why you should stop trying new social media sites

March 1, 2010 By 4 Comments

Google Wave. Google Buzz. Farmville. Foursquare. Gowalla. Yelp.

Maze

Don't get lost in the maze of choices social media offers. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1093677)

The list goes on and on. There are more social media sites, social media apps and cool online things that people are talking about than I will ever have time to fully explore. Even though I make my living in part by helping companies use social media, I can’t commit enough time to explore every new thing to come along. Chances are, you don’t have the time either. And that’s OK.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying the latest and “greatest,” easy to worry that you’re going to miss out on the next Facebook or Twitter if you don’t jump on a new site right away. In other words, it’s easy to forget why we’re here in the first place.

We’re here to have conversations, to learn, to market and brand ourselves, our businesses and our causes. Actually doing those things requires work, attention and focus. But the siren song of Google’s latest project or the newest game that all your friends seem to be playing on Facebook can be all too alluring sometimes.

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Filed Under: Business, Career, networking, Online marketing, Personal branding, Social media

How to strengthen your relationships

February 15, 2010 By 3 Comments
Handshake

Have you reached out and touched people in your network lately? (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/616726)

In social media it’s easy to get caught up in mechanical ideas of what building and maintaining relationships is about. Are you pinging your network regularly? Are you sharing content, creating value? Are you thanking people? In marketing, we start quantifying these things: How many tweets, how many retweets, how many followers or subscribers or fans?

And that’s fine. Except that it’s all just a way of dancing around the real issue: relationships.

I got an email last week from an old acquaintance (which I haven’t returned yet — sorry Jamie, I will). We’re connected via LinkedIn and she wrote to tell me what was going on with her life and to ask what was going on with mine. She said that she was trying to do a better job this year of connecting with her network. Good for her.

All of us should steal that idea and do the same. It’s not numbers of friends, followers or subscribers that are ultimately important, it’s relationships. That’s why it’s called social media, and that’s where its power lies.

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Filed Under: Business, Marketing & public relations, networking, Online marketing, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: , ,

What's your purpose?

February 15, 2010 By 2 Comments
Flowers by the side of a path

What's your purpose? (Photo source - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/867083)

I recently listened to an interview with author Daniel Pink (via Elizabeth Marshall’s free Author Teleseminars) about his new book Drive. (Confession: I haven’t read it, so I’m basing this blog post on the author interview, which ran about an hour. If you want to learn more about this, you should read the book, which has exercises and, I’m sure, a lot more detail and insight. The book is going on my to-read list.)

Drive examines decades of research on what really motivates people. Pink says that there are two kinds of activities — algorithmic and heuristic. Algorithmic work is anything that can be broken down into a set of rules. Heuristic work is more complex, more nuanced, and requires judgment, creativity, intuition and analysis. Heuristic work is what many of us spend a lot of time doing.

Pink says that the overwhelming evidence from decades of research on motivation was that carrot vs. stick type approach to motivation (penalizing people for mistakes, rewarding them for successes) work well in motivating algorithmic work. But for heuristic work, penalties and prizes have the opposite effect. So long as people are being paid at a level they believe is fair, paying them a lot more in hopes of motivating them for heuristic activities doesn’t work.

What does work to motivate people to accomplish heuristic work? Three things: autonomy, mastery, purpose.

  • Autonomy, obviously, is the ability to make your own choices about when and how you do things.
  • Mastery is the desire to achieve a high skill level.
  • Purpose is the belief that you’re acting in service to something greater than yourself (not money).

It’s the last one I’m particularly interested in. If you have a purpose, it can bring fresh reserves of motivation into your daily life. And that’s a good thing. Worthwhile things are frequently difficult to achieve, and achieving the difficult requires motivation.

Which brings me to — What is your purpose? Have you ever thought about that question?

For that matter, what is the purpose of your company? Your brand? Your blog? Your social media activities? Your marketing?

Are you doing it just to make money? Or is there something else that motivates you?

Google, a company that has made lots of money, says its mission is to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That is a grand purpose, and I wonder if it doesn’t play a role in motivating people at the company. A cynic would say that words like that are just clever PR, spin designed to pretty up Google’s real purpose, which they would claim is to make the founders and shareholders rich. Google has made its founders (and many shareholders) rich, but I don’t think that excludes the company having a purpose beyond that.

Most marketers (myself included) would urge the typical company (or product/brand/service/whatever) to clearly define its USP, its unique selling proposition. That’s the one thing that makes that product or brand different from everything else and desirable to some group of buyers.

But before you ask yourself what your USP is, maybe you should ask yourself what your purpose is. You with me? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: Business, Career, Creativity, Doing Good Tagged With: , ,