Jul 14, 2011
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Archive for the ‘socialmediabootcamp’ Category
Are you proficient in the use of social media for business communications?
In some ways, social media’s like a flame. In undiscerning hands, it can be dangerous. Many companies are choosing to vest responsibility for social media at the bottom of the org chart. With digitally illiteracy rampant in the C-suite and board room, we’ll no doubt see more foolish smear campaigns, Twitter gag orders and silly black hat SEO attempts.
What would you do if your Facebook page got brand jacked? What if your boss said she thought social media was a waste of time and money? Could you figure out and open her eyes to the opportunity that social presents for you? And could you track the ROI of your efforts to sustain and grow your budget allocation over time? Because if you can’t, you’re not proficient in social marketing. You may understand the “what” and the “why,” but to make social media work, you also need to know “how” to use it.
We all know everyone’s using social media. And we know how to post a Facebook status update and send a tweet. That’s the “what” and “why”. But developing the practical, applied skills for “how” to use social media communications strategically to support corporate objectives is something else entirely.
If you don’t have these skills, you’re not alone. Most professionals in the workplace today still lack the ability to win buy-in and resources for social marketing initiatives, let alone put a program into place that works without relying on an outside specialist.
The problem is a dearth of hands-on training opportunities. I’m talking about workshops where professionals can actually learn to use social media without getting upsold ever 5 minutes by a consultant. Yes, there are plenty of conferences where social media is covered, but you won’t get a comprehensive overview or participate in any hands-on exercises designed to teach you how to do it yourself. You won’t launch a blog, embed widgets, install Google Analytics and Feedburner or learn how to figure out the phrases your prospective customers are searching when they’re looking for you. You won’t learn the skills you really need.
Instead, you’ll hear mostly unpaid speakers seeking to recoup their travel costs through new business leads. They may throw you bone or two, but they’re going to focus on telling you all the great things they’ve done for their clients, avoid mentioning any of the nasty little mistakes they’ve made, let you ask one question and give you their contact info so you can hire them when you’re ready to get started. And that’s a problem. Because you’ll still be in dark.
In an effort to help change that, I’ve partnered with Social Media Today to bring you a new Hands-On Training workshop. This September, I’ll be in Sydney, Singapore, London, Paris, Toronto, New York, Chicago and San Francisco and if you want real knowledge, please consider joining me.
If know already how many people are using social media and why you should be too, it’s time to learn to execute. And that’s going to require hands-on, practical instruction. No keynotes. No panel sessions. No PowerPoint. Just step-by-step, hands-on exercises. Ask as many questions as you like in a safe environment with other professionals.
For the last five years, I’ve been traveling the world conducting social media trainings for Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and small groups of committed professionals and here’s what they’ve had to say about my workshops.
I don’t teach at hotels. All sessions are held world-class computer training facilities. Bring your laptop, logon and learn to search engine optimize copy, build social media monitoring dashboards, launch blogs, produce and edit audio and video, launch Facebook Pages, master Linkedin and Twitter, build a social engagement dashboard and much, much more.
So if you’re ready to get serious about social media without getting burned, join us for our new Hands-On Training presented by Social Media Today. Space is limited to 30 people per city, and admission is first come, first serve.
Feel free to tweet me your questions. Hope to see you there!
0 CommentsMay 31, 2011Are you ready to win the war against digital illiteracy?
The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.
Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.
Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives. Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:
- Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
- Attract and retain top-notch personnel
- Thwart obsolescence
Here’s why:
On social networks, trends direct our attention. We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.
For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved. The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.
A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community. And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.
Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely. If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary. But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.
Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives. If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable. Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.
It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just. Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards. In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.
Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective. But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.
Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.
Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.
In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage. The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.
Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless. Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.
Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.
In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.
May 24, 2011
As psyched as readers of this blog may be about the benefits of integrating social media into marketing, PR and organizational communication, we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to appreciating how these channels are redefining information discovery and reputation management.Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.
How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:
- Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
- A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
- Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
- JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.
The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy. And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too. But don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. And chances are, it’s even not your fault.
You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous. Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business. They avoided the gory details. No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them. Why would they? They want you to hire them.
The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge. You need to know how to:
- Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
- Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
- Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing. Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website? And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?
Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.
Or just stay tuned to my blog. I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.
If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn? Was it valuable? And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?
Aug 12, 2010
If you want to get an idea of what I cover in my Social Media Boot Camp or attend the workshop remotely, I’m live streaming my Los Angeles session on Aug. 18-19 from 9 to 4pm PT right here. So bookmark this page and come back anytime during the workshop to view the live stream.
Attendance is limited to 24 and my workshops are very interactive. I will be taking questions from attendees as they roll and helping people one-on-one through-out the course of the Boot Camp. But that only goes for paid attendees. You can audit via the web for free, but questions and one-on-one counseling is limited to the folks on site.
I will not be taking questions from the chat room. Also, I make no guarantees as to the quality of the audio or video, but we have a pretty good prosumer rig, a live camera operator and a Sennheiser shot gun mic so hopefully it’ll be more than watchable. I’d certainly appreciate your feedback as a comment to this blog post if you’re inclined to share it.
For Upcoming Social Media Boot Camp dates, visit www.SocialMediaBootCamp.com.
May 10, 2010
New York Times Social Media Editor Jennifer Preston‘s keynote presentation at The 2010 Digital Impact Conference in NYC.
Topics discussed:
- Inbound links and share rates as marks of influence
- Putting restaurant reviews on Foursquare
- Personal vs. professional online identities
- Using an individual’s tweet stream to gauge reputation
Hers was one of my favorite presentations at the Digital Impact. And she also stood still she the shot is fairly tight, and she stays in it.
We hope to have her back again in 2011. Enjoy!
Categories: socialmediabootcamp, Uncategorized