Aug 07, 2011
Sign Up for My Newsletter
-
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Learning how to share social media, whether with a tweet, a post on Facebook or even +1ing someone on Google+, can be confusing to some. Posting a link on your business Facebook page may not be the best Facebook wall post choice. Your recent tweet may not give you the response you were expecting. Many are confused by how to share social media engagingly and find themselves asking why even bother?How to share social media is becoming a prominent part of our personal and business lives. It’s important to know the correct way to share and how to engage other people in the process. Businesses and people alike are asking questions about social media, like why use Google+ when I already have Facebook and Twitter accounts? People are confused by social media but it doesn’t have to be hard to use.
Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan), best-selling author of Trust Agents and renowned blogger is immersed in social media daily. He juggles work and home life while being involved in every aspect of social media. We can all learn a few things from Chris with his insights into the complicated realm of how to share social media.
Keys to the Best Facebook Wall Posts
1) Joe Ciarallo (@joeciarallo) of Buddy Media found in a study that the best Facebook wall post does not use promotional language; it could be the kiss of death.
2) Use the 12 to 1 rule, says Brogan, where you promote other people’s or companies things 12 times more than your own. This is the best way to earn and build relationships.
3) Sometimes, the best Facebook wall posts or twitter posts are those where you recommend your competitor because your product isn’t the right product. This may seem odd to some, however it’s a huge opportunity to win the trust of the community as well as become an influencer.
Benefits of Google+
1) One of the key benefits of Google+ is that it allows a better opportunity to build more relationships than other forms of social media.
2) Engagement level is far deeper, which Brogan says is an advantage of Google + because he has seen more traffic through Google+ than he has on Twitter.
3) Opportunity to keep the conversation going, unlike Twitter and Facebook.
4) A benefit of Google+ for first adopters? An opportunity to teach businesses and people what to do next.
The Three A’s
One of the keys on how to share social media content correctly is using the Three A’s: Acknowledge, Apologize and Act.
1) Acknowledge: If there is a problem you have to acknowledge it. Previously, PR professionals could get away with spinning even the worst news around to make themselves look better. With all of the online social networks like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you can’t do that anymore.
2) Apologize: Find out from your legal department what you can and can’t say and apologize without sounding like a bad person.
3) Act: Act upon your apology to solve the problem.
How to share social media is an important part of businesses today. But using it correctly and in the most engaging way is difficult. Use these Chris Brogan tips and you should be well on your way to sharing, engaging and building relationships!
About the Guest Blogger
Jenna Andre (@jentopthat) is a public relations professional at Orange Communications in Minneapolis where she works with manufacturing, professional service and wellness clients. She is newer to the industry, having only graduated from Purdue University in 2008. She is a member of PRSA and volunteers within the Minnesota Chapter.
Categories: Uncategorized0 CommentsAug 04, 2011
I spoke with Neville Hobson about the specifics of my upcoming Hands-On Social Media Training in London on Sept. 8-9, 2011 presented by Social Media Today. You can have a listen at:
If you’re interested in attending, you can sign up here. Reduced pricing ends Tuesday, August 9, 2011. Hope to meet you there!
You should follow me on Twitter and send a question if you’ve got one by clicking here.
Categories: UncategorizedJun 10, 2011
Forrester Research found that only 16% of online consumers who read blogs trust them, and Marketing Profs and Junta 42 reported only 28% of marketers think podcasts are effective.But if blogs and podcasts are so ineffective, why is it that some use them successfully, while other fail? What is it that bloggers like Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, and podcasters like Mitch Joel and Shel Holtz do differently to make these channels work?
The answer is, they’re digitally literate. They’ve invested to time and energy and learned how to communicate effectively through conversational, inclusive media. They’re learned by doing, trail blazing a path. The war against digital illiteracy will not be won by attending social media conferences. What’s required is hands-on training. Not keynotes and panel sessions, but actual training in a wired classroom with broadband access, step-by-step exercises and expert instruction.
In my book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin, we cover every aspect of what marketers who get social media right do differently. They listen, create interesting, useful content in a variety of formats and ask meaningful questions. They leverage the latest online tools and services to do more with less. They understand that the message, independent of the media, must have merit. They appreciate the difference between marketing and editorial content. But most importantly, they have a high-level of applied social media literacy.
The fact is, most companies think social media marketing is launching a Twitter feed and a Facebook Page and spamming the community with links. They lack the skill and stamina to locate buyer-oriented conversations or steer purchasing decisions. And they regard social media as mass media, so they broadcast promotional messages and wonder why it’s not working.
There’s a real lack of practical, applied social media training opportunities out there, and not enough employers are investing in developing social media literacy in the workplace. I’m not talking about the dozens of social media conferences where speakers cover, at a high-level, case studies and success stories. I’m talking about a training environment where you bring your laptop, participate in exercises and gets hands-on training.
Thanks to PRSA and my clients, I’ve had the opportunity to lead over 100, two-day social media training courses over the last five years. I’ve trained Fortune 500s, government agencies, the military and nonprofits. If you’re interested in developing your digital literacy level, I have a Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.
When I first started, we called it new media training. Then it became new media and social media training. Now, with social becoming a component of destination site, search and database marketing as well, we just call it social media training.
I’ve had a chance to spend a lot of time thinking about how to advance social media literacy rates. So if you’re considering conducting a social media training class, or even starting your own social media training business, here are my top tips for what it takes to lead an outstanding web 2.0 training:
- Live Demos – Teaching people how to use social media via PowerPoint borders on criminal. Make sure you have high-speed web access and do live demos. And don’t do canned demos. Conduct actual keyword research for someone in the course so everyone can see how it’s done. Before I lead a social media workshop, I look over the list of registered attendees and make sure I’m prepared to focus all my demos around their particularly areas of interest. And I also make sure my case studies are applicable to them.
- Lead Exercises – Most conferences have woken up to the fact that wireless connectivity is like air conditioning. But in a social media training course, broadband access for everyone is mandatory. Live demos may engage your audience, but the knowledge transfer process gets cemented through experience. Have your attendees bring their laptops and lead them through a series of exercises. These are some of my favorites:
- Keyword Research – Show attendees how to use Google Wonder Wheel to discover relevant keyword phrases, Google Insights to get a handle on search volume, Google Keyword Tool to analyze your competitor’s website for keyword recommendations, how to check a site for meta keywords and how to use a density analyzer to check for keywords when no meta keyword data exists.
- Competitive Analysis – Once they have an understanding of the keywords that are relevant to their business, show then how to see who else is out there already, competing for the attention of their audience. Have them search the keywords and analyze the top results in Yahoo! SiteExplorer for inbound links from external domains, and Compete.com for uniue visits. Then have them do the same for their own site. If their competitors have established an overwhelming lead, ask them to reconsider their keywords. Show them how to add keyword modifiers to compete in the long tail of search. They may reach fewer prospects, but those who do find them will have a higher probability of conversion.
- Social Media Monitoring – Once they got a better handle of what they should be listening to, show them how to pull Google News and Google Blog Search RSS feeds into Google Reader. Then show how to monitor Twitter, forums, Wikipedia, YouTube and Linkedin by keyword via RSS as well. There’s a chapter that walks you step-by-step through these first three bullets in my book.
- Social Media Mapping - Once people start to see how difficult it is to drink from a firehouse and retain intelligence, show them how to use a social bookmarking service to build influencer lists. Demo Delicious or Diigo for tagging useful content and thought leaders, and show them how they can collaborate with colleagues to divide and conquer broad swaths of information. By monitoring and mapping, you find those hot pockets of activity I mentioned earlier. Then, you can strike where the iron is hot.
- Launch a Blog - Instead of just talking about the benefits of blogging, show them how to launch a blog for the purposes of education only. It doesn’t need to be a blog they are going to maintain. Use Blogger as a digital sandbox to show people how easy it is publish and mash-up content from other sources on the web. Have them all write an innocuous blog post, embed a Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo, blog a YouTube clip, install a Facebook “Like” button, add a Tweet Button, a Linkedin Share Button and install Google Analytics.
- Record a Podcast – Record a short, one-minute interview with a session attendee, edit it in Audacity, ad an intro with royalty free music, compress it to an MP3 and ID3 tag it in iTunes, right in front of everyone. Then show them how to get a podcast listed in the iTunes directory. Pull a streaming audio widget and show attendees how to embed a podcast episode in a blog. The show them how to record and upload audio from a smart phone with Cinch.
- Distribute a Live Stream – Use a consumer video camcorder and an MacBook Pro with firewire ports to live stream to Ustream. Have the attendees embed the stream in their blogs. Then show them how to live stream from a smart phone with Qik.
- Launch a Facebook Page – Show them how to establish a Company or Brand page on Facebook, install a few apps and show how to check a page’s usage statistics in Insights. Head on over to the “Marketing” tab in the Facebook Page admin console and Create an Alias, Add a Like Box to your Blog and Get a Badge to install as well.
- Set Up an Engagement Dashboard – Show them how to use the “Send To” function in their Google Reader to curate content for posting to their blog, their Facebook Page and their Twitter account. If there’s time, use TweetDeck or HootSuite, and show everyone how to pull their Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts in so they can spend more time engaging, and less time going from site to site.
- B2B Options - If your audience is interested in B2B social media, show them Linkedin and SlideShare as well. On Linkedin, demo Groups, Answers, Signal and Linkedin Today. On SlideShare, show them how to upload a deck and embed it in their blog.
- How to Format the Take Away Info - In the old days, people used to print out their PowerPoint decks and hand out hard copies. But if you’re workshop is all about online tools and services, that’s a whole lot of URLs for people to have to write down and remember. What I do is link any JPEG I show in a slide back to the URL where I got it from. And I number each slide in the upper right-hand corner. I upload the deck to SlideShare so everyone has a copy. All they have to do is advance to the slide and click on the image to get to the site I’m showing. Here’s how I format my decks for sharing:
- Solicit Recommendations - If you want to go into the social media training business, you need people who have taken your workshops to recommend it to others. Linkedin Recommendations is a great way to get testimonials, because they have to actually be written by another Linkedin member, and they can be rescinded at any time, so they’re more credible. I’ve built up plenty of recommendations for my social media trainings on Linkedin, and send people a link if they’re on the fence about enrolling in one of my courses.
I thoroughly enjoy leading social media training workshops. It’s incredibly inspirational to see others awaken to the possibilities of social media marketing. If you would like to use my training materials to lead your own workshop, go right ahead. I ask only that you attribute my slides to me, and that you share them as well with whoever you show them to.
If you’d like to hire me to conduct a social media training, or would like attend one of upcoming public sessions, please check my availability and contact me directly.
About the Author
Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman) provides social marketing research, social marketing servicesand social marketing training to businesses, government agencies and nonprofits. His book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin is the first book devoted exclusively to B2B social media marketing.Categories: Uncategorized
Jun 09, 2011
Categories: Uncategorized
May 27, 2011
This coming Monday I’ll be celebrating Memorial Day — which commemorates those who have fallen in military service to the U.S.A. — by getting together with family and taking the day off work. But I’ll also be thinking about those who gave their lives executing US foreign policy decisions that they didn’t make, about the innocent civilians would died in the cross fire and the decisions that we, as a country, have made that led to armed conflict.
In the U.S., the decision to go to war is made by the president, and the decision of whether or not to stay at a war resides with congress. During the Vietnam war, this distinction must not have been clear because American civilians greeted returning service members by spitting on their uniforms, as if they were somehow solely responsible for the atrocities of that war.
Military service is voluntary in the U.S. Growing up in West Los Angeles, I had no friends or family members who elected to join up, so I had no first hand experience with men or women in the armed forces. But in 2007, I was conducting a social media training course in Boston that was attended by group of senior officers and their gunnery sergeants from the United States Marines Corps.
Not only were they among the most physically fit specimens and I had ever seen. They were keen of mind, and with razor sharp of wit, as well. And over the course of the two-day social media workshop, I became more and more enthralled by their sensitivity to ethics, loyalty and total commitment to the United States of America. And today, the U.S. Armed Forces lead the private sector in their use of social media for public affairs.
Here are just some of the commands that are leveraging social media effectively:
- How DoD Social Media Trains the U.S Armed Forces
- Balancing Public Disclosure Against Operational Security at USMC
- Inside the Pentagon with the Asst. Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs
- Social Media inside the U.S. Dept. of Defense with Greg Reeder
- US Navy Admiral TL McCreary on Why He Decided to Embed Journalists with Military Units in Iraq
- How DoD Got Social: Origins of Social Media at the U.S. Dept. of Defense
I developed professional relationships with many of them, consulting on different strategic communications projects and was even invited to audit a Marines Boot Camp training at Parris Island in South Carolina. Ans it was there, at the Marines Recruit Depot, that I witnesses something truly remarkable.
During the final, culminating 72-hour training exercise known as The Crucible, in between excruciatingly difficult physical exercises, drill sergeants gathered their troops and read short stories about Marines who had succeeded under what seemed like impossible circumstances.
When I asked Brigadier General Padilla what that was all about, he explained that when you send armed troops into battle, they need to be able to make ethical decisions quickly, under duress. By instilling “Core Values” as part of the boot camp training, they were taking measures to make sure troops were prepared not just how to fire weapons, but to decide when and when not to fire them as well.
Since that time, I have been have been honored to provide social media communications training to the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, NORAD Northcomm and U.S. Pacific Command. I am also proud to say that I call many them personal friends too. And it has been my experience that these men and women who serve in the U.S. military come from all different types of socio-economic backgrounds and political beliefs. I even met one who was a Harvard graduate who could have had any job, but he decided to join up instead.
I have never met a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who was in any way, predisposed to violence. Instead, what I found were pragmatic, honorable men and women of service who have made conscious decision to sacrifice their well being for the collective good of their nation. They are men and women who understand the meaning of the following quote:
“It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”
Robert E. Lee, Statement at the Battle of Fredericksburg (13th December 1862)US-Confederate general (1807 – 1870)
War in service of access to resources like oil, rather than in service of human rights, is misguided and ugly to me personally. I cannot say I am firmly behind all the decisions our political leaders have made that have resulted in armed conflict. But I can say, unilaterally and unequivocally, that I feel nothing but respect and support for the men and women who go into harm’s way, and who have died, in service on our way of life. Whether I agree with that way or not.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the thing for those US policymakers who, in service to corporate greed, choose to send troops into battle for the sake of commerce. To the president and congress, on this Memorial Day, I say this:
Before you send troops into battle. Before you support actions that will require the U.S. Dept. of Defense to carry out. Let’s make sure our policies are worth their sacrifices. And the sacrifices of civilians who will undoubtedly suffer under combat.
Let’s send a clear message to our legislators. We owe to those who have sacrificed everything to serve in our military. We owe it to innocent civilians who will get caught in the cross fire. We owe it to ourselves.
Let’s honor the fallen everywhere with policies that put people, not companies, first.
To stay up date to date with the U.S. Military, follow this list of U.S. military commands on twitter.
Categories: Uncategorized