What makes social media an essential tool for social enterprise is
Viewing entries in
Social Media
So you posted your story to your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and maybe even Google+ accounts. But the great social soap box isn't so. For businesses using social media, the most important message is: target, target, target.
The society-wide "breaks" that we enjoy for Christmas, Winter Solstice, Eid, or even just Victoria Day or the 4:20 are all occasions that we agree to be together and to not work.
Every organization has blind spots and, for most, social media is on that list. Yes, still. The ones who figure it out and run with it are the ones who work to fully understand it. There's still a lot of time to get there.
If you can master growing and staying in touch with a network of people on Twitter you'll find it a lot easier on the other networks.
If social media monitoring is about communications, measurement is about business strategy.
I don’t expect everyone to jump on this but for those who already know the superior value of Google+, this simple little service makes it easy to make Plus the centre of your sharing activity without causing you to lose the social networks you’ve built elsewhere.
a simple, common sense, social media policy and saved it in formats for download that you can print and staple to a common wall in the office, if necessary.
Influencers get the word out with the same reach and authority that TV, radio, newspapers, and flyers did in the former media era. It is through people sharing that things spread now.
Your online profile changes over time depending on how people interact with your content, interact with your competitors content, and even in how they look for you.
Facebook is now the great social forum where businesses can get to know their communities and build a social reputation. Budgets and expectations should be built around this understanding.
Sharability is the ingredient that must exist in every piece of content you share or you are wasting your time/investment.
In this e-book my wish is to help you produce more authentic - and beautiful - images of yourself, your staff, your friends, your colleagues. Written to be a quick and accessible read, take these tips with you on your quest to create a better personal online image, avatar or headshot.
It turns out that storytelling, especially through a visual, "moving picture" medium like video, TV, or film is how we see things in our minds so they speak to us in our most natural language
How content is shared determines the ROI of the content more than the content itself and should be considered before the content is even created.
Once you Find out who is influencing your company’s brand you can build relationships with them. If the leaders of your company are not among them, they need to be and here are a few steps you can take to figure out who they should be and how you can increase their influence.
Investing in your brand without investing in who is going to influence it the most is kind of crazy. And since "social media" is so obviously about people, it's important to understand how important the personal brands of your people are on social channels.
90% of customers will recommend brands after social media interactions (read the story) and that should make things very 
clear for every business: if you are not interacting with people you are letting someone else steal your influence.
This study and others validate a social business posture because it supports a long-held understanding of human motivation that when people feel important, cared for, appreciated, they respond positively and with support. By talking, listening, and helping consumers, companies endear themselves to consumers in a very human way. That's social.
Showing your customers that you appreciate them and that they are important to you is and always will be the best way to earn and keep their loyalty and to spread endorsements for your brand.
Online social channels allow a business to do this in a very real and manageable way and should be a priority for any company that considers loyalty and customer recommendations to be important.
What Does Social Interaction Mean Online?
I feel a little silly explaining this but here goes: listen to what people are saying, talk to them, understand them, and show them the kindness that expresses your appreciation for them and what they have to say. These are basic communication skills for decent people and they are just as important online.
"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James http://t.co/KkCrbmyRjn #learnsocial
— Sociallogical™ (@soclogical) October 11, 2013
Create a list of those who influence your brand in a positive way online so you can pay special attention to them. They are as important to the success of your company and your future sales as many other factors that you invest in.
The worst thing you can do is let the supportive efforts of your influencers and advocates go unnoticed and unappreciated.
This is a brief message leading into the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. What do you do to show your online community that you appreciate them and are thankful for their support? Please tell me in the comments. I want to know.
Richard, Vincent, Katherine, Margaret, Lawrence, and Elizabeth have all been lost to me online because I have been looking to connect with Dick, Vinny, Kate, Peggy, Larry, and Beth - the names I know them as.
Just because your parents named you Stephen doesn't mean you are disrespecting them by being Steve online. And if everyone knows you as Steve, when they go looking for you online they're not likely to find you if you're listed as Stephen.
The Purpose is to Connect
The whole purpose of creating an online profile, on any social media channel, is to connect with people and to give them an authentic picture of who you are.
So the best approach is to think like a search engine. What will people search for when they look for you? Make that the name that you use on your social profiles. And while you're at it, make sure that the keywords that people are likely to think of when they think of you are also included in your profiles so they get picked up by search.
My real name is Jeffrey. It's the name my parents gave me and it is the name on my Passport and other formal/official documents. But everyone in my life knows me as Jeff. Fortunately for me, Jeffrey is likely to get picked up by most search engines when searching for "Jeff" but a scan of search results by any friend who is looking for me is likely going to miss my 7 letter full name if their brain is scanning for 4 letter names starting with J. So I use Jeff always.
Now imagine if your name is Margaret but you are known as Peggy! Who in the world is ever going to know to search for Margaret?
Respecting Your Formal Side
People aren't going to visit your profile repeatedly after they've connected with you. When they are looking for you you don't need them to find the formal you, just the you they are familiar with for one simple reason: so they can connect with you.
Include your more sophisticated name elsewhere in your profile if you can. In your Linkedin summary, maybe mention your full name somewhere or even tell the story of how you came to shorten your name if it's a good one.
You don't need to let go of your proper name. But if you don't use it regularly, put it in the same place you have it in your everyday life: in the background as a passing reference.
Photo ref: That's me and my friend Manami Fukuda being very sophisticated while modelling for a very fun and memorable event a few years ago.
Likes, follows, or being added to circles are passive expressions of a low-level of interest that businesses pursue simply because they are numbers that can be measured, pure and simple. "How many" do we have this month compared to last month? It's a natural instinct to count numbers to measure perceived growth in a space that is always misunderstood by pretty much everyone in the beginning.
But when we play with social media for a little while we eventually come back to remembering that we are in business to sell something to people who need it. And as we know from politics, just because someone says they like you doesn't mean you'll get their vote when it counts.
Followers Can Filter
One of the greatest and most necessary features of social media is the ability to filter out noise. When we can listen to such a massive number of people and businesses in this wide open online world we run into limits almost immediately as humans. We need to filter to get any value out of these channels.
On Facebook, as quickly as you can call someone your friend or Like a business' page you can "Hide" them from your feed and never hear from them again. This should stop any business in their tracks who believes these superficial numbers count for anything close to long term value for their business. They don't.
On Twitter, the only thing gained by someone following you is that you can then send them a private direct message, which is basically an email. And we have a well-known word for a business who would abuse this channel: spam. Twitter is the truly wide open channel in which using a filtering tool so you can
pay attention to hashtags or lists of people with special interests is necessary to get any value. So if you have 1000 followers on Twitter you can't have confidence that any percent of those followers are paying attention to anything you post. What's even worse is that 85% of all tweets are never seen by anyone, ever.
LinkedIn may be the only social channel where the number of connections matters because there is little social activity. It is powerful and personal but brands struggle to get their numbers up for their Company pages on this professional, etiquette-driven channel.Google+ is the most recent major social platform to emerge and is actually built for when things get noisy. By allowing users to curate circles of their own design, it is an essential feature of this channel to choose who you want to listen to every time you visit.
Social Media Presents An Opportunity
Social media presents your business with the opportunity to connect with customers in a two-way relationship. It is not a new broadcast channel and those who treat it as such are severely punished with isolation and a damaged brand. It's why so many businesses have "tried social media" and let their efforts die in frustration.
What you can do is measure activity on your channels and find out who is influencing your brand. Who is talking about you and with you and getting your content to new people who might be interested in it? Your influencers are having an impact on your brand in a way that growing follower numbers just is not. Social is about people, not audiences. [tweet this]
When you know who your influencers are you can get to know those people better. Smart businesses will look for ways to reward influencers for their interest in an effort to convert them to advocates that love what your company does and talk positively about your brand to others.
Advocates generate leads. Leads can be converted to sales. And sales are what grow businesses. Measuring this progression of the online relationship is how you measure the ROI of social.
Is your business counting followers or are you earning the deeper interest of your brand influencers? Please tell me what you've learned in the comments.