You are here: Home / Archives for Social Media Tools / Facebook for Business

Business Reviews: Social media at its best

November 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Image representing Flip Video as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase

After hearing Lee Aase, of Mayo Clinic speak at a recent American Advertising Federation – Madison meeting about how Mayo has taken on the social media conversation space, I was inspired.  Lee talked about how they(Mayo Social Media group consisting of 2-3 people) have invested all of $200 in a flip video camera to do video blog posts and video interviews of real people using their great services.

I also heard Ron Davies speak about his coaching programs at a recent Internet Marketing conference.  Ron talked about his long hours of travel across Canada and how he has become more productive by blogging in the car with a Flip video attached with Velcro to his dash.

Part of the video generation

Guess what?  I have a Flip video camera and recorded my first video post. Utilizing safe driving techniques while on a recent 3 hour drive, I talked about social media and how it provides consumers the opportunity to create reviews of business products, services and companies on a variety of sites.  Don’t worry – its only 8 minutes long.

Is this good or bad?  Listen and watch the video to find out my opinion.

Related articles by Zemanta
Share
Filed Under: Business Blogging, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

A blogging approach by Wired Wisconsin | Nonprofit social media

November 4, 2009 By 2 Comments

Wired Wisconsin is a coalition of concerned individuals, businesses and organizations working to put the wired-wisconsin-logostate of Wisconsin on the cutting edge of technology. However, like most nonprofits they face challenges in trying to raise funds for outreach and marketing of their message. With only two or three employees and a couple of interns, how do they accomplish statewide what they need to do?

A social approach

After meeting several key staff members of Wired Wisconsin during the recent event – Government 2.0 | Utilizing Social Media – I looked at how they are using  social media efforts to accomplish their organizational goals and the partnerships they are forming along the way.

Wired Wisconsin is actively using social media in their public relations and outreach efforts. They appear to have started their blog about 1 year ago in October of 2008 with weekly updates to Twitter included.  The blog does not identify the author(s)  in anyway, and its lacking a personality at this point. They have a Website setup as a home base for traditional media and social media.  They have links to their Twitter profile, Facebook, Youtube, Podcasts, and a RSS feed for their blog.

Practicing what you preach

You can see that they started slow, with a website and added a blog.  You should have a strong “home” for social media links.  Just consider that with a bio area of 160 characters on Twitter, you don’t have a lot of room to state your mission and issues. So take the time to have good landing pages on your website to explain your mission.  If your budget doesn’t allow that yet, be sure to create a solid LinkedIn profile or other social media profile with very complete details that can help deliver more of your brand and various content for you, but one should be designated as home.

The first six months of blog posts are all Twitter weekly updates of news articles that they added to the Tweet stream. This is an inbound marketing tactic.  This is a good way to start with baby steps based on resources and time. Starting in February 2009, Wired Wisconsin began to offer monthly blog opinion blog posts about the issues they have coalesced around.

May 2009 brought a new addition to the action plan. Bring article content around core issues from other journalists and editorials directly into the blog posts. The Twitter updates continued and in fact they are longer and appear to more much more active during this time period.  Wired Wisconsin also penned more opinion posts covering issues.

While it appears that their Twitter activity is all about outbound press and news media type content, by creating a blog post out of the update (through the use of TwitterTools plugin on their blog)  it does help to give them weekly posts and document activity for the non Twitter users who may want to stay in touch with these issues.

Incorporating video posts

Emily Lenard, Associate Director,  explained that they have used Youtube to post their videos for free and feed to other social media sites such as Facebook. They have an ongoing program to interview state politicians on their stands for issues pertinent to Wired Wisconsin and post them on their Website.

Other uses that they have planned to put in practice for social media include:

  • Press conferences
  • News
  • Events
  • Issue presentations
  • Action alerts
  • Interviews
  • Programs

Wired Wisconsin comments

Emily Lenard has a few comments about a blogging strategy government agencies and nonprofits can follow that might help with blog ideas:

Audit and assess regularly

After a year, it may be time for Wired Wisconsin to take stock and review their activities, audiences, spaces and places for social media sites interaction.  Evaluating and benchmarking the progress over the past year for subscribers, comments, membership growth, partner additions and activity should shed some light on any changes in directions that they should pursue.

Ideally they should be blogging 2-3 times per week.  If the goal of the blog is to strictly be a news source they are doing a good job of that.  I think that they could  increase the Wired Wisconsin opinion pieces to give someone a sense of the passion and drive this organization has to make change happen. And personally, I would like to get sense of who the authors are.

Social media is about people after all and we don’t connect with companies and organizations, we connect and share passions and interest with the people inside them.

Do you have a nonprofit I should review?

Related articles by Zemanta

Share
Filed Under: Business Blogging, Government 2.0, nonprofit, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools Tagged With: , , ,

Working with social media | Thoughts on Blogs | Week October 30, 2009

November 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Social Media ROI
Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

Activities and participation on the social web following Social Media Academy’s NCP Model.

To be or not to be… on a social network by loriruff in Ask an Expert, LinkedIn, Social Media

In regards to conversation about whether someone needed to invest his time (gain ROI) by participating in the LinkedIn community since he had such a strong referral network.

Lori, I had a similar conversation with a professional who got top notch referrals.  We had almost concluded that it wasn’t worth his time, when I asked him if he thought that his contacts would always be at their present jobs, or firms.  Would they be smart enough to leave with their outlook contacts? Have you ever left a job, only to begin the long process of re-entering business contacts from collected cards.

As an online location to collect your business associates, that allows the contact to updates his data, Linkedin can’t be beat.  Even if you do the bare minimum and you don’t need people to find you – it helps you have emails and contact data for your best contacts. The result was he had never thought about it this way.  And no, he had not recently backed up his outlook files.  He also tossed business cards after his assistant added them to Outlook.  He ended up creating a profile and had his admin, start sending invites so he could have a backup, web based location at the least.

Although there are several online contact databases, none have the added functionality of LinkedIn.  Perhaps your contact should reconsider his profile on LinkedIn?

Using Social Media for B2B Marketing.

Linkedin Questions, Ellen Martin, Receptionist at Campbell & Chadwick PC

Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word of Mouth and Buzz Innovators Group

In regards to a question on how can you can use social media to find and develop business contacts into clients for a professional services firm?

Ellen,
First understand the business goals of your firm, then do an assessment of the social ecosystem to see where the possible customers are and what they are talking about.  Build a strategy and action
plan after getting an understanding of the spaces and issues.  Only then can you figure out how to solve the problem, build a action plan and then select the right tools.  You may find that customer support is the best place to use social media that leads to leads for your firm.  Hitting marketing and sales too early without a clear understanding of how to participate in the social web can backfire on you.

Other steps would be part of the action plan along with resource allocation – time, personnel and budgets.

COMMERCIAL OVER-POSTING IS PROHIBITED, PERIOD!

Linkedin Group Social Media Marketing (with over 50,000 members)

In regards to Mike Crosson vigilant policing of spammers in the group. His policy is clear and I have included it in this post since I think it has great value for other group managers.

From Mike Crosson: Hello, everyone – there have been a number of people who have ignored the clear directive that spam and straight commercial messages are NOT appropriate for this forum. I have warned these people and banned two from the list as a result. Here are the simple common sense rules so that everyone gets real value out of our Social Media Marketing group:

1. You can post something you feel will benefit the group, even if it is somewhat self-serving or has reasonable costs associated with it. There will undoubtedly be a number of people who might
your product or service beneficial. What you CANNOT do is post the same thing over and over. That becomes spam and benefits no one.

2. Try to provide something of VALUE in every posting – a resource you have or found, a relevant article to a discussion, a presentation or research that is useful.

3. Be transparent and honest – a lot of very smart people are in this group and can see through flimsy or sales-y materials. We all benefit from sharing knowledge and resources, and respecting the value of people’s time.

Here’s to 2009, a great year for our business!

Cheers,
Mike Crosson

Here is my reply:

I have used this group and your techniques as a moderator on more than one occasion to showcase a great moderator and the type of group that is worthwhile.  I have used your suggestion to keep the same spammer out of two other groups I participate in.   Feels like a blog topic coming on.

However, face it, people have spammed email forever and continue to do it in spite of software to reduce it. So I am afraid that spamming social media is here to stay.  In fact it chokes up Twitter all the time.

That doesn’t mean we should stop these efforts and we need to continually remind ourselves and new users in our social ecosystems what is consider good and bad form and what we will allow in our groups that we can control.

Take out the light sabers and may the force be with us!

Related articles by Zemanta

Share
Filed Under: Business Blogging, Reputation Management, Social Media Academy, Social Media Strategy, Thoughts on Blogs Tagged With: , , , ,

Challenges we face as leaders | Thoughts on Blogs Week of October 23, 2009

October 27, 2009 By 1 Comment

Participation on the social web following the Social Media Academy’s NCP Model.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for business leaders in the next 12 months.

LinkedIn Questions -Dan Paulson C level executive adviser.  CEO of InVision.

In response:

Corporate websites are doomed.  Buyers are not going to these sites for information. They are using online readers, social sites, product sites and forums to learn the “real story” and share reviews on products and services.
Leaders need to find ways for buyers to personally connect with you  while integrating them into your business. This allows you to establish lasting connections.

Leaders need to recognize that buyers (both consumers and B2B) have fundamentally changed their buying process. Therefore they must change the sales process.  Trust is the biggest issue.  Those suppliers who  are open and share information,  are active in marketplace, and engaged in community of professionals will standout and can be trusted sooner.

Having customer evangelists who are freely recommending your product and service based on their customer experience being outstanding is the most important thing to move you up the recommendation chain. Your goal should be to provide the best customer experience and engagement.

Your online presence should integrate with social sites in various forms.  Build your platforms across your organizations to integrate with the social web.

Does your company have a Social Media Policy for employees?

Social Media Marketing Group – LinkedIn Questions & Answers

Can employees blog about your company? Tweet about it? Can they RT something about the company that someone has already said?

In response:

I also agree with Ryan that social media policies and guidelines are helpful to both employees and senior management.  It provides the structure for employees to follow so they know when they are out of line.  It reassures senior management that they have escalation paths in place should conversations go haywire and it documents for legal reasons grounds for inappropriate actions.

I recently heard Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic speak and they have a policy statement on their blog.

I have started to see policy statements by social media professionals such as chrisbrogan.com that include disclaimers, linking policies, connection policies, and disclaimers.

Privacy Begins at Home.

Lee Aase on the use of Skype and various social media tools.

In response:

Lee, thanks for making yourself oh so human.When we see people from big organizations talking about using social media, its easy to assume that they know everything.

Its easy to be intimidated by the conversations that’s ongoing or in trying to start one yourself.

I appreciated the very real presentation you gave on your own humble beginnings recently in Madison WI for the AAF. It helps even to those of us firmly entrenched in the world of social media, It also helps us be creative with how we implement social media.

You provided great incentive to use Flip video for interviews and capturing content in new ways. So I did a video blog post while I was traveling to a soccer game in the car. I will try and be brave and post it today on my blog. Note to everyone, its easier to do this with some type of velcro on the dashboard so you don’t have to hold the camera.

Thanks again for the great presentation and for your blog and SMUG university.

Share
Filed Under: Business Blogging, Social Media Strategy, Thoughts on Blogs Tagged With: , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »