All Posts By

Marijean

Marijean Oldham (Jaggers), a social media specialist and public relations professional, is president and CEO of Jaggers Communications LLC, a strategic communications firm based in Charlottesville, Va.

Nov 18
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The Truth About Social Media: Five Facts for Your Business

By Communications, Social Media

When it comes to social media the hardest part to swallow is the investment it takes.

It’s not about money, and what I have to share may make you question the way you’ve been engaging in social media for your business. The truth is this: it takes time. Not just time, but an investment of yourself as a person to be successful in using the tools of social media. It takes transparency and a willingness to share information. It takes (gulp!) being real, both for your customers and your potential customers.

Now just relax for a minute. I know you think you’ve got this handled for your business. You may be saying, “We’ve got a blog. We have a Facebook page. Our marketing person is using Twitter. We’re engaged!”

Are you?

I’m referring to businesses here, but a business engaged in social media is not a business engaged in social media.

(What?)

A business engaged in social media is people, a.k.a. representatives, employees of or ambassadors for the business engaged in social media. I have never seen it work better than when said people have personal brands (i.e., are interesting). The people responsible for the reputation of your brand must live their lives with a significant portion of brain cells thinking, “I can’t wait to put this online” if they’re not already in the act of doing it, as we sit here, mulling over truths in social media.

These people blog about your products or services, they post photos on Flickr, they tweet, they comment on others’ blog posts, they rate books on Amazon and movies on Netflix, they Google everything. They’ve entered, edited or sourced an article on Wikipedia. They’ve used another wiki and/or Google Docs to collaborate with others. They have hundreds of contacts in LinkedIn and friends on Facebook that span ages, races, genders and socioeconomic statuses.

And yet … are you tapping into these people and their vast networks to promote your business? Do you know how?

Pour yourself a drink while I prepare to launch onto your consciousness five facts about social media engagement for your business. It’s going to hurt a little bit, but trust me, this post ends with a path to recovery.

 

Five Facts About Social Media Engagement for Business

  1. You must have a plan. Social media engagement should be looked at as an arm of your business. You have a business plan or at least know what your goals are, how much money you need to make this year and how that translates into sales of products or services. You need goals for social media engagement as well or else you simply won’t know when or if you’re achieving what you intended.
  2. You do not need to be everywhere. There are hundreds of tools. Choose to engage deeply in a few; not in a shallow, dipping in infrequently, many. Don’t be tempted to dive into them all; you’ll only drown.
  3. You must have passion. If you’re going to engage on behalf of your business, you have to really be enthusiastic about your brand. Not excited? Then perhaps someone else on your team is; and that’s OK — one of the most difficult truths for business leaders (the C-suite folks) to accept is that they aren’t necessarily the right people to be engaging in social media on behalf of the brand. Empower those in your organization who live it; deeply and constantly, and while they might do it differently than you would, Mr. CEO, that doesn’t mean it isn’t right.
  4. You must know who you are, and be OK with it. If you’re still struggling to define your business, if you can’t provide a profile of your “best” or ideal customer, if you’re going in five different directions and you aren’t sure WHAT your primary business offering is to your community, then that will come across in your online content. You’ll confuse your audience. Take a step back, figure out who you are, then come back and engage with focus.
  5. Engaging successfully in social media can take 20 hours a week* or more … if you don’t have time to engage, yet you have identified social media as important to your business development, look at prioritizing your current activities. What’s at the bottom of the list? Can it go completely, or be outsourced to someone else?

If your team cannot devote the resources to do it right and across a few key platforms, pick one and do it really well. Which one? That depends on your business, but for most B2B businesses, the online tool where you will find the majority of your contacts and prospects is LinkedIn. Too old school? Not when your whole team has fully gotten up to speed, fully loaded contacts and learned a few key ways to use LinkedIn to help your business grow. If you’ve gotten #2 and #4 figured out, spend some time identifying the strongest personal brands in your organization. Who are the people who can engage on your behalf, and make a difference? Finally, create a plan with goals (here’s a self-serving plug: Jaggers Communications can help you with that) and stick to it, evaluating your progress along the way. For those in your organization who don’t yet think that social media is important, you need to be able to demonstrate the return on the investment of all the time your team has spent engaging on your company’s behalf.

How are you doing? Are you ready to accept the truth about social media?

*20 hours is, of course, not continuous time. Blog posts can take an hour apiece; monitoring, updating social networks, engaging in online conversation using Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, commenting on blog posts and more take only a few minutes at a time, but it adds up. This is an estimate of all the time above, combined.

Nov 16
Love0

Working in Unusual Conditions: How do you cope?

By Communications

The kitchen and sun room at my house are undergoing a complete overhaul. This means we’re without a kitchen entirely for approximately four weeks. (I can hear you laughing. I’m just telling you what the contractors said. I don’t actually believe that number, either.) So today I’m working from my couch with headphones trying to ignore the sound of a nailgun and general construction mayhem happening in the next room. I would work in my home office but it’s currently filled with the contents of my kitchen and sun room.

I’m plugged in to Spotify with headphones and trying to maintain concentration on projects that must move forward today. Work has to get done, no matter the circumstances.

What do you do to cope in unusual working conditions?

 

Nov 15
Love0

The Business Implications of Diabetes: One in 10 Afflicted by 2030.

By Communications

The International Diabetes Federation is reporting that people living with diabetes will number 552 million by 2030 unless urgent action is taken.  The kind of diabetes referenced is Type 2, commonly caused by obesity and resulting in symptoms such as kidney failure, heart disease and failing eyesight. (Personal note: I have had dozens of family members with Type 2 diabetes and have supported the American Diabetes Association for many years.)

Diabetes is an expensive disease; pharmaceutical companies provide medications, insulin and products to help patients monitor and track their blood sugar levels. The problem is, that patients with diabetes often go undiagnosed or reject the diagnosis because the lifestyle changes and diet required to manage diabetes or avoid it are not easy, and often people diagnosed later in life aren’t interested in making major life changes. This inevitably leads to serious complications; strokes, heart attacks, poor circulation sometimes resulting in amputations, kidney failure and eye disease. In other words, more, longer-term health problems that are costly to the patient and the health care system.

I’ve been involved with organizations trying to spread the word about ways to manage your life with diabetes. We’ve done outreach to at-risk communities, worked with medical professionals to provide motivating language to patients, delivered help and education to patients to help them better understand the risks of the disease and how important managing diet and getting exercise is before and after diagnosis. It’s often an uphill battle — not unlike encouraging smokers to throw away their cigarettes.

Since, as a nation, we’re focusing on the business of health care and how it affects our economy, our citizens and our quality of life, the confluence of this report and the Supreme Court review of the Obama administrations health care bill  is interesting. Since dramatic change is unlikely to occur quickly enough to change the prediction of the increase in diabetes patients, our health care initiatives would do well to plan for one in 10 Americans to be facing serious health issues in a mere 20 years. That’s frightening from a financial and a cultural perspective.

How can we effectively communicate to Americans the need to maintain a healthy diet, exercise and avoid this disease? For some, scare tactics work, whether it’s the financial cost of the disease or the toll its symptoms take on the patient. The frustrating part of the diabetes diagnosis is this: it’s entirely preventable. The trouble is, each person has to make up his or her mind to care, and to change behaviors. It’s not easy, but in the end, it saves us all money and keeps our loved ones around and enjoying life much longer.

Nov 14
Love0

Facebook: The Best Place to Celebrate a Birthday

By Social Media

November 13 was my birthday. It’s OK if you missed it. (SNIFF!) Just make sure you make a note of it for next year.

I am a big fan of birthdays; I celebrate mine in a big way and my friends’ birthdays as well. I used to spend much of my birthday on the phone and getting together with friends — I still do a lot of that but Facebook has expanded my birthday into a pangalactic holiday. (That’s right. Aliens celebrate it, too.) Throughout the day I heard from childhood friends, cousins, clients, former clients, colleagues, people I only know online and close family and friends wishing me well on my Facebook profile.

It’s fantastic!

If there’s a so far unconvinced social media-interested person in your life, make sure they have a Facebook account and connect with all their contacts and friends before their birthday — they’ll get a kick out of all the birthday wishes and begin to understand how the platform keeps people connected to one another in the simplest of ways.

Nov 14
Love0

Americans Spend More Time on Facebook Than any Other U.S. Website

By Social Media

About a year ago in a client meeting a CEO of a business I worked with said to me, “Facebook is just for kids. We don’t need to pay attention to that.”

Really?

As business owners and marketers it’s no longer possible to ignore the fact that Facebook has won the eyes and rapt attention of millions for hours every single week. Nielsen reports that Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other U.S. website. Facebook had more than 140 million visitors in May of 2011 alone.

Facebook attracts an astounding 70 percent of active internet users.

This may be stating the obvious, but it is not enough to simply have a presence for your business on Facebook. Your business, whether a consumer business or B2B should have a business page, but that’s not all. Your business should have a plan for updating the page with content valuable to your community. Someone in your organization should be responsible for generating and posting that content, for tagging and liking others’ content and pages, for generating conversation and for being responsive to the community that gathers there.

How are you managing your business’s Facebook presence?

 

I’m teaching a workshop, Social Networking for Business Growth this Wednesday — you should come!