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.

Apr 04
Love0

Profile to Page, Now Possible with Facebook. Or NOT!

By Communications

It’s really impossible to guess what Mark Zuckerberg is going to do next with Facebook. He’s like that guy your girlfriend married, hoping she could change him over time. We all know that story — he’s only going to change when and if he wants to and probably with little to no notice.

A lot of us in the social media business have bitched and moaned for years about how businesses and organizations set up profiles instead of pages. I wrote Businesses: Why I Won’t Be Your Friend on Facebook and have provided a lot of education in workshops and client counsel to either make sure clients have a page and know what to do with it or, if they made the mistake of creating a fake person profile, to get them converted over to a page.

Lo and behold, Facebook had some kind of moment of clarity last week and decided to make it easier for us to convert a profile to a page.

But wait — haha just kidding! Just like that bad husband swearing off the booze on a Sunday, it’s Monday morning and he’s hitting the bottle. Facebook has disabled the profile to business page converter.

It’s a challenge to keep up with the mood swings of the world’s largest social networking platform, isn’t it? Like your gossipy best girlfriend, I’ll keep my ears and eyes open and keep you posted if I learn any more.

Mar 31
Love0

Five Lessons on How Not to Use Twitter

By Communications

I was absolutely stunned when, during a workshop I was teaching, I learned that a business owner had instructed staff managing the company’s Twitter account, to block anyone who wanted to follow the business on Twitter if they seemed irrelevant.

Huh?

I know that the business community is still trying to wrap its mind around Twitter and how it can be used in a business context. Above all, what I want to share is this: Twitter is a microblog — updates are like tiny blog posts of 140 characters or less. If that helps make sense of Twitter to your and your business then good; you understand that a blog is published for anyone to see and find via search engines and the idea of publishing in this way (0r on any social network) is to attract people who find you and your content of value.

As a short and sweet guide to what NOT to do on Twitter, I offer you the following five thoughts:

  1. Don’t block people following you unless they are obnoxious spammers (in which case, block away)
  2. Don’t sell, sell, sell, instead, take the time to engage in conversation with those who follow you and those you follow
  3. Don’t regurgitate endlessly; there’s a trend among some Twitter users to tweet quotes from others — ad nauseum! I don’t care if Oprah, the Dalai Lama or Jesus said it; I don’t want to read a stream of tweets that’s mostly “quotables.” That’s just boring.
  4. Don’t — for the love of all that is good and holy — use AutoDM’s, as my aunt would say, like they’re going out of style. There’s a time and place for auto response and this isn’t it.
  5. While it’s important to stay on message — and I fully support that if you’re tweeting on behalf of a business you need to make sure what you are publishing there is relevant — but for goodness’ sakes, pay attention to what’s being said in the stream of those you’re following and join the conversation. Don’t just push out your content — engage.

In case all of this still leaves you scratching your head in wonder, one last reminder: you’re there to discover and build relationships, not merely crank out content. Honor that.

 

Mar 30
Love0

Facebook for Family History

By Communications

Photo credit: Waterford Historical Museum and Cultural Center

I know you all know that I’m a fan of social media for business. Once in awhile though, social media takes my breath away and I just have to share.

Now, this is a personal example, but makes yet another point of the value of the online social network.

The house on the left is where my father grew up in Waterford, New York. It was divided into four apartments, 11 children in my dad’s family, 11, 7 and 6 kids in each of the other families. That’s 34 kids growing up in close quarters.

The Waterford Historical Museum and Cultural Center posted the photo on Facebook and asked the community to identify it.

The appearance of this photo has led to me connecting with a cousin and an aunt, but also, the remaining children of those families that grew up there are beginning to find one another and reminisce.

I just think that’s magical and love watching it evolve.