Show Me the Blog St. Louis Conference
Below, just some of the awesome tweets that helped convince the conference organizer to include me.
#FF @ginidietrich and my buddy @rustyspeidel (HB2U, Rusty!) I also highly recommend Gini’s blog, Spin Sucks.
If you’re not familiar with “follow Friday” — it is a weekly feature on Twitter where users recommend others to follow, as indicated by the tag #FF.
So you finally got down to it, wrote and published a blog post. Think you’re done? Hardly!
Here are five steps to take to make sure that people actually find and read your blog post:
1. Do a Google blog search on the topic of your post. Find other posts that are similar in nature, read them and, if appropriate, leave a comment.
2. Share the link to your post across your social networks — on Twitter, Facebook and if appropriate, LinkedIn.
3. If your business/company/organization has a Facebook page, post the link to the post (if it is relevant to the business) on the page.
4. Think about who you know who is not an active part of your social network, but who would really appreciate what you’ve just written. You can probably think of a couple of people. Send them the link in an individually addressed e-mail.
5. If you are lucky enough to have generated some comments, respond to them.
My friend Leigh Fazzina just used Twitter as a rescue tool. Leigh took a bad spill from a bike in an unfamiliar area with limited cell reception. Leigh has a strong network of followers on Twitter and when she couldn’t contact emergency services using her phone, she was able to tweet; her followers responded and sent an ambulance to find her. Leigh is recovering with bumps, bruises and muscle soreness.
The story was covered by USA Today where some commenters have missed the point entirely.
What Leigh did was resourceful and because of the relationships she’s initiated, nurtured and maintained, she had a solid, reliable, caring group of people she could contact when she was unable to reach anyone else with any other more conventional method.
I had a similar, though non-emergency experience when our kayak was stolen a couple of weeks ago. After alerting police, I tweeted to my followers (who retweeted) until someone located our stolen property, thus starting the process of prosecuting the thief and recovering our kayak.
Twitter, and the networks it creates and allows one to maintain, is fantastic. If you don’t get it, you’re just missing out. That’s all.
The most frequent topic at the social media workshops I give on behalf of Standing Partnership is the separation of personal and professional. This usually provides and opportunity to point out that PRIVATE and personal are different and there is NO PLACE on the internet for the private. None.
I think Dr. Ruth Westheimer said it best when she tweeted that if you’re going to make a sex tape, get your hair done, smile to the camera, because nothing like that ever stays private, so you might as well look good.
People are very concerned about separating their personal and their professional “selves” — I’ve written about this topic before — and for some, it makes sense to keep Facebook the place where they play and connect with friends, and LinkedIn where they do business and connect with prospects and colleagues. It’s fine, however you want to play it.
However!
As an employee of a corporation (or a nonprofit or an institute of higher learning or a hospital, etc.) you have the POTENTIAL to be an ambassador for that company with your social media engagement. And I’m not talking to the marketers, the development people, the HR folks — I’m talking to YOU. Every single employee has the potential to share the messages of the organization for which you work. You can use social media to position yourself as a more valuable employee. You can be smarter than other staff members because you’re listening to the social web, know what’s being said about the organization and are responding or sharing the opportunities to respond with the organization’s leadership.
This is why I encourage individuals to engage on Twitter using their own name (Gini Dietrich has a great post about this) and photo as opposed to the organization’s name with a logo. Sometimes I’m asked if mutiple people should tweet under an organization logo’d Twitter account and that’s fine, but it’s not an engagement model. People want to develop relationships with other PEOPLE, not logos or a twitter account where it’s unclear who they’re talking to (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!). Step out from behind that logo curtain, people, and embrace the opportunity to be an ambassador for your workplace.