Category

Social Media

Jul 07
Love0

Seven Ways to Manage Social Media When You’re Out of the Office

By Social Media

About this time last week, that was me, on the right, covered with sand and watching the waves.

I tried to unplug as much as possible — it’s the one vacation I’ll have this year. If you can get to a beach from where you live, you kind of owe it to yourself to embrace the culture while you’re there. Growing up in the Midwest, the idea of having an ocean a half a day’s drive away is still really novel to me.

Being an entrepreneur means never taking a day off, or so I understand. So here’s what I did to appear to be in my office when I was really catching some rays at the beach:

  1. I wrote blog posts for almost every day of the week I’d be gone and scheduled them using WordPress so they’d publish automatically.
  2. My blog posts automatically update Twitter when the publish, so that audience was covered as well.
  3. I used my phone to tweet, retweet and to share information (in fact, at one point, a follower who knew I was on vacation told me to quit tweeting and BE on vacation for goodness sake’s).
  4. I updated Facebook from my phone.
  5. I scheduled tweets, using TweetDeck so blog posts would get the same amount of traffic as if I were managing them from my desk.
  6. I’m promoting two upcoming workshops, so I made sure registration links were going out via the Social Trinity (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) at least once a day.
  7. I continued to read others’ content, liking, sharing and commenting in the hour or so I allowed myself to work each day.

How do you manage your “out of office” time?

 

Upcoming workshops:  Social Media Summer School and Don’t Be a Weiner: How to Use Twitter Like a Professional

Jul 06
Love0

How to Handle a Client that Won’t Take Your Counsel

By Public Relations, Social Media

My friend Ken and I were chatting via instant messenger while working last night. An excerpt of our conversation follows:

Ken Mueller

Ken Mueller and his mom in a recent photo

Sent at 8:00 PM on Tuesday
Marijean: so serious question
when you have a client who WILL NOT DO what you recommend and it’s obvious
do you:
a) dump the client
b) make sure no one knows they are your client
or
c) let people know they’re a client and let the cards fall where they may
(maybe this is a blog post?)
Ken: hold on
mom
Marijean: HI MOM!
Ken: ha
Sent at 8:04 PM on Tuesday

Our conversation was delayed while Ken talked to his mom on the phone and I forged ahead turning my question into this blog post. I’m curious what other PR people and social media professionals think about this. What do you do when it’s really evident that a client you’re working with is NOT taking your counsel? It’s embarrassing, right? Clients can’t change overnight, obviously and sometimes behavior or cultural changes must happen before client communications are up to snuff . . . but while they’re getting up to speed, what’s your approach?

Thanks in advance for the input — and everybody, say “Hi!” to Ken’s mom!

 

 

Jun 29
Love0

Community Managers: Who Will Do the Social Media Work for Your Small Business?

By Social Media

The number one struggle small businesses have with social media is this:

Who will do the work?

It’s an extremely important question to answer before your efforts online begin in earnest. An estimated 95 percent of all blogs have been abandoned. For those who don’t engage, tweets fritter away over time and for those without a strategy or a plan, Facebook pages go dormant. Companies have grand plans about how they’re going to engage in social media and then … no one truly owns the effort.

One approach that’s been discussed is the creation of a  community manager or a conversation manager or sometimes even simply a social media manager (a quick Google of this found upwards of 14,000 jobs with this title). The point is, some companies have come far enough in the process to acknowledge that if they are going to be successful in their social media efforts, they need to create a position to handle it.

Companies often think, “We want the young, hip intern who ‘gets’ social media to do this for us.” This is like hiring your 16-year-old nephew to build the Web site for your business.

Just.

Don’t.

It’s great that the youngest person on your team uses social media on a regular basis, but they’re not the voice and face of your company, unless they ARE your primary audience. If your audience needs to engage with someone who represents your company — truly — who can answer with authority any question or respond to any inquiry without checking with a battery of people first, then THAT’s the person who needs to be your community manager.

Now it’s fine if that community manager is not a subject matter expert on all the different products and services your company provides. In fact, what the community manager needs is the young hip intern and a team of others in the company to research and supply a feed of information: blog posts and articles to read, news to react to, ideas, photos, product information, etc. The manager can then use this flow of creative inspiration to develop the content that engages your community. Give the manager the support they need to represent you, but first choose wisely, knowing that that person may find themselves representing you in a crisis, or on a day when business is not going well at all. The community manager is your company spokesperson. Are you ready to have that person represent you online?

The person who can and should manage your community should have the authority to do so; they should have the respect earned through longevity with the company, and the skill and personality to enjoy engaging with others on the social Web.

Who manages your community now? If you’re not yet engaged in social media, who do you plan to have manage your community?

Jun 28
Love0

Who’s Listening?

By Social Media

Today’s guest post is from Ken Mueller of Inkling Media.

Social Media platforms can be incredibly personal. For those of us who spend a good part of our day communicating via Twitter, it is not only personal, but has become second nature. So much so that we really do need to stop and think from time to time before we Tweet.

If you’re anything like me, you use Twitter for both personal and business reasons. You might even have two separate accounts, but we need to remember, it’s hard to separate the two. I’m a sole proprietor; I AM my business. People associate me with Inkling Media. Anything I say on my personal account will affect how people view me. That includes clients and prospective clients. Even if you are one of those people whose Twitter bio reads, “I also tweet for @[businessname] but my tweets here are mine alone and not those of my employer,” you need to think before you tweet. You can throw down all the caveats and disclaimers in the world, but if you annoy or alienate me on your personal Twitter account, and I know that you work for Joe’s Taco Shack, there’s a good chance I’ll go elsewhere when I’m jonesing for a taco.

It basically comes down to whether or not you have a filter. This can either be your own internal filter, or an external filter, or both. I normally have a pretty good internal filter. I find that in both the personal and professional realms, there are certain topics I’ll avoid. Those include politics and religion. Oh I have very distinct opinions on both of those topics, and I might make the occasional mention, but I also know that Twitter might not be the best realm for discussing them in any meaningful way. 140 characters of text can certainly limit understanding and cause confusion.

Additionally, I also tend to avoid any sort of profanity or off-color humor. I don’t really speak like that in my real life, so why should I talk like that on Twitter or Facebook? I know that there are some people I follow that I would NEVER want to work with based on their “sense of humor”. Often, I might even unfollow them if it gets out of hand. Some folks seem to wear their brashness like a badge of honor. Sorry, I’m not buying.

I also have at least two external filters in place. Very often you’ll hear someone say, “Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mother to see.” Well, my 77-year old mom is one of my filters. She subscribes to my blog via email, and while she doesn’t understand most of what I blog about, just knowing that she’s reading my blog does have an effect on what I write. For instance, while I don’t use profanity, my mom’s definition of profanity and mine, are decidedly different, mostly based on being from different generations. I remember my mom making a big deal about one of her grandchildren using the “F-word” once. I was shocked that one of them would use it, and then discovered that to her, the “F-word” is “fart”. Yup. That’s my mom. Needless to say, the word “fart” won’t appear in my blog (but I’m more than OK using it here on Marijean’s blog! Hope your mom doesn’t mind, MJ!)

My second external filter is my 21-year old daughter. She recently joined Twitter as a way of being a part of the Tony Awards. But, now she’s there. And she follows me. She’s a great kid and we get along really well, but knowing that she is reading my tweets does make me pause from time to time. She’s kinda nosy and won’t hesitate to question me on things. So I’m now learning to put my tweets through an “Elizabeth Filter.”

Do you have a good filter in place? External, internal or both? What rules do you have in place for yourself? Are there certain types of language, behavior, or content that you don’t like seeing on Twitter, Facebook, or other social platforms?

 

 

Jun 21
Love0

Social Content, Allergies and the Parents who Diagnose Them

By Social Media

Photo credit: Muffet

I was allergic to dairy products until I was about 12 years old. Recent health issues led to surgery (I’m fine, now) and for the last month my diet has subsisted primarily of fruits, vegetables and lean proteins. I’ve been adding dairy back in gradually and it’s the weirdest thing — it all tastes off to me. In the last couple of weeks I’ve poured out a couple of glasses of milk that were fine, but for some reason just tasted really sour.

I’m fascinated by this new study that suggests food allergies may be more common than originally thought and that about 8% of American children likely have them.

The Booster Shots blog of the LA Times reports this:

KidsHealth, from the Nemours Foundation, has this to say about “growing out” of allergies:

“Most kids who are allergic to milk, eggs, wheat, or soy outgrow their allergies by the time they’re 5 years old. But only about 20% of people with peanut allergy and about 10% of kids with tree nut allergy outgrow their allergy. Fish and shellfish allergies usually develop later in life, and people are unlikely to outgrow them.”

Now, I hope that information like this study doesn’t result in a slew of parents downsizing kids’ diets. If anything, I hope that more parents seek allergy testing for their kids when they suspect sensitivities. The results of these studies are often inflammatory, whether that’s the intent or not.

I’m glad I outgrew my allergy to dairy early and suspect that this current aversion will work its way through my system as well. Studies like these and the wealth of health information available online may contribute to parents over-diagnosing allergies. Leave the diagnosing to the professionals, and read online social content such as blogs and warnings via social networks with a grain of salt.