Category : Social Media
One of your responsibilities as a social media marketer is to educate your stakeholders. They could be your co workers, company executives or clients (internal or external).
It will be very difficult for anyone to support you with your social media marketing ideas and campaigns if he or she doesn’t know anything about social media.
Let them start using Facebook as a start.
Ask them if they have a profile on Facebook? If they don’t, help them set up their profiles, help them answer the sign up form and explain the importance of every field. You must be prepared to answer their questions. Remember that you are being considered as the “authority” on social media within the organization.
You must appear confident so prepare a script or write down an outline so that your “tutorial” is organized.
- What should they put in their bio?
- Do you have a naming convention that they must follow?
- Should they have a business AND personal profile?
- How are they going to handle personal messages on their walls?
- What about privacy?
- How does Facebook know their friends?
- Should they accept all friend invitations?
- Think of more questions…
The objective of teaching them how to start using social networks is to make them feel comfortable. To answer some of their questions, show them that online social networking can be learned and minimize their privacy concerns. By helping them set up their profiles, you will bring them to the exploration stage. It is at the exploration stage that you can start showing them other business pages and how other companies have used social media.
Photo is under the creative common license
Ah…in just four short months, I have hosted 3 different webinars and 11 sessions on social media marketing. As the social media marketer for the company, I find it best to educate the stakeholders (over 300 of them) about social media in order to get buy in for my projects. Thus, the 3 different seminars about social media covering three distinct topics.
Sharing my take aways that you can use when talking to your stakeholders about social marketing:
1. Facebook is scary… if they don’t know what to do. Majority of our stakeholders don’t have Facebook. Majority vowed not to be on Facebook and will never “get it.” Those who have existing Facebook profiles had their kids set it up for them. After teaching them the basics such as adding content, posting photos and making comments, my students are now active Facebook user. I get 5 requests daily from those who attended.
2. Social media is still considered an emerging channel. Many entrepreneurs still don’t understand the value of Facebook marketing. Prepare for rejections and negative feedback when talking about social marketing.
3. Slooooooowly introduce social marketing to late adopters. Don’t be pushy. I didn’t get upset when people I invited didn’t attend my seminars or presentations… but they catch up and watch the recording after hearing about it from others.
4. Set expectations. Tell your stakeholders that social marketing is a relationship-tool first and lead generation tool second. They can’t expect lead in the first few days of their Facebook campaign.
5. Prepare to answer this: what is the difference between Facebook Page and Facebook Profile?
Graphic courtesy of Francesco Marino
My co worker and I hosted a webinar last Thursday to teach her region (and others) about the basics of Social Media Marketing. A simple seminar on setting up social networking profiles. I prepared an outline of what I thought were simple exercises.
But I soon learned that I just made a one big training fallacy – generalization. I didn’t prepare for different set of audiences. My co worker sent out the invitation to everyone with vague description of “How to set up your Facebook account seminar” which I hought it would be a breeze. The result? A lot of surprises, impromptu lessons and mixed reaction. Others found the topic and lessons easy, others thought the seminar was amazing while others struggled to do the exercises.
As a social media marketer for the company, one of my strategies to get buy-in for my projects is to educate the stakeholders because social media is still a vague channel for them. They agree that social media marketing is a promising initiative but it’s difficult for them to visualize my ideas. Educating them about social media marketing, helping them set up their profile to start with, will alleviate some of their fears and confusion about this new emerging channel. So it was crucial that they come out of my seminar comfortable with the social networking.
They came out of the seminar more comfortable with Facebook and yet confused as they had lots of unanswered questions (we had to end the session) – a good sign because questions signify interest. Slow learnings (for lack of better term) asked for more screen shots while the more advanced ones wanted to know about content development.
My biggest take away is this: learn to adapt to different learning styles when giving social media marketing presentation and seminar.
Some of the lessons learned were:
- Adult learners have more complex needs than children so a needs analysis must be conducted before deciding on content
- Hold series of seminars to address those needs
- Most people will feel comfortable participating in social networks and social marketing after you teach them how to use it
- Adults have different learning speed so the educator has to adapt and put them in their respective learning pace as much as possible
- Adults have different learning styles so I created workbooks, slide presentation and host webinars
- When I have to talk about social media to our franchisees and co workers, I have multiple audiences that I have yet to profile (interested but late technology adopters and advanced social media competency come to mind)
My next few posts will be about exploration of these take aways.
Social media marketers often have three monitors. I have two computers - Mac and PC
After four months in my gig at Pillar To Post working with hundreds of franchisees and inspectors, coming to second webinar on social media and talking to hundreds of realtors who are big advocates of social media, my job as social media marketer goes beyond developing an SM plan. There are still a lot of educating, a lot of championing and a lot of hard work.
What is the role of a social media marketer? What is really my role.
1. Voice of the community and customer
As social media marketer for Pillar To Post, I am the voice of our consumers, of our referrers and of influencers in the field. I continue to solicit and digest feedback from the community. I continue to champion and inform myteam of what the community wants, what do our customers want and what information is useful for them.
2. Educator
We live in a time of high-speed technological change. Adoption level varies from one person to another. Interest level is the factor not age. Some people like to try new methods and technology because they are (at least partly) interested. Social media was born in the midst of the chaos of social innovation – online engagement. Those with smart phones and have spent hours on the internet didn’t have a hard time transitioning as they were already comfortable with the medium. Those who were big advocates and have seen great results in traditional marketing were reluctant to change. There was a big “don’t fix if aint broken” mentality.
Many of our franchisees have businesses to run and doesn’t have the time to invest the time reading about new technology and trends. It is my job to teach them, patiently, about best practices in social media.
3. Editor
I will never control the message, I just can’t, but I can influence conversations. I can talk anything under the sun but it is my job to figure out what conversation will help our brand awareness and engagement. I will have to write content that’s relevant to our audience whether on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or blog. Or at times that I’m overwhelmed, it’s my responsibility to contact a guest blogger or writer.
4. Fun watchdog
Social media has to be fun. How many funny videos are in top most watched videos? I would say 8 out of 10. People don’t want to listen to a boring speaker. Yawn. It is my job to cultivate a fun, professional environment in our communities. It’s also my job to create a respectful environment in our communities.
5. Community creator
Whether through Facebook or LinkedIn groups, I should be vigilant in identifying niche topics or communities that are worthy of their/its own spaces.
6. Endless student
It is my responsibility to know my industry and master it. What are the people in the industry talking about? What is their lingo? Are there new laws? I may not be technical but I should have a general knowledge of industry trend. How do I do that? Read magazines, blogs and newspapers.
It’s been a while since I posted something. Gig with Pillar To Post has been very busy educating operators on how they can talk to their clients through social media. Unfortunately, I can not discuss any of our social media marketing strategies and plan.
What I can talk about thought are lessons I’ve learned from my fellow social media marketers, conferences and training. Here they are:
1. Video marketing is here to stay. Your video will not just sit in video sharing sites, it will appear on google too.
2. When selling homes, the first open house happens online.
3. Got a really bad product review? Take a deep breathe, apologize and rectify the situation.
4. Twitter is not just a good source of information as what others studies suggest – it can be a relationship tool. I use it to connect with my offline networks.
5. Offline networking and tweetups can co exist.
6. Live tweeting rocks! It brings your brand to the eyes of thousands of followers monitoring the event you’re covering.
7. Teens are getting bored of Facebook. Ugh.
8. Twitter is not a lead generation channel.
9. You should not take online reputation management lightly. It’s for real. And here to stay.
10. You can be dumb – just not post it online.
There isn’t a lot of talk about forums in Social Media Marketing lately. Books, magazines and online resources rarely talk about forums anymore. So that begs a qusetion, is it still worth spending time on forums as part of a social media marketing strategy? I asked on Twitter.
According to Chris Bogan and Steve Haase, niche-specific forums are still important part of marketing mix.
@jorgemlee: In your opinion, do you think that Forums (not social networks) are dead? I’m talking about niche vBulletin-type forums.
@chrisbrogan: I’m part of a very successful forum right now and launching more. I’llsay I’m bullish 
@stevehaase: totally agree with @chrisbrogan. Having a private, niche-based space to go into nitty-gritty with each other is very valuable.
When I attended RisMedia Leadership Conference’ Social Media Summit in New York, there were many realtors who approached me and were concerned that they didn’t know how social media works. Some of the major concerns were time, didn’t know where to start and content of those social media projects. Needless to say, there is GROWING interest in social media marketing among realtors.
Based on Realtor® Technology Report in 2009:
- There are over 30% of realtors use social media
- 60% of realtors own a website that is at least 5 years old
- Of the ones using social media, 76% use Facebook, 58% use LinkedIn and 25% use activerain(R).
- Among the smar phone users, realtos use Blackberry, Palm Treo and iPhone – iPhone is growing in popularity and now have apps for LinkedIn and Facebook.
- 25% believe that social networking is effective for business and 38% feel that it’s somewhat effective.
- Engagement is still limited however. Only 36% of them use Facebook daily and another 22% use Facebook weekly
And this is striking, though expected… 52% of them say that they receive too much email from vendors.
As social media marketing specialist, I’ve had hours of conversations, read books and watched countless videos to keep me stay current in the ever changing world of PR, online marketing and social media marketing. But I find that PR and social media marketing (and professionals) may have some overlap. So I picked up a PR 2.0 book.
This week, I vowed to finish the book by Brian Solis and Deirde Breakenridge… but I am trying very hard to stay awake.
I’ve mostly been in the client side so perhaps have less understanding of PR than most PR professionals. And yet I find the book, Putting the Public Bak in Public Relations, uhmm… a bit boring. Why? It’s written so textbooky. The book’s target audience are clearly PR professionals – people who know (supposedly) the ins and out of PR and yet it has discussed in length the fundamentals of PR (history, style guide etc). I’m on page 54 and the book has yet to engage me. I’m falling asleep fast. Faster than the caffeine I’m drinking.
But I’m committed to finishing it. So I’m going to write down some of the quotes, you and I may find valuable. Feel free to comment.
Influencers – whether they’re traditional journalists, bloggers or enthusiasts – all seek information in specific formats through their preferred methods of contact.
Bloggers have earned the title of “citizen journalists”
From Erick Schonfeld: Some people question whether TechCrunch is even a blog anymore rather than media site. But that distinction is becoming increasingly meaningless… there is something about blogging – the immediacy, the give and take, and the point of view – that helps it compete with traditional media.
In the realm of Social Media, conversation is king, and only active engagement and listening can lead to meaningful relationships.
Some tips for Facebook Marketers:
1. DND – Do not delete a comment. If someone posted a comment on your wall regarding your service/product, respond public and privately.
2. Turn Haters into Evangeslists – You sold their house or did an inspection. But the owners aren’t happy. What should you do? Makek up for your shortcomings. Thousands of social media marketers have confinced irate customers that they can and will do bette jobs next time. A phone call, a direct message and an apology will solve this.
You can also offer coupons, a gift or additional service. Remember, people complaint want to be “heard”.
3. Privacy – Do you have an open door friending policy? Be wary of your privacy. Names of your children, your street address and other personal information must be kept confidential. As well as information of your clients.
4. Update, update, update – Make sure you update your status. No, your business contacts don’t want to know when you’re washing the dishes. But they would want to know if you saw a client, attended a community event or received a new designation.
5. Ask questions – Do you want to test a product? A promo? Or you have a business-friendly question? Engage your friends with you by using your wall to ask questions. People are generally helpful and will answer your questions.
Of course, google will never stop and embark on social media to directly rival Facebook (or other social networking sites for that matter). What does this mean? Social media marketers will have a new network to study, observe and manage. Currently, I have been advising new social media marketers to focus on Facebook and slowly roll out their strategy on Twitter and LinkedIn. With the vast resources of Google, this adds to the mix of our already complicated, hard-to-track social marketing strategy.
Read more about the “true” rumour on Fast Company’s blog
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