Thought Leadership in Social Media
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I talk a lot about thought leadership in social media. In fact in our Social Media Matrix Stephen Jagger and I label our 5th and highest level engagement “Thought Leadership.” When I talk about social media and thought leadership on my blog, Twitter or live at an event/seminar there’s always a couple of people that moan or whine. They say the word is overused in social media. Funny thing is the term has been around a lot longer than the term “blog” or social media (1994 According to Wikipedia) — it is an integral part of any marketing, community building, or leadership endeavor.
Thought leaders create community, build other leaders, and create unique content that speaks to and helps specific markets. Today’s podcast (direct download here or via iTunes here) discusses thought leadership and it’s importance to marketing, leadership and even your career.
Here’s a SlideShare embed of the model:
As for those that don’t like the term “Thought Leadership” here’s my challenge to you: find me an easy to understand, non-geek or non-tech speak definition that has global appeal and I will gladly use it.
As for the rest of us. Thought leadership is a process of becoming, not an event or clever blog post. Here are a few of my favorite modern day business thought leaders:
- Jeremiah Owyang
- Jay Conrad Levinson
- Arrianna Huffington
- Tim O’Reilly
- Charlene Li
- John C. Maxwell
- Rob Cottingham
- Bruce Philp
Let me know who your favorite thought leaders are.
Social Media for Real Estate – Sociable! Slides
Stephen Jagger and I presented this weekend at the Banff Western Connection on how to get Sociable! and use social media to drive business as a Realtor. Because real estate is a hyper-local marketing game social media has many powerful applications. Here is our presentation:
11 Social Media Tips in 140 Characters or Fewer
I tweet social media tips on a regular basis. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or for those who missed some of my tips this week, here are 11 tips on social media (if you have any to share please post them below):
- Social Media Tip: Focus on what you love and those who love the content you create.
- Social Media Tip: A single tweet may not create a best friend but it’s a doorway to many new relationships.
- Guerrilla Social Media Tip: Nano-marketing is not just about hyper-segmentation – it’s the process of developing intimacy with people.
- Social Media Tip: Social media monitoring isn’t for keeping score it’s for deepening engagement. #scrm
- Social Media Tip: Social media monitoring allows you to have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. #scrm
- Social Media Tip: Engagement is great BUT sustained engagement will maximize ROI.
- Social Media Tip: Being the signal not the noise also means with more attention you will have more critics. It’s a sign of success.
- Social Media Tip: Your blog is for both creating and aggregating content and conversations. It’s part of an ecosystem.
- Social Media Tip: While marketing online creates profits, leadership can create legacy. Think short and long-term.
- Social Media Tip: Mobile and location based tools are growing in importance and effectiveness. Invest in learning about them.
- Social Media Tip: When writing your 2011 business plan see social media as part of the mix – there are applications in most departments.
12 Social Media Tips <140 Characters
- Keep giving and contributing more than the competition. Pay back will be huge.
- Every tweet, blog entry, comment and status update will be saved forever and is permanently part of your brand.
- Before permission to market comes permission to connect. There’s a lot of trust building in between.
- Make it easy for people to find you. While you’re out looking for business there is an entire market looking for you.
- “It’s not about B2B or B2C it’s about person to person marketing in social media” – @jeffbooth.
- Use the back links function in Google to see who is linking to your competitors. Reach out to those connectors.
- Go wide with social media then build strong deep networks by going deep with the phone, Skype, webinars or in-person.
- Twitter search and tools like Twellow.com can dampen the noise down from millions on voices to the exact ones you’re targeting.
- Picking a fight publicly stays on record long after the battle is done. Rarely is it worth it.
- Not getting the results you want? Are you asking for help often enough? It’s about community. Reach out.
- Share and give more than you think is practical… then do it again. It will build positive momentum for your brand.
- When partnering with other social media influencers start by making sure your values and principles are aligned.
12 Social Media Tips under 140 Characters
These are social media tips under 140 characters that I have posted on Twitter over the past week or so. For those of you who may have missed some, I have put them into an archived list here on my blog. Add your own tips and comments in the comments section if you would like. Here’s my 12 social media tips under 140 characters:
- Stay curious and you will stay current.
- Momentum is hard to build and easy to lose. When things start to rock… ride the wave and keep pushing.
- Have a goal or theme and build a monthly calendar around your social media activities
- Crowdsourcing still requires leadership to take ideas and turn them into action. Don’t just create fans, equip leaders.
- Fresh valuable content beats perfect outdated content every time. Use tools that help you publish easy and fast.
- Understand tools like friendfeed, tumblr, and ping.fm. They can help you syndicate your messaging for maximum reach.
- search engine optimization helps people find you. Integrate an SEO plan with your social media plan.
- Have a set of guidelines and a social media training program for your staff to ensure that you maximize results.
- Being transparent has it’s downsides, make sure you can walk your talk. You’re always on stage.
- Evaluate your strategy as if you were looking through your customers eyes. Ask “So What?” a lot
- “There is no failure only feedback” – @fredshadian
- Create spaces (Ning, Buddypress etc.) for communities to form. Creating positive community is great for business.
3 Things You Must Know About Social Media
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I was recently asked to summarize the what marketers must know about social media marketing by Jay Levinson. I was about to answer him when he added a stipulation in, in 3 points, only 3 summarize what marketers must know about social media. I thought I would share with you what I shared with him:
- It’s a conversation – As marketers in the past we have been awarded based upon our ability to craft messages and broadcast to an audience, a niche or a market segment. People no longer want to be talked at. In fact their conversations with each other on Twitter, Facebook, or even the videos they post on YouTube impact and define major brands. As social media marketers we need to get involved in those conversations if we want to effectively brand and market online.
- It’s a listening tool – More than a conversation, social media marketing is about listening. We need to be listening for opportunities to engage with people that are talking about our brand. Social media gives us the opportunity to engage at the instant someone is talking about us (if we’re listening), and have relevant, personal and authentic conversations with our customers. Use tools like Twitter search, Google Alerts, and SocialMention.com to monitor those conversations.
- Social media belongs to everyone, which is good and bad, it forces you to be different to win – As a marketer you no longer have control or a monopoly on a medium. Social media tools are in everyone’s hands. This is great news for anyone who wants to create a brand and generate revenues online. This is also a bad thing, because it creates a lot of noise. You must have a distinctive message, offering and leadership style if you want to get noticed online. To win you must be more engaging, add more value, and be more creative than everyone else if you want to rise above the noise.
You no longer own your brand so get used to it
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
You no longer own your brand. The customer owns your brand. Listen to this podcast and tell me what you think.
To Donate the the Vancouver Food Bank Click here or the image below. Every bit helps!
Blogathon 2009 for Vancouver Food Bank
Linkedin Groups by Richard McLaughlin
A big thank-you to Richard McLaughlin for guest blogging on LinkedIn to help me out with my 24 hour Blogathon I’m doing for charity today. Here’s Richard’s Guest Blog Entry
Linkedin Groups by Richard McLaughlin (@_McLaughlin )
There are many social media groups out there and I have come to the decision that LinkedIn has the best possibility for connecting with people of your niche. There are over 340,000 groups so everyone can be reasonably sure to find at least one group that find your niche. For example, there are over 1000 groups related to social media.
When you when you go to join LinkedIn groups make sure you choose a combination of small niche groups and larger groups. Don’t join a group on firefighting, with the intention of writing about knitting. That may seem like something that goes without saying but there are a lot of people that will join the groups with the most members and post garbage. MLM posts in a technical group. Maybe they are right to try, the numbers are more in their favor. The problem is that many group members ask to have people that make posts like this banned from groups, which can lead you to a site-wide ban.
On the front page of linked in there is a section where you can have questions posted for you to answer. Take advantage of this by answering the questions and remember to include a link back to your site. I have IT questions posted on my LI home page, I answer those there are really related to me. I avoid answering the open questions that do pop up (“what’s better black or white…”) because opinion questions in a forum can be too time consuming.
Once in a group, write a post specifically about the niche that the group covers. I mentioned MLM people posting in inappropriate groups and this example holds true for any group. Do ask questions. If you find a site that has not been listed in the group, then list it. Groups have job openings listed in one section and I have even found a way to get traffic by making useful posts for job hunters based by region.
With over 340,000 groups, the opportunities are close to limitless. By the time you have run through all the existing groups for your niche, you can be pretty sure that someone else will have made another group. And if no one has made a group, then you should consider making one yourself.
To Donate the the Vancouver Food Bank Click here or the image below. Every bit helps!
Blogathon 2009 for Vancouver Food Bank
18 Social Media Tips Under 140 Characters
18 Social Media Tips Under 140 Characters
1. Use http://www.backtype.com/ to search blog comments about you, your blog or a topic.
2. Social media is too new for Gurus. We’re all amateurs! That’s what makes it fun and open.
3. Social Media Phases: Adoption, Population, Pollination, Aggregation, Splintering, Commercializing, and Globalizing.
4. Social media is here to stay and has more relevance and power everyday.
5. Embracing and understanding how to use social media is a core life skill, leadership skill and career building skill.
6. Social media is social. It’s about helping people connect to people using technology, it embodies truly what the internet was intended for.
7. Social media is not just about technology, it’s a new way of leading, thinking, and connecting with other people.
8. Social media belongs to all of us. An ordinary consumer, a front line employee, a political activist in Iran all have access and a voice.
9. You need different messaging for client retention than you do for attraction.
10. Statistics tend to be a history lesson. Growth and human behavior are rarely linear. Listen to customers and staff.
11. Use social listening tools: http://www.collecta.com/ http://www.twitority.com/ http://socialmention.com/ http://www.twazzup.com/
12. Develop a social media policy and set of guidelines to keep your team on track and on message.
13. You can force someone to be social, you can only give them the tools and training.
14. Worry less about selling and more about connecting and rapport.
15. Read Free the Future of a Radical Price before launching your next marketing campaign.
16. Read “Ignore Everybody” by Hugh Macleod if you want to tap into your social media creativity.
17. Spend time each day promoting and contributing to another blogger’s success.
18. What works for you now will only keep working until it is no longer unique. Keep innovating.
To Donate the the Vancouver Food Bank Click here or the image below. Every bit helps!
Blogathon 2009 for Vancouver Food Bank
22 Types of Updates You Can Post on Twitter
Following is an excerpt from Sociable! a book about how social media is turning sales and marketing upside down.
22 Types of Updates You Can Post on Twitter:
- Where you are physically located at that moment.
- A link to a picture of an event you are at (using Twitpic.com)
- A question about a business challenge
- A question about a popular topic in the news
- Share a link to your most recent blog entry
- Share a tip on your area of expertise
- Share a link to a breaking news story
- Retweet someone’s update that your followers would find useful
- Answer someone’s question
- A link to a picture of a social outing (using Twitpic)
- A link to an image of a diagram that would explain a business process or ideas
- A link to an event that you are promoting or that is happening in the community
- A link to a community event of value
- A link to a sale or business promotion that will save people money
- Promote a person who just joined Twitter
- Promote and thank some of your favorite people on twitter
- Thank someone who has linked to your blog or retweeted your updates
- Upload a photo of a sunset or your natural surroundings
- Praise someone for great content they have created.
- Review a restaurant, movie or business in 140 characters or less.
- Share some of you favorite quotes from authors and famous people
- Share a link to a whitepaper or press release
This is blogathon entry #4.
To Donate the the Vancouver Food Bank Click here or the image below. Every bit helps!
Blogathon 2009 for Vancouver Food Bank
Developing a Social Media Calendar and Implementation Plan Podcast
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Last week in our podcast we discussed “Integrating Social Media Into Your Sales and Marketing Process.” Today I would like to talk about what a social media roll-out plan could look like for your company or department. If you’re a lone ranger, don’t worry, this will work for you too. Based upon sections from our book Sociable! here’s a 13 point outline. Listen to the podcast for a full description of these points:
- Agree goals (Buy-in)
- Pick your Platforms
- Assess Resources and Allocate them
- Social Media policy and guidelines
- Listening strategy and tool implementation (includes analytics, alerts and social search)
- Populate and customize build platforms
- Content development and roll-out social media calendar (Think notes in a symphony)
- Train and teach internal contributors
- Recruit or connect with external contributors (Encourage conversation and contribution)
- Train and develop external pro-active contributors
- Marketing and exposure for social media destinations
- Blogger and press outreach
- Spin-off Marketing Stage
Loading…
Speaking and Training
Subscribe in iTunes
Buy Guerrilla Social Media Marketing!
Buy Sociable! Now.
