LinkedIn Archives - Page 2 of 2

Nov 29 2010

Objectives: Your Social Time Needs Them

What Business Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

Clarity around objectives can make your “social” time much more palatable. Seriously: if the boss knows why you need to do this – or if YOU are the boss and you know why you need to do this – you can better justify the hours spent blogging, tweeting or updating the world on Facebook.

So how DO you set objectives? And can those objectives be purely social?

Some thoughts from here…

1. Awareness – good place to start. But knowing where you want to increase awareness is an even better place to start. Local? Hyper-local? Industry-focused?

We’ve met folks who said, simply, where they are right now is “eyeball acquisition.” Some tweets on a regular schedule, a hundred Facebook “likes” so they have an audience to speak to. Actually, not a bad objective.

2. Measuring can be a soft science. The obsession to measure everything – the obsession with the word “metrics” – has taken a lot of the “social” out of social media.

We made a concerted effort beginning October 1 at Area 224 HQ to blog regularly. By regularly, we said “once a day during the week, give or take.” We missed a few days, we double-posted a couple other days. But the result was a traffic spike – but also an awareness spike. In that we got calls, we got emails, and the inbound marketing machine was, well, working.

3. You work for the boss. If you’re inside Corporate America somewhere, you need to find out who that boss is. You might be in corporate communications, but if it’s the CEO who gets to be the social face of the enterprise, then your objectives are gonna be different.

And you may have to have a heart-to-heart talk with your actual boss: executive positioning and industry thought leadership have just become your objectives as a team.

4. Being social can be an objective. Reconnecting with friends, old classmates, old colleagues – strengthening your actual social network – this is a great use of time. And you can be up front about it to the boss: “having a better LinkedIn network helps us showcase our organization’s expertise, and opens us all up to more business opportunities.”

Setting social objectives need not be totally stressful. Start small and ask the right questions.

Nov 09 2010

Insert Social Media Here

Thanks, simplesbm.com

It is that simple. Right?

Love to think back to that time two years ago when Area 224 was just getting rolling as a marketing consultancy. Back when we were having tons of meetings with tons of businesses and trying to find out what was on everyone’s minds.

The everyone we met with on this particular day was the Chief of Sales for a B2B Concern. (Again, protecting the innocent here.)

This particular person (may have been a man, may have been a woman; protecting the innocent) wanted to buy a “solution.” “Viral marketing,” said s/he, “will solve our problems.”

And…what are those particular problems?

The long silence was deafening.

Seems the CEO had seen a video on YouTube and thought “we should do that.”

Seriously.

The knee-jerk response, two years later, from the C-suite, seems to be “Social Media will solve our problems.”

This possibly brings about the opportunity for us to help you – or for another top-notch marketing consultancy to help you. BUT not before you figure out what the problems are.

What business problem are you attempting to solve?

Dave from Area 224 used to work for a very smart guy who abhorred busy work. And, in the “pre-social media epoch” (right before the YouTube era), he’d ask the above question all the time. Saved us a lot of busy work, but also saved the organization a lot of wasted effort on things that just didn’t make strategic sense.

Your job – as a marketing executive, as a C-suite aspirant, as the guy or gal who needs to translate all this stuff for the bosses (or for yourselves if you’re one of the bosses) – is to ask these questions first. And here’s a little how-to guide.

Why are we doing this? Doesn’t quite matter what the “this” is – could be a video campaign, could be getting the boss on Twitter, could be blogging. The objectives for each could be radically different. You want a video so the CEO can show how passionate s/he is about the business so that your startup can raise its next round of capital. You need to Tweet because it’s the most laser-focused way to reach the 15 influencers you have targeted for relationship building. Your blog has to be launched because you have a network of people who can write insanely well and you want to be the centerpiece of a budding community.

What will happen if we don’t do this? Seriously – you need to think about the alternatives. You may even have to negotiate with your bosses.

Roger Fisher and William Ury wrote a best-seller called “Getting to Yes,” and they coined the term “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement,” or “BATNA.” Consider the BATNA in your social media planning.

If we don’t get social with our marketing – will our competitors do that? If our competitors do that, will they be able to effectively tell the story that we can tell better? Will they win market share if they beat us to the market?

It might be likely that your competitors are NOT in the position to win lots of eyeballs and market share. It might even be likely that, while they focus on “social,” your focus on product excellence, or distribution channels, or fine-tuning your message could be the best thing for your business.

Upshot: Insert Social Media Here at your own peril – and not without some serious thinking and planning first.

Oct 20 2010

Creating a Social Media Strategy – Webinar on October 28

We’re excited about a webinar we’re having in another week…

The “strategy” thing can be tricky – and it’s not as easy as just saying “let’s get onto social media because everyone else is.”

SO that’s why we’re doing a webinar next week, on the 28th to be exact. More info at this link – http://socialstrategy.eventbrite.com – and you can sign up by clicking this nifty button. See you there!

May 19 2010

How to Make LinkedIn Work for You in 20 Minutes or Less

I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with LinkedIn.

Friendly Faceless LinkedIn Logo Guy

There are days when I think it’s the most awesome thing ever. Those days are rare, though: most often, I find it to be the 5th Beatle. An afterthought in my social media marketing time. It doesn’t have to be that way – and, for you, here are the 20 minutes you should invest to make it suck less.

Set the Egg Timer to 20 Minutes. And…

5 Minutes: Answers. Go there, now. (You will have to go where it says “More” on the navigation bar.) Look for something interesting that has been asked and answer it with your expertise. Seriously: you don’t have to be right. You just have to be there.

Be sure to “Browse” the categories on the right hand side to see if anything strikes your fancy — imagine your ideal prospect and think about what they want to know about. Niche, baby, niche.

5 Minutes: Check your contacts. Pick a couple, reach back out to them to say hi. No reason, other than checking in and saying hi.

What is currently wrong with LinkedIn? It’s not SOCIAL. It’s networking, but it’s not SOCIAL NETWORKING. And, other than craptastic “hey recommend me” lame-ohs who do this for SEO purposes, it’s not really SOCIAL MEDIA.

1 Minute: Get off your soap box.

8 Minutes: Prune. That’s right, get rid of those who you cannot see a reason for having connected with. I’m serious: if you don’t know why you connected with them, and you cannot help them, exit stage left and don’t look back.

Their name should spark a memory. “Hey, it’s that guy in Melbourne who does tech recruiting.” Or, “it’s that woman who graduated from my alma mater and was looking for a job last year.” Keep ’em.

1 Minute: Recommend someone. Look at your list of contacts. Don’t over-recommend. But do the unsolicited recommendation.

Beep Beep. Timer’s Up.

BTW, have we connected yet?

Dave on LinkedIn.

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