The Social Orgs Blog

7 Things to Think About When Beginning to Use Social Media with Your Employees

Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

These are ways to start using social media with your employees when you do not have a clear plan:

  1. Say its’s as a “pilot” and you are experimenting to test the effectiveness of social media
  2. Develop a “lite” social media policy to say it’s OK for employees to participate and determine what your guidelines are going to be
  3. Make sure the goals are clear – awareness and branding of company, creation of a “social media” personality, information gathering, etc.
  4. Communicate a total time limit for involvement during the day – for instance, 1/2 hour a day is OK
  5. Analyze rough results if not a formal program or no official monitoring program or system – new friends, deeper realtionships, location of resources – conferences, white papers, etc.
  6. If “moving the needle” and people making friends, expanding relationships and finding new connections keep having them do the program. 
  7. Decide relative value and  how to continue, keep time involved the same, increase time, decrease time, etc.  Making “baby steps” in relationships are fine and part of the overall process of social media. Be patient and reward participation.

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Google Now Indexing Tweets – What does that mean?

Monday, November 9th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

The key to a solid social media program is that much of the information posted by the community manager or individual gets picked up by the search engines.

There are a number of things that influence organic search engine positioning. With this recent announcement, “tweets” on Twitter has become an even more important tool to increase the impact of the use of Twitter. more - Click Z - http://bit.ly/3ktEtE

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Linkedin Tip – How to send an “inmail” to anyone without having to sign up for premium services (ssshhh, don’t tell Linkedin) and without knowing their e-mail address?

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Posted in Linkedin

You can send an  “inmail” to anyone in Linkedin without bothering to go “through channels” (your other 2nd and 3d degree connections).  Also this tip is good if you  have run out of the alloted “inmails”.   Check out the profile of the person you’re interested in.  Look at the groups they belong to.  Join one of those groups.  Then you can send an inmail to them without a hassle.

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Wave Good-bye to e-mail..

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

Why waste your time on e-mail? Now, you can be in another place, visiting or working and people will know your there by your status in social media. Because of social media, you can communicate a more personalized message to someone with exactly what you want to tell them (besides your location and what you are doing) without having to “catch up”. So social media with all of its various intense frequent communications also allows you to tell very important, targeted messages without any preliminaries or all of the extra “fluff”.

According to Nielson, in August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

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Everything Up for Grabs with Google Sidewiki

Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

Google has just released a tool that can put on your Google Toolbar that allows you to comment on any website and see the comments of everybody else.  This is going to create a “huge” response from website owners (mostly large companies) that are not liked very well for their custom service.

Google has an algorithm that determines priorities for the order of comments that are shown and theoretically filters out “nasty comments. I could see the health insurers getting “slammed” for their practices in the first bout of comments.  Also cell phone companies, utilities, etc. have not been open to much public feedback.  This is really a major step in social media that takes public collaboration and opinion to the next level.

Put this on your Google toolbar and comment away.  If the site has an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate this feature won’t work.  In order to protect your site, you can put on a SSL certificate which you can obtain from Go Daddy.

See more about the history of group annotation functions at http://www.clickz.com/3635103

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How The Internet Sees You

Monday, August 24th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

Because everybody is using social media today, I have often thought that there will be two major types of databases people will use in the future; one will be the normal Google type that will find articles and information as it does now and another type of database that only mines your personal information collected from social media.

Well, I just saw “Personas” from MIT Media Lab which basically outlines what the Internet has on you.

You just enter in your name and it comes up with a profile of the type of information it can find about you. Using an algorithm based on natural language, it puts together a chart that shows your identity in terms of “online”, “books”, “legal”. “social”, “committees”, “education”, “news”, etc.

After you see your chart, you’ll want to know where it got your information from to make those conclusions – but you won’t see that.

So, it’s just a summary and “some” information, and you’ll probably see categories that aren’t accurate. However, it’s a good attempt at showing what you can expect to see about yourself in the future.

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Most Useful Social Media for Business

Monday, August 17th, 2009
Posted in Facebook, Linkedin, twitter

“More time is now spent on social networking than on e-mail…..The rapidly evolving world of social networks and blogs has officially grown up. Last year (2008), the largest increase in visitors to such ‘member communities’ came from those ages 35-49,” according to a new report from The Nielsen Co. One of the most valuable aspects of social media for business is the ability to learn more about our business partners, clients, and prospects from a “personal” perspective.  After all, social networking is all about building “relationships.”  Just as early CRM programs encouraged us to capture things like clients’ favorite sports, theatre interests, family info, etc., those personal elements are now freely available and readily broadcast.  This gives us the chance to learn more about the people we are connecting with and therefore enables us to forge closer bonds by knowing and using this information.

Which Programs Are the Most Useful for Business?

The following are the most used and important social media programs for business:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read each other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Why is it important?

  • Communicate information about the company via a profile along with capability of using logo in each individual message (Tweet)
  • Send messages instantaneously about new product development, events, and any significant news within the company
  • Establish two way communication with any clients or customers or the general public in a new way

The purpose of Linkedin is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.

What can it do?

  • Set up organizational profile to establish company presence
  • Create personal profile to establish identity
  • Industry issues can be discussed to gain recognition and involvement of individual company represented
  • Can join related groups to establish and grow relationships and find new business contacts

In Facebook, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.  Company and organizational profiles can also be established.

Why use it?

  • Increases awareness of companies and individuals
  • Can create company profile to establish organizational presence
  • Communicate with individuals and company at all levels
  • Creates a place to become fans of the company and can get targeted messages

How Does This Really Work?

All of these social media give you the possibility to establish you as a person, your “personal” brand.  Once people are comfortable with you and how you relate, you can continue with your personal brand and infuse your company’s brand.  Once your “company” brand is established, the mix of your brand and the companies will be stronger than either one separately.  Then you’ll be able to influence your immediate social and professional network and then reach and adventure out into the broader world of social media and increase your impact in the market place.

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Social Orgs Website Premiere

Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

Just finished this web site. Thanks to all my friends and associates for their input. Especially thanks to Neal Chester at iKreator Web Design for being one of the best, most talented designers I have worked with because he demonstrated the ability to translate concepts into great designs.

It was a labor of love and a challenge to communicate in just the right way with the correct words and have those translated into great designs.  I’ve worked with lots of graphic designers in all possible media at all different levels and Neal has exceeded all of the expectations I had.

On another note, we will be shooting the video for this site on Tuesday, July 14 in Brighton, MI.  I’ll give you a quick hint of the plot – A manager is disgusted with his social media team and brings them all in to get a “dressing down” (you will see why I used that particular word) because they don’t coordinate with each other.  His team consists of Twitter, Blogger, Linkedin, YouTube and Facebook.  Stay tuned to this site to see the final edited version of the production.

We are also working on an e-book about social media planning which will be free and available on this site without having to leave your contact information.

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Too Much Information?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Posted in Uncategorized

Blackberries and iPhones are in use everywhere we go.  We can’t drive in a car without making a cell phone call or texting.  Will we no longer be able to go to a tropical island that has no cell towers and no electricity without feeling like we are being cheated of our important amenities?

Endless data keeps going back and forth among us – Google returns 2.92 million results in .37 of a second.

Do we have time to use more words than we use on a “tweet” in a face-to-face conversation?

The answer is we have learned how to adapt.  We know how to pick and choose among all of the messages bombarding us and other people mostly know how to filter and select messages coming from us (that’s not always a pleasant thing).  We can go with our society stimulated ADD or pay attention and focus on what we think is important.  Can we actually be “strong enough” to determine what combination of message paths we should pursue without being swayed by the strongest, loudest, most demanding message?

If we stop for a moment (do yoga, meditate, slow down or just plain stop) we can actually get a chance to integrate all of the messages and thoughts pinging around us and determine how we should navigate so we can get our information “just right” like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears.  We need to go with the “Goldilocks Principle” and find the combination and messages and media that’s “just right” for us.

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