One of my favourite workshops to deliver is one I call “Making the Most of Social Media”; especially if I get the chance to convert someone from the “I don’t care what people had for breakfast” mindset to one where they race home to get started. Before I get to the ‘how-to’s, the first task is to convince the audience of the benefits of engaging in social media, and to clarify for the people who say they ‘know they should be doing it’, why exactly that is. This post outlines the reasons I believe you should be using social media to help achieve your goals – whether they be social, business-related or simply for the greater good – along with some interesting examples to get you thinking.
I considered splitting this introductory post into the three different areas I work in - life coaching, business coaching and arts coaching. But I don’t believe that the connections we make with people should necessarily be categorised by different areas of our lives – you never know how someone you know in your social life could be instrumental in your professional career, or you in theirs – and of course professional contacts often become good friends. I also fervently believe in applying some business strategies to your private life and hobbies, or to charities and causes you support, and bringing the ‘play’ element to your work; the boundaries are becoming ever-more blurred. At the end of the day, life is all about people.
So, first things first: What is Social Media?
Social media generally refers to online tools and technologies that are used to broadcast information and enable discussion and social interaction. Social networking is the use of those tools to engage directly with people online – at least, initially online. So why as an individual, career-builder, business owner, artist, charity member, celebrity, spokesperson, passionate advocate, should you be engaging in social media?
12 Reasons for Engaging in Social Media – Whoever You Are
1. Strengthening existing social relationships
I love hanging out with friends. I love meeting them for coffee, or preferably lunch (usually here) – actually, preferably a lengthy dinner accompanied by fine wine, perhaps followed by cocktails. I love going to gigs with friends (preferably here), going to the cinema with them, chilling out on a beach or tramping up the side of a mountain with them. I like to see their faces when I’m talking to them, high five them (ironically, of course) when they make me snort with laughter, and hug them goodbye.
But there just aren’t enough hours in the week to do see as many of my legendary friends as often as I’d like – and some of them are just too far away to see often. Social media helps bridge the geographical distance, or tide me over ’til I next see them. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and personal blogs can all be used to keep in touch with friends, share photos, keep abreast of changes in their lives – big or small – and keep the lines of communication open until you next see them, or get a good long catch-up on the phone. One of the big criticisms I hear about social networking is that it encourages people to be anti-social – I say don’t blame the tools, it’s all about how you use ‘em.
2. Strengthening existing professional relationships
Social media can be used to deepen your professional relationship with employees, employers, clients, colleagues and associates by sharing something about your personality, interests, hobbies etc. How far you want to take this is up to you – there are many conflicting ‘netiquette’ tips on the subject. The most important thing is to never put anything online that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your local paper. Then think about what image you want to portray to the various groups of people you interact with. LinkedIn is a site specifically built for professional networking and as such is a good place to upload professional information about yourself that includes something of your personality/interests. For other sites, if you get an invite/add request from a work contact and don’t feel comfortable accepting, a polite way to decline could be to say “Thanks for the invite; I only use [Facebook, eg] to keep in touch with family etc., but here’s my profile on LinkedIn if you’d like to connect there.” When you follow someone on Twitter, they get notified, but there’s no automatic request made for them to follow you back (they might be using an auto-follow feature but that’s an optional). For Facebook, you can group your Facebook friends into different lists with different privacy settings – that way you can control how much of your personal information/interactions work colleagues and other groups can see.
3. Creating new relationships
There was a time in my life, hard as it is for me to believe, looking back, that I felt that my social circles were diminishing rather than increasing. I have some excellent friends from that time, but I wasn’t often meeting new people or having new experiences; being stuck in a rut in life at that time. More on that in another post, perhaps. These days, I’m extremely grateful for the sheer number and variety of amazing human beings in my life. (I’m a huge Nick Cave fan, but I wholeheartedly disagree with him on this point. People are class.) And a good few of these relationships began with, and/or were accelerated by, an online connection. Social networking is a very powerful way to reach new clients, find new employers, create associations with people, source suppliers, find peers to share experience with or just make new friends with similar interests/passions. You can make an initial connection to someone on Twitter, say, or in special-interest forums, that can be followed up with face-to-face conversations (or a video call) to discuss ideas and opportunities – and having an online profile that shares a bit of information about you can help to start creating a bond, since you can see what shared interests and commonalities you have, as well as interesting differences. Whether you’ve moved to a new location or are just looking to widen or social or professional circles, it’s easier than ever to find and meet like-minded souls.
4. Information sharing/best practice
One of the most commonly-trotted-out criticisms of Twitter and other sites is the old “I don’t care what someone’s had for breakfast” line I mentioned earlier. Now if someone’s tweeting about a great breakfast experience in a local cafe, maybe adding a photo and geotagging so I know where it is, I’m delighted, because I can go try it out for myself. I also like that the cafe’s getting well-earned publicity for doing things well. Someone posting that they’ve just had a bowl of bran flakes is, of course, less interesting or useful – but the point is: Twitter and these other sites are just the media, not the message. (If someone walked up to a podium with a microphone and bored me with what they’re saying, should I blame the microphone?) You can easily unfollow someone on Twitter if you’re just getting a run down of someone’s dietary habits, and seek out more interesting Tweeters. (You can also hide a person’s – or an annoying application’s – updates from your Facebook homepage feed, for that matter; hover top right of the post and a ‘hide’ button will appear.)
Lots of people are using social media to spread excellent ideas, best practice case studies, and links they find useful or interesting. A stellar example is the fantastic TED, who share amazing talks for free via a great website, blog and YouTube channel, where you can watch anything from a talk on crow vending machines to a debate on nuclear energy. Social media platforms offer a quick and easy way to find and pass on valuable information, contribute to constructive discussions and share great ideas. Not least in times of emergency, to wit: the Haiti earthquake (in particular, this story of a man claiming an iPhone app saved his life) or volcanic ash disruptions, to name but a couple of examples.
5. Research
Social networks can be used to research latest trends, get real-time information and find out what your existing and potential customers, fans, employers, associates are talking about. You can, for example, monitor trending topics on Twitter (with charts and explanations available at whatthetrend.com), creating and posting links to polls and online surveys, asking general questions of your followers/friends and direct questions of specialist contacts. (For free online surveys, see www.surveymonkey.com or http://www.zoomerang.com.) You can seek out reviews/comparisons, how-to guides and prevailing attitudes about topics of interest, through a mixture of traditional search engine research and using your social networks to ask for people’s opinion on what you find. Turning your secondary research into primary research, in effect. In any case, social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Hitwise.
6. Crowd-sourcing and audience participation
Using online networks to gather information from people is just one example of crowd-sourcing, a process whereby large numbers of disparate people are asked to provide input – in the form of ideas, information, content, collaboration or even funding. Of course, there’s no need to wait to be ’sourced’ – people are going ahead and creating content anyway, and savvy organisations know how to engage with that and make the most of it. Terms such as user-generated content, user-created-content, fan-generated content, consumer-generated media, citizen journalism all apply to this new reality whereby people can create and upload and spread their own content without the need for ‘traditional’ channels of broadcast.
http://www.kiva.org sources investors for projects in the developing world, in a fantastic example of how to leverage social media for social good. The site includes guidelines for teaming up with other investors and making your money go further, and a Facebook plug-in helps raise visibility.
Pioneers of the online band-to-fan connection Nine Inch Nails turned to crowd-sourcing to create a DVD package from their 2008 tour. Making the raw footage from the tour available for download, they invited fans to edit it into their own package – one group spent a year on a documentary which you can now download for free (find out how here). Aside from the tangible output of the video itself, Nine Inch Nails also increased fan loyalty to the band and further strengthened the sense of community amongst them and their fans.
E-retailer Yoox and British style magazine i-D have joined forces to cross-promote each other through a competition – with a Facebook application – to find new stylists. Both companies get to attract new customers, both online and offline. (And they could take it even further by spreading to/integrating with platforms other than Facebook.)
Sticking with fashion, Urban Outfitters have a Flickr pool where customers can upload pictures of themselves sporting the latest UO clobber – customers get to see themselves in the galleries and UO gets a load of free images of their stock, as well as fostering that notion amongst customers that they’re part of a family or group.
7. Feedback – invited and passive
Social networking is a great way to get feedback on your activities – whether that’s as an individual (“does my new haircut/colour suit me?”), a business (“how are we doing? What would you like us to offer you?”), a musician or artist (“which of these works should I include on my next album/in my next exhibition?”) or any organisation wishing to improve. There are two main types of feedback – feedback that is asked for, as in the above examples, or passive feedback, where people are talking about you indirectly. You want to be both driving feedback by asking for people’s input and monitoring and (usually*) responding to the passive feedback – particularly if it’s negative. That negative feedback can be useful to you, and you can at the least show that you care about what people’s experience of your product/service, brand etc. is, and that you want to improve it.
Boeing hit the press recently when they came across some negative feedback about their professional conduct with a very particular customer – and managed to turn the situation round.
*Trolling or flaming are words used to describe unwarranted abuse in online forums/on blog comments etc – usually best not to dignify with a response. Unless of course you’re a comedian wanting to showcase your deft handling of hecklers.
8. Broadcasting
One great benefit of social media is the power of broadcast – you can have your own radio show, podcast, tv show or online book, or even live stream events as they happen. Whether you’re trying to build a show-reel, disseminate information about your business or industry, or whether you’re part of a governmental/policy research body, news team or social cause, you can use social media to get necessary information and galvanizing ideas out there to the masses. You may just want to use social media for one-way information flows – eg a Twitter feed where you simply post items but where you don’t engage in 2-way conversation, or a blog or Facebook page which doesn’t allow comments. As noted above, the tools are all there and you’ve many choices in how to use them.
9. Increasing visibility
Whether you’re trying to promote your business, build a professional or personal brand or raise awareness of a particular issue or cause; social media tools help you and your message get noticed by many more people than you could reach without it. Blogging, micro-blogging (which is what Twitter is, due to its 140-character post limit), starting discussions on LinkedIn, podcasting, vodcasting, commenting on blogs/in forums – all of this is powerful stuff for raising visibility, and the trick is to make it easy for people to share what you’ve created. ‘Buttons’ for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc. all help people share in an instant the stuff you’ve lovingly made. (Do an online search for free button packs and install, or have your web designer do it for you.) Your social media activities can greatly help you move up the ranks on search engine results page. I don’t pay for advertising, yet Soul Ambition is currently the first non-paid result for ‘life coach Northern Ireland’ on Google. Don’t spend lots of time (or money) on an ‘SEO-friendly’ site and then disappear on rankings because of a lack of/minimal social media presence.
One particular aspect of interest here is viral marketing, which I find so interesting (and which so many people ask me about) that I’ve devoted the next item to it:
10. Going viral
When you hear about viral marketing your hand might instinctively reach for the tissues – but the ‘viral’ refers to how quickly an idea – or an advertisement – can spread. Social networks allow ideas to spread amazingly quickly – and this can either be good or bad for your business or cause. What you want is for content you’ve created to catch people’s imaginations so well that they spread it to all the people in their networks, and so on.
A recent [June 10th 2010] Visible Measures chart of the top 10 viral ad campaigns featured 10 major brands, with the top video reaching just over 3 million people, by their measures. I’m going to ignore those big brands tho’ and share the example of 27-year-old single mother Lauren Luke, who hit the spotlight when her home-made YouTube tutorials showing how to apply make-up became an internet smash – leading to lucrative ad deals, a book and more ideas in the pipeline. Read more here. (See that friend who’s been filming stuff since they were a teenager? Take them to lunch.)
One really clever viral I watched recently was from blender company BlendTec, who have a very popular ‘Will it Blend?’ channel on YouTube. They recently gave away a blender with an iPad – or, with the blended remains of an iPad; your choice! As they say in the video, they’re well aware of the polarised attitude to the most-talked-about product of the moment – and they’ve tapped into that most cleverly indeed:
What current trend can you tap into?
11. Not being left behind
Social media is not going to go away any time soon. Individual sites may come and go, but we’re in a digital age and it makes sense to make the most of the opportunities available – whether that’s for your personal life, causes you believe in, your career, your business or whatever. If you’re seeking a job, rest assured some of your competitors for it will have well-constructed LinkedIn profiles and be using social media to research and connect with potential employers. If you own a business/are self-employed, chances are your competitors are tweeting, uploading how-to videos to YouTube, engaging people through a business page, hiring people through online sites and keeping abreast of industry trends through social media. If you’re an artist, be assured other artists are using Twitter and other online means to connect with true fans, drive people to their sites and buy their work. And if you represent a charity or have a strong cause you believe in, you are competing for support or, simply, airtime with other charities and causes, who may be using social media to showcase their work and compensate for declining returns from traditional fundraising campaigns.
This digital age does of course bring massive challenges in terms of privacy and security, but these differ from product to product and there’s a wealth of constantly-updated information online offering guidance – the search engines are your friend! You can adjust privacy settings and set yourself rules for which sorts of contacts you engage with on which platform – but shouldn’t you be engaging?
12. Sharing the love!
Finally, one of the nicest ways to use social media is for publicly thanking or praising a friend, contact or business (in a heartfelt way now! No fawning…), sharing a happy story or a great piece of art or music, or just exclaiming joy at the wondrousness of life. Gandhi once said “be the change you want to see in the world”. Maybe one of the changes you’d like is to see more good news instead of bad news, more nice things than bad things being said about people, or more optimistic opinions instead of pessimistic ones. So why not be an online ray of sunshine yourself? When you get lovely messages back in reply, the rosy glow only increases. Ahh…
On that note, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite viral videos from old-brand-seemingly-undergoing-a-makeover, Old Spice: May it brighten your day every time you watch it.
PS Feel free to connect with me via:
My LinkedIn profile
My Twitter feed
My musician page
My YouTube channel
