I got a lot of positive comments on my Four Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media. It reminded me that people are at all different levels of knowledge and interest in social media. When you spend all day thinking about it and using it, it’s easy to forget that lots of people still want the basics.
So, here are some basic steps for getting started on Twitter:
What Twitter is good for
• Many of the advantages of blogging in a short, quick format.
• You can support your other communications channels and activities by promoting them on Twitter.
• Hashtags allow you to gain a presence in and around events, conferences and issues.
• Twitter search can show you who’s talking about what.
• It’s still a relatively small community in many professions, allowing you to make connections.
What Twitter is not good for
• Twitter is a tool, not a strategy.
• You have to be interesting to get followers; it’s not the place for heavy-handed sales pitches.
• It’s a firehose, and it’s getting worse. You need filtering tools to find the value (TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Hootsuite).
Getting started on Twitter
• Create an account, using your real name, and set up your profile.
• Use the search function to find people to follow in your industry, and follow who they’re following.
• Get to know the standards of the community and the way people use it.
• Think about all the useful and interesting information you encounter every day.
• Start contributing.
Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog
Tagged as:
B2B,
enterprise,
marketing,
tweets,
twitter 101
Recently I speculated about the future audience I’ll be talking with in 20 years. Despite being someone who thinks on a daily basis about communicating as a brand, I think that mindset is on the way out. I don’t mean we shouldn’t have brand standards and think about how our communications reflect on our company, or try to have consistent messages and useful content. I mean that in 20 years, the idea of a company will be completely different.
My father’s generation responded well to the idea of a corporate entity. And no wonder; the military/industrial complex had just defeated the Nazis. What was good for General Motors really was good for America. They still firmly believed you could work for a corporation your entire life and the corporation would take care of you. My generation knows that ideal is nearly gone. My son’s generation will probably see it as quaint as dial phones.
Each succeeding generation has responded differently to the idea of corporate perfection. Will future generations respond better to brands, or to people? At the Society for New Communications Research’s NewComm Forum, Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu from Clemson gave us the results of her survey of college students and how they relate with brands on Facebook. The gist: “Being friended by a corporation is creepy.”
People these days react poorly to “Mistakes were made” and positively to “We screwed up.” Why? Because we can relate to other people screwing up, because we’ve all screwed up. And we can forgive that. Maybe we expect companies to be perfect, but we expect people to be human.
Todays kids won’t expect everything to be buttoned down and perfect. The cracks and fissures won’t put them off. It’s the cracks and fissures that will convince them we are real people they can trust.
Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog
Tagged as:
communications,
enterprise,
organization man,
social media,
society for new communications research
