Somehow I missed that Mashable had declared June 30Â Social Media Day until yesterday. People are celebrating with meetups. I’m celebrating by sitting in a coffee shop working on my enterprise social media book and being distracted by Twitter and Facebook. Seems appropriate. “Writing blog posts is another of my favorite ways to distract myself from writing the book, ironically.”
I’ve spent most of my career in marketing and marketing communications, mostly for technology companies, but with some interesting detours, including one into the music industry. I’ve written everything from radio spots to 40-page technical marketing manuals. I’ve thought a lot about how people and companies communicate, and why those two are usually different.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince business people that it’s okay to talk like human beings. I’ve written and re-written press releases to try to make them sound like the way people talk, only to have the product manager or marketing manager put the buzzwords back in. “If we don’t use them,” they argued, “people will think we don’t know them.”
I’ve wondered for years about the real-world possibility of taking a radical transparency approach to corporate communications. I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few companies, most notably SAS, who really do live the values they profess. What would happen if a company told everybody everything? Not the proprietary details of the products they’re developing or who they’re about to acquire, but the internal debates and discussions that went into tough decisions. What if they really did say, “Whoops. We screwed up”?
What if companies talked to their customers as peers, as equals, as friends? Often the differences between the people on opposite ends of the telephone amount to where they’re sitting and the company name printed on their paychecks. Most of us spend the day talking to other people like us. What if we removed the artificial boundaries, which are almost solely boundaries of perception?
Social media is making all of that happen. It’s helping us see that companies are made up of people, with all the good and bad that entails. It is frightening. It is exhilarating. It is revolutionary. It is not going away. It is good. We will never go back to thinking of companies as gray, faceless edifices that speak with one voice. And hooray for that.
The Mrs: What’s your first name?
The Boy: Conrad
The Mrs: What’s your last name?
The Boy: Thomas
The Mrs: What’s your middle name?
The Boy: Clifford the Big Red Dog
Nothing new to anyone, I’m sure, but my bank just called me at home. I listened because, you know, it’s my bank. Maybe something weird was happening with my account. He thanked me for being a customer, so I knew it wasn’t them calling to tell me a check had bounced or anything. Then he offered to send me $20 worth of coupons in appreciation. Then he offered to enroll me in a program that would… and I said, “No, thanks,” and hung up.
Calling me at home is the LEAST effective way to sell me something, other than perhaps running up to me in the street, tugging my sleeve and shouting, “Hey, mister!” But as soon as I hung up I thought, “Wait, I wonder what that program does?”
From a quick search, it does not appear that my bank has a Facebook fan page. If they did, I would be inclined to join it, because I find that’s a good way to get information from businesses I have interest in, provided they do it well. If my bank used their Facebook page to talk about the service they were offering me in a straightforward way, I might read it. And if I saw that people in my network “liked” that service, that would make me more inclined to sign up for it.
No big revelation, just further evidence that you need to reach your customers where they are in the ways they want to be reached, even if you’re selling something they want.
New Marketing Labs does a great job with their conferences of distilling the essential information into easily understood chunks that you can take home and start, um… chunking with right away. One of the first social media conferences I attended was their Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco, way back in the mist-shrouded days of January 2009. We were so young and eager to learn back then.
So I’m really pleased that I’ll be on the agenda for their New Marketing Experience in Chicago on Sept. 21. It’s a one-day seminar with a great lineup of smart, experienced folks who will give you practical information you can really use to get actual results. And me. But I have funny slides.
Best of all, they’ve given me my own discount code: DBT5. Use that and you’ll get 50 percent off your registration fee.
I wonder if DBT10 would get you in for free?
Don’t try that. That was a joke.
Here’s the list of topics to be covered at the event:
What is New Marketing and how does it affect my business?
Innovative Marketing Programs Using New Media
Internet Marketing and ROI: we all know it is important / now we know how to do it
Sales 2.0: using new marketing tools to change the way your sales team makes sales
We saw a sheriff’s deputy on the way to school this morning. I tried to explain the difference between a sheriff and a police officer to The Boy:
Law enforcement officers who work in towns and cities are called police. If they work outside of towns, in the county “even though towns are actually in the county”, they are called sheriffs, only really they are sheriff’s deputies, and sometimes they are called just deputies. So if someone “calls the sheriff,” the sheriff probably won’t show up, he or she will send a deputy.
The law enforcement agency responsible for highways and interstates is called the Highway Patrol. Their officers are called State Troopers.
job board at SXSWI’ve had a few conversations lately with friends and business acquaintances who expressed an interest in a job involving social media. I found myself giving all of them the same basic advice, so here it is. None of it is new or novel, and I’m not entirely sure I haven’t written this post already, more or less, but I’d rather write it again than search for it.
We just hired someone who has contributed to multiple blogs, created promotional campaigns on Facebook and has a solid understanding of the social media landscape. The competition was fairly stiff and her practical social media experience got her the position.
Oh, did I mention she’s a summer intern? That’s what you’re up against.
This post is not aimed at someone applying to be a community manager at a social media company or a social media marketer at a major brand. I’m talking to people who are hoping to get a marketing or communications position in nearly any company right now. This is what I think you need to be able to answer yes to the question, “Are you active in social media?”
Get right with Google
Google yourself and see what comes up, because that’s what a prospective employer will do. If you’re not appearing on the first page of Google, do some Web searches for things you can do to make that happen. There are plenty out there. Here’s one to get you started.
It’s not essential to have a Gmail account, but 75 percent of the active social media practitioners I know have one. The rest have email at their own domains. That’s what it takes to look clued-in, email wise. And I know I’ve said this before many times, but have a professional-sounding email address and if at all possible, make it your name.
Start a blog
Start a blog on WordPress.com “or a self-hosted WordPress blog if you’re so inclined”. Write as though you are already active in the field. Show your prospective employer that you know how to contribute something of value. Leave him or her thinking, “Damn, I wish this person was writing this on our blog.”
If you’re worried that you’ll be starting a blog from scratch and your interview is in a week, go back and look at other things you’ve written that would be worth posting. When I started the blog that turned into this one back in 2003, I unearthed a slew of long emails I’d written to my friends over the previous year that I thought were funny enough to share. That’s where my first dozen or so posts came from.
And once you have a blog, it becomes the home of your online presence. Content you create there can be promoted on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and it usually doesn’t require anything more than your blog’s RSS feed.
Max out your LinkedIn presence
I assume you’re on LinkedIn, but is your profile 100 percent complete, according to the little LinkedIn progress counter? Ask people for recommendations. If you’re just graduating, ask professors for recommendations now. Take advantage of the things LinkedIn lets you include, like an RSS feed of your blog. Personally, I don’t post my tweets to LinkedIn, but that’s my preference. As a hiring manager, I wouldn’t hold it against you. In fact, I’d see it as evidence that you had spent some time learning the tool.
Also, what does your LinkedIn Summary say about you? It should give a prospective employer a clear idea of who you are, what you’re looking for and what you can offer. It may be the first thing your next employer ever reads about you.
Wash your Facebook face
I won’t spend too much time here becoming the one billionth person to warn you that prospective employers will look for you on Facebook. But they will. Be sure you know what’s there, how the privacy controls work and what people will see. Better yet, turn your Facebook presence into something you hope the hiring manager will see. Remember, I’m talking here about getting a job where social media is part of your duties. Lots of people choose not to mix their personal and professional lives on Facebook, but not so many who do social media for a living.
Tidy up your Twitter
Again, I’m assuming you’re on Twitter. Do you have a presentable photo, a bio that says who you are and a link to a site where we can learn more about you? Is your Twitter handle your name?
It would be great if you have an established following on Twitter, but I won’t hold a low follower count against anybody if their account shows a sincere effort to use Twitter to engage and learn. But if you’re only following ten people and they’re all celebrities, that will tell me right away you’re not using Twitter professionally and I’ll have to teach you.
Those are what I consider the basic requirements, at least right now, in June of 2010. Depending on where you are and what kinds of jobs you’re applying for, that might not be enough. If you have an active YouTube channel and have shot and edited some videos, that’ll be a big plus. If you’re sharing on sites like Delicious, even better. If we can have an intelligent conversation about the potential B2B value of Foursquare, well, then maybe you can have my job.
Somehow I missed that Mashable had declared June 30Â Social Media Day until yesterday. People are celebrating with meetups. I’m celebrating by sitting in a coffee shop working on my enterprise social media book and being distracted by Twitter and Facebook. Seems appropriate. “Writing blog posts is another of my favorite ways to distract myself from writing the book, ironically.”
