by Caroline Leach | Nov 12, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
Why doesn’t everyone have a social media strategy for their career?
There are two main reasons: not seeing the value and not having the time.
The value proposition has a simple answer. Our professional reputation increasingly influences how we get jobs, advance in our careers and navigate transitions.
The time equation is more difficult. We each have 24 hours in days that seem to get busier by the second. How can we make the most of our limited time to build our careers through social media?
Start by thinking about what you’ve done professionally over the last month.
Have you –
- Spoken at an event
- Attended a conference
- Taken a course, online or in person
- Traveled for a work meeting or event
- Joined a professional or trade group and attended a meeting
- Received an award for your work
- Completed a key project that can be shared in public
- Participated in a company-sponsored charitable event
- Seen an engaging video about your company or industry
- Found a valuable article about your company or industry
- Read a thought-provoking book about business or your industry
- Come across an interesting post by a colleague or your company
Why consider these activities?
VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk identified a simple and powerful strategy in his post, “Document, don’t create: creating content that builds your personal brand.”
Documenting is creating content, he says. It’s simply sharing your career journey and what you’re doing every day. And it’s easy to do because you’re “just being yourself.”
To look into the future of this documenting trend, check out the New York Times article Keeping Up, on Camera, Is No Longer Just for the Kardashians.
In everything you do professionally today, start by asking yourself if it can be shared publicly in social media. Make sure to never, ever share non-public and/or competitively sensitive information in social media.
When in doubt, err on the side of caution and don’t share. Even if you think something is okay to share in public, check that official company sources have shared the information publicly, or ask your supervisor for confirmation.
Career blogger Penelope Trunk said it well in her online course Reach Your Goals by Blogging. “Just don’t write anything near where your ‘security clearance’ goes,” she advised. While most people don’t have security clearances, this is an apt analogy to keep confidential information confidential. Don’t share it.
Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, then focus on what you’re doing, what’s interesting about it and why it could be valuable to your network.
What specifically in the course of your day, your week and your month could you share that builds the career brand you want to be known for?
Some of my colleagues do this really well. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Here are just a few.
TeNita Ballard. TeNita is an enthusiastic champion of diversity and inclusion. She shares the events she attends, the people she meets and what she learns through posts in Instagram, Facebook and more.
John Starkweather. John is a big advocate for business customers. He shared his experience at the company’s recent tech conference The Summit in LinkedIn and Twitter. His posts make you feel like you were there.
Jennifer Van Buskirk. Jennifer leads the east region of the company. She shares leadership lessons she’s learned in her career in LinkedIn, along with the events she attends and speaks at in the course of her work.
Sarah Stoesser Groves. Sarah is a digital marketer who shares news and information her network can use. At The Summit she posted insightful video clips and sound bites from many of the speakers in LinkedIn and Twitter.
L. Michelle Smith. Michelle is a multi-cultural marketer. She’s a great source for the latest research and thought leadership on inclusion marketing through her posts in LinkedIn and Twitter.
Reflecting on the last month, here are some of the professional activities I’ve shared in LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. It only required taking a few photos and videos of the events and sharing key messages in my social networks.
They tended to be squeezed into the nooks and crannies of busy days as well as evenings and sometimes weekends, forming the public side of work-related activities that can be shared in social media.
Attended The Summit in Dallas as a marketing leader and participated on a team of social influencers to amplify the event’s messaging and reach, thanks to Sarah Groves.
Joined the Women’s Sports Foundation‘s annual salute gala in New York, thanks to Fiona Carter who is a member of the group’s board. It was inspiring to see so many strong female role models and spend time with colleagues.
Spoke at #WeGatherLA, the second-annual women’s leadership experience spearheaded by Otter Media President Sarah Harden, thanks to an invitation from Jennifer Cho and Katelynn Duffel. It was an amazing experience interviewing Helie Lee about her project Macho Like Me, when she lived life as a man for six months. Truly incredible!
Talked with visiting students from Howard University and North Carolina A&T University about how to build a career through social media, thanks to Grant Reid, along with John Willis and Kaleb Pask.
Participated in events at USC as a member of the USC Alumni Association Board of Governors and USC Annenberg Alumni Advisory Board, thanks to Leticia Lozoya and Ashley Cooper.
Beyond building your career through social media, there are other benefits to documenting your professional life in social. You’re helping to build the brands of your company and your colleagues.
Employees are a trusted and credible source of information about their companies, according to Shel Holtz. Take that responsibility seriously and be sure you’re communicating in alignment with your company’s values, brand and social media policy.
And as we approach the end of the year and you summarize your key accomplishments, your social media feeds are a powerful input. They document many of your key accomplishments. You can add to quantifying their impact by the reach and the engagement of your posts.
As you head into a new week, what are you doing, experiencing and learning this week that you can share in social media?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 15, 2017 | Careers, Social Media
What’s ahead in 2018?
How will you continue to build your career through social media in the coming year? As a corporate professional, how can you best tell your story through social media – and promote your employer’s brand and your colleagues at the same time?
A top trend is the continuing growth in employee advocacy programs. Through them, companies empower their employees to be brand ambassadors.
Employees can share official news and information about the company and its brand through personal social media channels.
Some research I did this week got me thinking about this topic (opinions expressed in this blog are my own).
I reviewed recent literature and studies to identify the trends and challenges in marketing, branding and public relations for the coming year.
6 PR trends to check out in 2018 pointed to the expansion of personal branding and thought leadership beyond a company’s leaders.
“The more people on your team who are building their brands and, by extension, your company’s brand,” says the article’s author John Hall, “the more opportunities you have to distribute content and connect with your audience.”
This dovetails with the observation by IABC Fellow Shel Holtz that “employees are now your most credible spokespeople.” This is based on the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer.
It also aligns with the “media fragmentation and loss of trust” that Robert Wynne covers in The biggest and most important media and PR trends for 2018.
In it, Bob Gold also speaks to the burgeoning challenge of getting noticed in growing media among the “ever-expanding communications channels.”
Another study full of interesting stats is the 2017 State of Employee Advocacy Survey. Conducted by JEM Consulting, it includes responses from 155 mostly U.S.-based companies:
- Employee advocacy adoption grew by more than 25% over the last year.
- In 2018, the top goal is to increase the number of employees participating as advocates.
- Growth occurred for use of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Surprisingly, LinkedIn declined after being the top channel last year.
- The most popular channels are Facebook (76% of respondents’ employees use it for advocacy), Instagram (62%) and Twitter (56%).
- Twitter’s popularity went down 29% over the last year.
- YouTube grew dramatically (35%) in its use year over year – to 43% in 2017, up from 8% in 2016.
“We attribute this shift to the increased variety of industries and type of organizations adopting employee advocacy, as well as the expansion of business objectives for these programs,” says Jen McClure, CEO of JEM Consulting.
“We’re seeing that all types of organizations are using visual media effectively,” McClure also says, “especially online video, which was one of our key recommendations from last year’s study.”
This is good insight for companies and individuals alike in planning for the coming year.
Personally, I’m looking at shifting my employee advocacy more toward Instagram and Facebook. This will be an interesting evolution, since I currently use those channels to connect with my personal networks (although the proportion of professional contacts is growing on those platforms).
And while advocacy seems to be declining in LinkedIn and Twitter, I’ll still focus on LinkedIn. The 500 million people on LinkedIn make it an ideal place to connect with other professionals. And the recent addition of video capability will be fun to explore.
With these data points, how will you create your social media strategy for 2018? What will you you continue? What will you change?
by Caroline Leach | Sep 30, 2017 | Social Media
There’s nothing like discovering a shiny new tool and then learning that using it doesn’t necessarily make a difference.
No, I’m not talking about those teeth-whitening strips that promise a sparkling smile but don’t fully deliver.
I’m talking about headline analyzers. In my last post I did an experiment to analyze all of the headlines in this blog. The purpose was to see if my headlines were doing a good job of attracting and engaging readers.
Turns out, according to some sources, it may not make a significant difference in how many people actually click through and read the post.
But “making a difference” can have different meanings.
If we’re talking about improving the open rates of a blog post, then using a headline analyzer may not make a difference.
However, there are other ways of making a difference.
For me, using a headline analyzer is a fun way to practice writing 25 headlines for each blog post. This is a best practice to land on an attention-grabbing headline.
Using an analyzer – and my favorite is CoSchedule – is an engaging game to see how I can get the highest score. Then, among the top scores, I look for the headline(s) with positive sentiment, as opposed to negative or neutral sentiment.
Each week as I repurpose a blog post as a LinkedIn article, engagement is increasing with more likes, comments and shares. However, it’s hard to tease out if that’s due to the frequency and consistency of posting, a growing number of connections and audience size, or better quality headlines.
But whether or not headline analyzers have been proven to increase readership or not, the tool is helpful in improving the quality and descriptiveness of my headlines.
That got me thinking.
How else could I use the analyzer tools?
Email subject lines. With every email I write, I ask myself a question: if the recipient reads nothing else but the subject line, will they get my main message?
Also, will that subject line be easily searchable later on, when the person is looking for relevant information?
If writing 25 headlines for each blog post using the headline analyzer helps me write better headlines, couldn’t it help with my email subject lines too?
Clearly, with dozens of emails going out every day, it’s not feasible to analyze every subject line.
But for the more important messages, going to the busiest people? Absolutely.
Speech titles. Today I’ve been working on what I call my TED talk about “How to boost your career through social media.”
Or maybe it will be “How to live your best professional life in social media.” That’s the headline that got the highest score, with an 83 out of 100. The target is a score of 70 or higher.
It’s not a real TED talk at this point. Although it was fun to see my teenage son’s eyes light up when he thought his mom was actually giving a TED talk.
It’s the process of creating a TED talk that is guiding my presentation about social media savvy for corporate professionals.
Over the last few months, I’ve been invited to speak to 3 or 4 groups about how to build their careers through social media. That’s why it’s time to create the actual presentation and synthesize everything I’ve been blogging about for the last year.
TED talks are how people are used to learning about “ideas worth spreading,” so it made sense to me to start with this format. I’m inspired by the TED Talks book, and the talks by Chris Anderson and Nancy Duarte.
Once the talk is crafted in that format, I can adapt it to different audiences and different speaking times.
The “idea worth spreading” is often crystallized in the title of the talk. So why not give the headline analyzer a try?
In addition to trying 25+ different titles, I entered a few existing talk titles in the headline analyzer. Not surprisingly, most of them were above the 70 threshold for a good title.
Slogans and tagline. Then I wondered how a slogan or tagline would fare in a headline analyzer.
I added “how to” to my employer’s consumer brand tagline. I’m happy – but not surprised – to report it scored above the 70 threshold. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own).
Then there was a variation on the employer brand tagline that a group of us created at a former company. Again, I was happy to discover it was well above the threshold.
When we were narrowing down the tagline from a dozen options, though, it would have been great to test them with a headline analyzer.
What other ways could a headline analyzer be helpful? Book titles didn’t fare well when I tested a few. Maybe I’ll try it for blog post subheads or upcoming tweets.
Most importantly, this tool has prompted me to stretch and try a variety of word combinations. Whether or not the data supports greater readership and engagement, the fact that I’m being more creative is a win in my book.
How are you using headline analyzers beyond their original purpose?
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