by Caroline Leach | Feb 6, 2017 | Learning, Social Media
Do you have a social savvy strategy for the next conference you’re attending?
This is top of mind for me this week. I couldn’t be more excited to attend the The 2017 MAKERS Conference for women’s leadership, which starts tonight.
With the recent film Hidden Figures, I look forward to hearing from Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, pictured above, and the other luminary women and men who will be speaking.
My employer is a sponsor of the conference, and I could not be more proud. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Here are some ideas about making the most of your conference experience in social media.
PROMOTE
How can you amplify awareness of the conference and its goals?
- Check out the social media plan for the conference. For MAKERS, this came in a series of pre-event emails with sample messages and great content to share.
- Know and use the relevant hashtag(s). #BEBOLD is the MAKERS hashtag. It’s perfect because it stands out in all caps and its brevity saves characters.
- Share pre-conference information in your social networks. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I’ve shared content in Twitter and LinkedIn.
CONNECT
How can you get to know new people you can learn from?
- Check out the attendance list in advance. If anyone already in your network is attending, you can reconnect as well as identify new people you want to meet.
- Be active in the event app – or in a social media group. Add your picture and key info to your app profile. Send messages to people you want to meet in person.
- Introduce yourself to 5 to 10 new people at each session. A goal to say hello to a focused number of people makes connections meaningful and manageable.
SHARE
How can you share valuable content with your social networks?
GROW
What can you do after a conference to share the learnings, increase the impact and grow the new network connections you made?
- Share with your colleagues. Post a summary for appropriate groups in your company’s social intranet or present it in a face-to-face meeting.
- Take one new action. Commit to doing one thing that will make a difference. My #BEBOLD action will be the subject of a future post.
How do you make the most of a conference experience in social media?
by Caroline Leach | Feb 5, 2017 | Social Media
Looking for a simple way to share great professional content in your social networks?
If your company offers an employee advocacy program, download the app and start sharing content that matches your professional goals for social media.
This can be a key part of your social media savvy strategy to personally brand and market yourself successfully in social media.
But first, what is employee advocacy?
It’s “brands empowering employees to support the goals of the brand, through employee-owned social media,” says Chris Boudreaux in Social Media Governance.
My employer makes it easy to share company-provided content with Social Circle, powered by Social Chorus. Nolan Carleton pioneered the approach, with much success.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions in this blog are my own.)
Here are 11 ways to make the most of your employee advocacy program, promoting your company while you build your own professional brand.
- Download the app. Make it easy to share content by putting the app on your mobile devices. You can use snippets of time during the week to review and share content.
- Choose content categories that support your professional goals. Align your own social media strategy with the available content categories. For example, you could focus on your company’s business strategy, the customer experience, the employee experience, career strategies or community engagement, just to name a few.
- Customize your feed for your content categories. Once you know what types of content you want to share, see if you can customize the content you see. This will make the process more efficient as you choose what to share.
- Select the social media platforms you want to post on. Assess how the available content lines up with the platforms where you’re most active for professional purposes. In my case, it’s LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Keep looking before you link. Just as you shouldn’t link to other social media content without reading it first, you should do the same with a company-provided message. Make sure it reflects well on your professional brand before sharing it.
- Tailor company-provided messages to your voice. You can use the company-provided messaging to share links, or you can edit it to be closer to your own voice. Just be sure that the edits you make reflect positively on your company.
- Share your pride in your company. Let your enthusiasm for your company shine through. Whether you love the employee experience, the products and services, or everything about your organization, share that sentiment.
- Follow your company’s social media guidelines. Make sure to follow the spirit and the letter of social media guidelines at your company. When in doubt, err on the conservative side. While you’re acting as a brand ambassador of your company, that holds you to a higher standard.
- Target 3 or more posts each week. Sprinkle your company’s posts among a broad variety of content you’re sharing. Don’t go overboard with excessive sharing. Since it’s company-related content, post it on weekdays. Your platform may enable you to schedule sharing in advance to post at a specific time.
- Share social content from colleagues. Keep an eye on content from colleagues who also engage in the advocacy program. Share their content if it fits with your overall goals. This promotes your colleagues, your company and you – a triple win.
- Experiment and refine your approach. Check the analytics for each of your social platforms to see how your community is engaging with content from your company. Make adjustments based on that, and keep fine-tuning as you go.
What if your employer doesn’t offer an employee advocacy program? Make a pitch to your Corporate Communications team.
Here’s a key data point. Consumers see recommendations from friends as the most credible form of advertising – as much as 83%, according to a Nielsen study.
And IABC Fellow Shel Holtz shares for corporate communicators that “employees are now your most credible spokespeople.” This is based on the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer.
Also, check out the 2016 State of Employee Advocacy report from JEM Consulting and Advisory Services.
The study’s leader Jen McClure notes that, “Most employee and brand advocacy programs are still fairly new, and companies are still developing best practices.”
How are you using an employee advocacy program to promote your company’s brand along with your own?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 28, 2017 | Leadership, Social Media
It started innocently enough.
Someone mentioned me in a tweet about a business-related dispute.
I read the tweeter’s bio. I researched the issue. I realized there was nothing meaningful I could do in response.
Then the tweets came more frequently. Three, four and more times a day.
It became harder to ignore the notifications button on my Twitter app. I started to wonder if my non-response strategy was a good idea. In talking with some colleagues in the social space, we concluded that it was.
Still, it was painful being the subject of increasingly negative tweet after tweet. Generally I believe in responding.
This is especially true if it’s a customer, and it’s gratifying to help people solve issues. However, this particular case did not involve a customer.
The same as the schoolyard bully, the best response is often no response. Act indifferently for long enough, and the hater will eventually go away.
But the escalation of hate concerns me. With all of the positive energy surrounding this month’s Women’s Marches around the globe, I was disappointed by the level of vitriol in my Twitter feed.
It reminded me of Ashley Judd’s talk at the TEDWomen talk last fall. One of her tweets at a basketball game a few years ago incited a cyber mob of hate. Yet rather than responding to the haters themselves, she became an activist for a safe and free internet for everyone.
She had, from time to time, tried engaging people. She met with varying degrees of success. One person in particular had a refreshing response and actually apologized.
That made me think beyond the awful posts and comments themselves. What kind of pain must someone be in to post hateful and threatening material? What has happened to them to make them act that way? What are they most afraid of?
A Facebook friend posted recently that she was leaving the platform for a while. She was tired of the negativity and felt the best solution was to step back.
The outpouring of encouraging comments was heartening, including the advice to ignore the haters and focus on the connections with friends and family.
She still chose to take a break. But I hope she’ll be back.
Because we need positive voices. We need realistic optimism. We need civil dialogue.
And we need empathy. That was my takeaway from a bestselling book called Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. It’s an up close and personal look at rural America – the challenges, the issues, the highs and the lows.
Everyone is dealing with some kind of challenge, whether it’s visible on the outside or not. So be kind. Be caring. Be curious.
This is a strategy that has worked for Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia. Like Ashley Judd, he’s engaged haters with respect for their views. He asks questions to better understand the underlying issue.
That’s where your judgment comes in. Should you ignore or engage? Every situation is different, so what might work in one instance may not work in another.
Try seeing things from another point of view. And see where that takes you.
This is also about exercising control where you can. You can’t control the behavior of others, but you can control yourself. This includes your thoughts, your attitudes and your actions.
This concept of empowerment was beautifully expressed in the Academy Award nominated film Hidden Figures. It tells the story of three brilliant African-American women who worked as mathematicians and scientists at NASA in the early 1960s.
These inspiring and accomplished women continually had to decide whether to ignore the slights and snubs of daily life or to speak out and engage others in their struggles.
And thank goodness they did, time and time again, because they changed the course of history in the Space Race.
I couldn’t be more proud that my employer is offering free screenings of the film to students in major U.S. cities. (This is where I remind readers that opinions in this blog are my own.)
The positive actions that we take individually and collectively have the power to change the world.
What are you doing to make a difference?
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