Search Results for: "5 starter moves"

5 Starter Moves – Facebook LinkedIN and Twitter

chrisbrogan · January 14, 2008 ·

UPDATE: To receive a FREE copy of the entire 5 Starter Moves series in PDF form, sign up for my newsletter (also free), and I’ll mail you out a file shortly. (Note: if you don’t want to sign up for the newsletter, and still want the pdf, email me: blog at chrisbrogan.com
This is the last of the Five Starter Moves series. If you would like a copy of all five posts together in a single downloadable PDF file, please comment on this post, leaving a valid email address. I’ll send you one shortly thereafter.
Companies are wondering about how social networks will work for them, and whether they should engage on those fronts. They’ve been told they should be doing it. They just aren’t sure why or how. On one hand, some companies are thinking of these social networks are different channels for the same methods they have been trying in traditional marketing. On another, some are just wondering how to get involved, which platforms will do what for them, and where to start. Here are some thoughts.
LinkedIN
LinkedIN is a pretty safe place to start for a business. It’s targeted towards business professionals, and is built mostly to be an online profile repository and a reputation management system. But it can be used for more.
LinkedIN is a great way to recruit into your business, in so far as how your people write about themselves in their profiles. If your organization is on there, and people’s profiles all seem to say good things about the organization, that’s another way that folks can get an impression and interact with your company.
It’s also a way to share knowledge and give an impression of your abilities. You can answer questions on LinkedIN. Sometimes, this becomes an exercise in branding that can bode nicely for your company.
Facebook
I personally have mixed feelings about Facebook. At the least, it’s a place where you as an individual can build a profile and have another touchpoint to the web, and to the potential of meeting new people with similar interests. Putting together a decent profile isn’t especially difficult, but there are a few things I’d recommend:

Use a more candid picture than a posed one.
Consider which applications you add to your profile. They tell people a lot about you. Sure, you’re going along with the crowd, but why?
Join groups before you consider starting any. Participate.
Evaluate the value of your efforts. Don’t just stay there because people told you to be there.

What do you think? Are you using Facebook in a business way? Do you like it? Are you getting value?
Twitter
Ah, how do I describe Twitter. I have too many times to do so again in this article. But my business point about Twitter is this. Provided you are using Twitter conversationally, and mixing and matching between sharing things about other people and maybe a slight mix in of what you’re doing, then it’s a somewhat useful tool for getting the message out.
I use Twitter a lot to ask questions. Some of my questions are just to promote conversation. Other times, I use it to direct attention to things that are useful or matter, like social causes. Sometimes, I point Twitter towards my own stuff.
Social Networks In General
In general, social networks are useful for bringing about awareness, about meeting people outside the organization, and as Rachel Happe from IDC often says, about capturing unstructured information (like status messages). Tread gently into using social networks, as the return on their use can be questionable. It’s all a matter of engagement. How one engages is one thing. Why one engages is another. What you get out of the engagement is obviously the most important.
Ending The Five Starter Move Series
Inside of my Social Media 100, this has been the Five Starter Moves series. If you didn’t get your questions answered, let me know. I can cover any questions in a subsequent post, and share my response to your thoughts both in the comments and in subsequent works. I hope it worked out for you.
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog.

5 Starter Moves – Audio and Video

chrisbrogan · January 13, 2008 ·

The Five Starter Moves series moves into audio and video today, and whether your organization is ready for that yet.
Getting your organization into more than just listening to the social sphere and blogging is not always the right move. Using these other media CAN be time consuming, and the return on the effort is sometimes questionable. And yet, audio and video connect someone much more powerfully than just the printed word. It is with these tools that your clients, customers, partners, and colleagues can see the human behind the organization. This is at once scary and powerfully wonderful.
How Would You Use It?
Why would your company want to use audio and video? Are you hoping to build great viral videos like Will It Blend? Are you hoping to share what’s going on inside the organization? Are you hoping to use it for recruiting, like Standout Jobs promotes?
For audio, there are lots of applications, including giving quick audio status messages one-to-many, instead of the voicemail way (though you can sometimes collect audio off a mobile interface as well). You can use it to do conversational tips and advice.
In video, you can screencast on your products, or share inside footage on how things are made (people love that stuff). You can share video status messages, use it as a tool for field engineers, and perhaps as a way to build relations between multi-location organizations.
Which Tools Should You Use?
Some simple tools are in order here. There are complex ones aplenty, but here’s some really good simple baby step tools to get into creating audio and video for your organization.
Utterz
Utterz is a platform to enable sending audio, pictures, video, and text to the web (to their community site, but it also can hook to your blog and post there simply, too). The audio messaging capability works on any phone that has the number 2 on the keypad. Technically, it works like leaving a voicemail, only it takes that message and digitizes it, and allows you to play it back as a digital file from your phone, their website, or your blog.
Magnify WebCam
Magnify.net offers a Flash-based web cam video recording platform that is simple if you have a web camera to attach to a computer, or if you want to upload movies you shot from another camera. I’ve used it for a few months and it works well.
Seesmic
Seesmic is a video communications platform that deals more with a conversational style. It’s like instant messaging with video. There’s a strong community there, and it might not be very business-focused right yet, but the tool works well, and the buzz is growing around it.
Is This a Starter Move?
I’m not so sure. I think it’s up to the organization, how you’re thinking of using audio or video, and what you’re thinking you can accomplish. I think the status messages idea for either audio or video makes for a great start, though. From there, you can explore, take small steps, and see if there’s something else to consider.
Next up: Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter

5 Starter Moves- Should Blogging Go Next

chrisbrogan · January 12, 2008 ·

In our Five Starter Moves discussion so far, we’ve talked about framing the idea to our organization, and listening/hearing. Now, let’s talk about blogging.
I ask this question because I believe most people advising organizations about social media go straight for a blog as their first option. I’m going to step out and say that maybe a blog ISN’T a good first choice. Why? Because I think that blogs are fairly substantial steps, and that an organization might feel really exposed if their first attempt at clearing their throat is an A Cappella moment on stage in front of thousands.
Why not start with a tumbleblog? In fact, an organization could even do a stealth trial of the feel of blogging by doing a few “throwaway” tumbleblogs that AREN’T about the organization. Start with something that appeals to the person who might be asked to blog. If they’re into Texas Hold-Em, cool. See if you can get them to post once every few days about poker.
Find some blogs that you’d want your organization to emulate in tone or style or content, and subscribe to those in the reader, too (at this point, you might consider adding some folders to the reader, one for “listening” and one for “blogs.” Add a mix of related business blogs and maybe even some “fun” blogs to read, like poker blogs (to match my idea above).
Blogging is fun, empowering, and a great way to build the “face” of an organization, but it’s also some people’s version of standing naked out on stage. Ease them into it. Give them a chance to get comfortable, and then break out blogging.
Internal, External, or Both?
I advocate for blogging inside the firewall (privately), as well as having a public facing blog. The internal blogs make a great way to share and compare knowledge, and now that your company is full of professional RSS listeners, they can learn quickly the benefit of using a blog for information sharing instead of email.
Back outside the firewall, facing the public space, your organization will want to be able to use their voice and talk about what matters to their organization. Some companies, like Sun and Microsoft, have TONS of company blogs, several written by engineers and people in the trenches. Blogging is NOT the responsibility of the Mar/Com team, nor the CEO. It’s whoever should be sharing their voice to open up the conversation to the company.
Choice of Platform
This isn’t very important in the scheme of things, but I’ll put in a plug for WordPress as being simple, configurable, and non-threatening. Hosting a copy of the application on your own site makes it a lot more configurable, but if that’s an issue for IT reasons, or some other roadblock, there’s a free, hosted version too.
Other platforms you can check out in the free and hosted camp are Blogger, TypePad, Vox, and then about a gazillion others. Like I said: it’s not especially important, except in understanding the level of customization you want at your disposal.
Topics of Conversation
If your organization has been reading other blogs that you’ve recommended, or blogs in your space, you should start to get a sense of what’s important. From there, I’d recommend just trying it out. Post something. See what happens. See how people respond or not (comments should be enabled, but we could have another huge whole post just on comments, couldn’t we?).
Here, at [chrisbrogan.com], I tend to talk about things from two levels: starting with a simple strategy, and then finishing with some actionable ideas. I call this notion “giving your ideas handles.” Meaning, I want you to take what I share and apply it to your own needs, make it your own. It’s a great strategy for me, because it keeps people engaged, and it is, I hope, most often helpful.
There are tons of ways to get the conversation started. Don’t bog down on that. Just try something, and see what happens. With that said, read this.
Things to Avoid
Some easy landmines to avoid:

It’s okay to remove potty talk and unruly trolls from your blog’s comments section (lots of people cite the: “if I wouldn’t allow it in my living room, I won’t allow it on my blog” rule).
But DON’T delete comments that criticize you, provided the people stay civil. This is just begging for a brawl. It’s considered in poor taste. Besides, that’s one part of blogging: understanding what people think of you. If you can’t learn from your critics, where are you getting all your advice? Your raving fans only?
Don’t repurpose other people’s content without appropriate permissions. Learn about the Creative Commons and about the difference between RSS making it easy for people to consume content versus making it easy for people to steal content. (A hot button with creative types.)
Don’t just post press releases and marketing junk into a blog. No one will read it, and things will go ghost town quickly.
Try to keep your blog open to more than just pitching yourself, your organization, and your services. It’s your place, so you can do what you want, but if it’s just a big fat ad, that gets boring fast, too.

Sounds like there are lots of negatives to this blogging stuff, huh? Not exactly, but there ARE lots of ways to make a crummy first impression, so that’s why I wanted to cover all those.
What You Should Get Out of Blogging
Blogging, when you’re comfortable with it, is a great way to keep people in the loop about what matters to you. It’s a great way to represent your organization. It’s a wonderful way to share information back and forth, especially once you start learning from experiencing other people’s blogs.
Next: Audio and Video

5 Starter Moves – Listening and Hearing Come Before Speaking

chrisbrogan · January 11, 2008 ·

Our first Starter Move gave you an idea how to set the stage with your organization. Let’s learn now about listening and hearing.
It’s a lot of pushing and shoving to show someone why they should use blogs, and heaven forbid you try to launch them into Twitter too soon. Instead, start with listening. It’s easier, and makes for a more compelling demo.

Get a Google Reader account.
In another window, use Google Blogsearch, and enter your company’s name.
Take the results, and find the RSS link on the mid-left area of the page. Click it.
Take that long link that comes up, COPY it.
Back in Google Reader, click ADD SUBSCRIPTION in the mid-left area (see image)

A green box opens up with room to put in a URL.
Paste the URL from the search in there.
BONUS ROUND: Go back to the Blog Search page, and do the same for a competitor.

You should now have a Google Reader showing the result of searching for your company name (or product name, or what people would talk about) as it appears out and about in the wild. Repeat this a few more times with related search terms if you want.
Do the same by searching on Technorati as well. (This is another company that searches and indexes blogs and web sites). You’ll see another feed subscription button like this:

Click it, add it to your Google Reader. Repeat as necessary.
You’ve just built a decent listening device. Listening is the best of demos for an organization because it’s where we first realize that people are talking about us, and we probably don’t know it. And worse, if NO ONE is talking about you, that should tell you something, too. I think listening is the first big step to getting into social media for an organization.
By the way, the way I described building a listener is ONE way. You can also buy tools that are much more refined to do this, like Radian6. I think both have their place, as once you get over thinking of Google Reader as a “blog” reader and think of it instead as a serious console for any RSS-enabled data that’s useful to your company, that’s when the value happens.
Next up: Should Blogging Be Next?

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