Trafcom News

Friday communications roundup, October 19, 2012

Happy Friday! Just for you: some communications-related links from the past week or so (excluding the huge stories that you’ve likely already seen – binders, anyone?).

Tips for demos and presentations
I like this post from Mark Evans, with his tips for start-up people doing presentations (except for the phrase “no-brainer” in the title – a pet peeve of mine).

And here is my own post, written recently after watching a night of presentations: How to share your story in a demo.

Social media tips and tricks
It can be a challenge to keep up with all the changes in the various social media platforms. Here are some tips from Social Media Examiner on how to maximize your new Twitter profile.

When I do social media workshops or coach individual clients, they always ask about those mysterious hashtags on Twitter and elsewhere. In this excellent post, my friend Amy Sept decodes the hashtag and how to use it. 

Those of us who blog usually welcome suggestions about how to do it better. In this post Jeff Bullas shares 20 sins that bloggers often commit.

Sound bites
As a podcaster, sound is very important to me. And my friend Peter West knows it. That’s why he sent me this link to two videos about capturing great audio. They’re geared toward photographers using video, but the tips are useful to anyone who works with sound.

Friday fun
The Friday roundup would hardly be complete without a video. Going along with the Gangnam meme, here are the folks from the Stratford Festival, with surprise guest Peter Mansbridge. (For non-Canadians, Mansbridge is Canada’s top news anchor; he is also married to Cynthia Dale, one of Stratford’s leading ladies.)

For more content like this, follow me on Twitter or GooglePlus.

Visit the Trafalgar Communications website for information about how we can help your organization to tell its story through traditional and new media.

Friday communications roundup, September 21, 2012

Happy weekend! Here are communications-related links from the past week or so –- excluding the huge stories that you’ve already seen; was there a new phone or something?

TV West Wingers contribute to voter education
As a West Wing fangirl, I love this clever video from the show's actors, spreading the word about nonpartisan ballots in the U.S.

Here’s the story behind the video.

Five storytelling tips to capture and keep your audience
I’m a sucker for blog posts about storytelling. Here’s another good one, from Marketing Profs.

Why books are the ultimate new business card
This theme keeps coming at us from different people, so there must be something to it, right? Are you writing a book to use as a business card?

Everything you need to know about the new Twitter profiles
Here are some tips to make your Twitter web page look good.

Tech trends to adopt before year-end
Oh, yes, soon we’ll start seeing all the gurus’ predictions for next year. In the meantime, check out these tech trends to adopt now in 2012.

Hands-on social media workshop (not for beginners)
And lastly, a post from me about the hands-on social media workshop I’m leading on October 2 in Oakville.

For more content like this, follow me on Twitter or GooglePlus.

Visit the Trafalgar Communications website for information about how we can help your organization to tell its story through traditional and new media.

Hands-on social media workshop

Would you like to become a social media power user? Before the end of 2012, do you want to get better at integrating social media into your day-to-day work so you can meet some of your business goals? Check out this advanced social media workshop I’m leading on October 2 at the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, presented by HalTech. Details and registration here.

Here’s what we’ll cover between 8:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.:

• The importance of having a communications/marketing strategy before getting too deeply into social media
• Very quick overview of the platforms 
• Becoming a Twitter power user: Shortcuts; using a dashboard like Hootsuite or TweetDeck; setting up lists; joining chats; persistent searches; following thought leaders; gaining valuable followers 
• Making the most of LinkedIn: Optimizing your profile; joining groups, participating in discussions
• Using Facebook for business: Setting up a business page; winning likes; engaging with your community; pitfalls of Facebook
• Advantages of GooglePlus: Search, Circles, Hangouts and more
• Pinning with Pinterest: How brands are using Pinterest; setting up boards; building a following
• How to integrate social media into your daily activities
• How to keep learning

Why spend half a day building your social media skills? If you’re an entrepreneur or work for a small- to mid-sized business, you can enhance your marketing, lead generation and customer service efforts through social media. Those who work for larger organizations and who need to get up to speed with social media will also benefit from this workshop.

Prerequisite: You must have accounts on some (not all) of the major social media platforms and a familiarity with the basic operation of each platform.  

Please bring your own laptop computer, and be sure to have all the login information for your existing social media accounts with you.

Lunch will be provided.

Questions? Contact me directly at 905.844.7645. Or register now.

Friday communications roundup, August 3, 2012

In case you missed them, here are some interesting communications-related items from the past week or so.

Talking to employees about social media guidelines

This video from KPMG is a smart way to communicate with employees about social media guidelines. I do have criticism: the use of the term “common sense.” Perhaps their employees are a homogenous group, but I think we’ve all seen plenty of examples in the corporate world where one person’s common sense equals another person’s social faux pas.

Change your Dropbox password
If you rely on Dropbox to transfer large files, or for backup purposes, be sure to change your password after a recent security breach.

Interesting Twitter stats
Brian Solis gives us some interesting numbers about Twitter users. Refer to this the next time someone tells you that “no one uses Twitter.”

Another arrow in your social media quiver
Recent research from CEO.com shows why chief executive officers should care about social media.

Pinterest for content marketing
Pinterest is not just for posting photos of food and cute babies. Marketers are learning how to use this social network to share content.

Grammar matters
I love this piece in Harvard Business Review: “Why I won’t hire people who use poor grammar.” Amen.

Content curation: Coming soon to a job description near you
Several people asked me to post the talk I did at the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) world conference in Chicago in June. Here is a video version of my slides, with narration.

For more links, check out my Delicious bookmarks.

Happy weekend!

 

Content marketing and social media work hand in hand

 

Content marketing and social media go together like peanut butter and jam. You see, when you go to the trouble of creating great content, there are two ways people can find it:
(a) search, whether organic or paid
(b) sharing, by you or others.

Let’s focus on (b). After you write an article or blog post for your site, it’s important to get it in front of your customers and prospects. You might follow steps like this:

• Tweet a link to the blog post
• Post an update to LinkedIn with a link to the blog post
• Publish an item to GooglePlus with a link to the blog post
• Share the blog post on your company Facebook page or your personal page or both
• Pin the item to Pinterest, if it has a visual aspect

By the way, there are good reasons to not publish simultaneously on all platforms via a third-party application. Please refer to this blog post for several reasons why.

You might also add a line to your email signature with a teaser about the blog post and a link to it. Of course you’ll refer to it in your newsletter too.

If your post or article is relevant and well crafted, chances are that others will share it with their friends and followers. And so the conversation will continue and more people will discover your business. Perhaps they’ll subscribe to your feeds or sign up to get your newsletter.

In the same vein, content marketing solves one of the problems many businesses experience around their social media presence: “We are on Twitter and GooglePlus and so on, but what are we going to say?” The answer is content marketing: You are going to publish meaningful content that’s relevant to your audience, and you’re going to share it on your social media platforms. Think of it as a cycle – a cycle that gains attention and potential business.

Of course you don’t want your social media accounts to look like advertising, so don’t let them become push-only platforms. Be sure to engage with your readers, to ask questions, to answer questions, and to promote the work of others in your network and beyond.

Do you have any tips to share about the links between content marketing and social media?

See the other posts in this content marketing series.

For more content like this, follow me on Twitter or GooglePlus.

Visit the Trafalgar Communications website for information about how we can help your organization to tell its story through traditional and new media.

Can a 20-something be a social media expert?

At last night’s IABC/Toronto Professional Independent Communicators (PIC) meeting, Anita Windisman did a terrific presentation on LinkedIn, which I’ve blogged about here. In reviewing the tweets generated during Anita’s session, I noticed a single criticism:

Great networking & presentation at #pictips tonight. Some good tips, but I was surprised by 1 of the comments …

Ppl under 30 aren't all 'kids'. Just b/c someone has their MBA doesn't mean they're more of a 'SM expert' than someone younger #pictips

Let me put this in context. Anita mentioned that she has an MBA and 18 years of marketing and business experience. She made an offhand comment that she’s not a “kid” doing social media training.

[I did not write this down verbatim, but I think I’ve captured the spirit of what she said.]

I’ve always maintained that a social media “expert” is not someone who merely can train you in the mechanics of Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or GooglePlus or Hootsuite or TweetDeck or whatever. Anyone can learn how to retweet, how to tag, etc. These are necessary skills, but they do not in and of themselves yield business results.

Plenty of my clients attend seminars on social media, then walk away saying, “OK, so now I know how to do the mechanics, but what do I tweet about? Do I have to be on Facebook? Why would I connect with someone on LinkedIn? What do I say? How is this stuff relevant?”

These are important questions about business strategy.

So, yes, one does not need an MBA or any other degree for that matter to be a social media “expert.” [You’ll note I keep putting the word in quotation marks because I’m not sure that the word “expert” is even appropriate.] But I do believe that business people want to work with a marketing specialist or a communications consultant who can help them solve problems, using social media or some other tactic.

In a field as young as social media, there are bound to be many young practitioners. Last year I attended an event where I met one such woman. She described herself as a social media trainer who’d been in business about a year. When I asked her what she’d been doing before then, she said she was a wedding photographer. In fact, she still was.

I’m sure she’d be proficient at explaining how to retweet on Twitter or tag someone on Facebook, but I doubt she’d be able to advise a senior executive on a blogging strategy or a content marketing campaign.

After a decade or so in business, one’s degree is largely immaterial. I don’t think I’ve mentioned my own Masters in Public Administration to a client, with the exception of some of those in the public sector, who like to see consultants with these particular letters after their names.

But business experience is another matter. It’s a prerequisite, in my humble opinion, before one can advise another person.

One’s age is not a prerequisite. Someone can be 40 with two years in business. But I doubt that a 25-year old, unless he’s a prodigy of some kind, could have more than a couple of years of real-life business experience.

I’d love to know what you think. Does a person need business experience to be a social media “expert”?

Please share your thoughts on this. Am I off base?

You need a strategy and content plan before launching social media tools

Lately I’ve received calls and emails from existing clients and new prospects seeking ways to use social media tools. They want to find out how to set up a Twitter account, exploit the ins and outs of LinkedIn, create a Facebook business page, and maybe even learn about GooglePlus so they’re ready when Google admits brands to its new platform.

Some of these people are pretty smart about their requirements. In many cases, however, I discover that two things are missing:

1. A commitment to developing an overall marketing or communications strategy first, before diving into social media. If you don’t know what your goals are, or who your target market is, how can you even dream of reaching them? And how would you measure success?
2. The allocation of resources for content development, curation and publishing. Think about this: After you’ve set up your cool-looking Facebook page, put a snazzy avatar on Twitter, and added fancy plug-ins to your WordPress blog, what are you going to say? Do you have a plan for curating, creating and publishing content?

Spending a few days hashing out your communications strategy and then planning your content flow will make the whole process of “using” social media a lot more effective.

I’m assuming here, perhaps too optimistically, that the organization in question is already monitoring mentions of their brands and their key people on the Web.

Do you agree? Easier said than done? Do people argue with you when you say “There’s no such thing as a Twitter strategy”?

Reasons to keep Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates separate

Social media updates are converging. Now you can easily use such tools as TweetDeck and Hootsuite (and others) to post your status on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at the same time, or just LinkedIn and Twitter, or… You get the idea.

Speed and simplicity are wonderful, but what about communication? When I teach business writing, one of the first points I discuss with the class is the concept of knowing your audience and your goal. So I think of my online audience's needs and my own goals before I publish any status update anywhere.

In my world, LinkedIn relationships are the most formal; this place is strictly for business. Facebook is more social; many of my “friends” are actually family members and old schoolmates. That's the place where I might write about my aunt’s birthday party or comment on someone’s new baby pictures.

Twitter is my online water cooler, research department and referral engine, all in one. Most of my Twitter updates are business-oriented (such as an invitation to my upcoming Webinar: "Take your podcast to the next level"), but some are more personal, showing my authentic self, as they say. (I heard a great quote last year, and I wish I knew the author: Facebook represents the people you used to know; Twitter represents the people you’d like to get to know.)

If I posted the typical Twitter update on Facebook, most people would be flummoxed. The hashtags, RTs and @ signs don’t contribute much to readability when you’re not accustomed to them.

Each of us uses these social networks slightly differently, but I doubt that many of us are speaking to the same audience in each arena.  At least for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to update each site manually, with rare exception. What about you?

UPDATE: Since this post was written, Facebook changed its way of deciding which posts get into your friends' streams. Items posted directly to Facebook are favoured over those posted via a third-party application. So there's another reason to post diriectly to Facebook.

IABC/Toronto Communicator of the Year

Peter Aceto, President and CEO of ING DIRECT Canada, received the 2010 Communicator of the Year  award from IABC/Toronto this morning at a ceremony downtown. ING DIRECT Canada is the largest direct bank in the country.

If you’ve seen Mr. Aceto in one of his videos or read his tweets, you know that “what you see is what you get.” He carries this sense of transparency in all of his communications.

Powered by two lovely cups of coffee, I’ve captured some of his remarks for you.

Truly a “social CEO,” Peter Aceto places the highest value on communications and connecting with people, referring to this strength as the biggest predictor of leadership success. Of course a CEO must be concerned with profit, but he contends that the leader must also be held accountable for valuing people and communications, for behaving responsibly, for providing value and service, and for always telling the truth. “Communications will become the most valued leadership skill in five years,” he predicted.

To be effective, messages must be simple, transparent and honest. He believes that there’s no longer a need to communicate differently to different stakeholders.

Throughout his speech, Peter Aceto emphasized the excellent contributions of his team at ING DIRECT Canada (some of whom were in the room – along with his wife and mother), and introduced a few of the staffers who so capably handle internal and external communications.

He reminded us that communication occurs when the message is understood, not just when it’s disseminated.  He then shared a story of one time within the bank when leadership assumed that all employees were aware of a new program. Thanks to Peter’s brown-bag lunches with call centre and operations staff, he discovered that this wasn’t the case, and that employee communications needed to be improved in this particular area.

When asked about internal communications, Mr. Aceto told us that the bank has recently implemented Yammer, an internal Twitter-like micro-messaging tool. “It’s important for us to hear what people within the organization really care about,” he said.  

Responding to a question about the time he himself devotes to social media, he said: “We know that social media is not going away. We need to be there, to be a part of the conversation.” He cited the example of ING DIRECT Canada’s new Thrive account. “Online we’re getting direct feedback from people, from customers,” he said. The public responds through social media much more easily and quickly than they would by email or letter.

All the IABC/Toronto members I spoke with were impressed with Peter Aceto’s passion for his work and his dedication to constantly improving as a communicator.

We were also inspired by a speech by Priya Bates, ABC, who has been named a Master Communicator, the highest honour bestowed by IABC in Canada. Congratulations, Priya!

Thanks to the organizers of IABC/Toronto for this worthwhile morning, and to the event sponsor, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.

Curating Twitter content with Paper.li