The “I don’t have time for social media” Excuse
How many of you have ever said, “I don’t have time for social media?”
I know I hear it from potential clients, and even from team members of current clients.
So in this week’s video, I explain why social media is not a time hog, nor a waste of time. What is heard when you say that you don’t have time for social media is, ““I don’t have time to directly connect and communicate with my audience.” I don’t think that’s true, so we should understand that with proper planning, you can make your communication work for you and help you achieve your goals.
If you prefer to read through what I’ve discussed in the video, then you’re in for a treat. Here’s the full post:
For years and years, we have had the same sales, marketing and communication tools to work with. Now with social media, we’ve added these dynamic tools to the toolbox to help us do our jobs better, and we push them aside and label them a waste of time. The thing is, if we keep using the same old tools we’ve been using forever and ever, we will continue to produce the same results.
Your audience is online. And they are using social media. They use social media to gather news and information, to share information and discuss, and to learn more about and connect with people and organizations they care about. They are online waiting to connect with YOU.
Put in simple terms, social media are communication tools. Social media are simply communication tools designed to help you communicate directly with a specific audience. That’s it. Social media is not some big mystery or time hog. Social media is not out to get you or make your job more difficult or add extra work to your already big load of tasks.
So let’s take a step back and understand that when we say “I don’t have time for social media,” we are really saying is,
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with my members.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with my potential members.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with the parents.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with alumni.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with donors.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with future students and student-athletes.”
“I don’t have time to connect and communicate with corporate sponsors and media.”
“I don’t have time to directly connect and communicate with my audience.”
Is that true? Would you ever say that? Probably not. I sure hope that’s not the case. How can we get over this sense that we don’t have time for social media, then?
We have to change our approach to why we use social media and how we label it. We need to appreciate that this is the preferred form of communication for the majority of our audience and that social media presents a HUGE opportunity for our organizations to connect directly with our members and community. It’s a crazy effective tool that will allow us new, improved results. Here’s what we need to do to change our approach:
1. You must set clear and specific goals which allow your communication to work for you. Maybe you want to encourage current Members to sponsor one new Member this month, perhaps you desire 250 more people at the soccer game. You might set a goal of growing your alumni reunion attendance by 7% this year. Or you may set a goal to recruit 5 new graduate students from San Diego. Your organization has lots of goals. Each department has specific goals. And the individuals in your organizations have goals to fulfill as well. Communication can serve to achieve those goals.
How can communication serve those goals?
2. This is done through a content plan. Setting up a content plan is really not that difficult. It organizes your communication so that everyone on your team understands that on this date, X message will be posted to Y channel. A content plan will help you organize your daily, weekly and monthly communication to your audience. It will also help you keep track of what you’ve said in the past, so that you stay on point and remain consistent. A content plan will save you time. This is key, because without a specific plan of action, you can and will get lost within your social channels because you are not fulfilling a task. You’ll find yourself aimlessly searching through your news feed, because you didn’t have a clear purpose for logging on to the network in the first place. Coupling a content plan with a social media management tool like Hootsuite or Buffer, where you can schedule messages in advance will eliminate distractions and help you stay on track.
What else can a content plan do?
3. A content plan can also help distribute responsibility for posting to social media. For example, a Private Club has several voices the Members should be hearing from. Chef, Food & Beverage, The Golf Pro, Membership, Private Events and Member Relations all make up the collective voice of the Club. However, if all of the Club’s communication is initiated from Member Relations, that is the voice the Members will hear. Your members miss out on the opportunity to learn how to sponsor a new member, what private event packages are on offer or what’s the best advice to improve a golf swing. Everyone needs to and should want to contribute to the content plan so that everyone has an opportunity to achieve their department goals, and directly connect and communicate with their audience.
Therefore, your content plan should include notes to the tune of that on this day, at that time, on X channel, so-and-so will post Y message.
Let’s change what we label social media…
4. Just as you make time in your daily schedule for meetings, sales calls, responding to e-mails and events, so you should make time for social media. But instead of putting “social media” on your calendar which is vauge and without purpose, be specific. “Reply to Twitter messages.” “Post the sponsorship details of the ABC event and include weblink.” “Invite the ‘new biz cards’ pile to connect on LinkedIn.” This makes for a specific task with a specific purpose, designed to help you achieve specific goals.
Social media provides us a tremendous opportunity to creatively, quickly and directly connect and communicate with our audience. We really need to make that mental flip and value the opportunity that social media provides us. We need to approach these tools with the attitude, “This is my goal, this is my message, and this is how I’m going to deliver that message to my audience.” Otherwise, we will keep doing the same thing, using the same methods, and achieving the same results. That to me seems like the waste of time.
The Power of the Oscars, Ellen DeGeneres and Twitter
All I have to say is this…
Ellen was the host of the Oscars. She took this photo with some of the most famous people on the planet. She asked the audience to retweet and break the retweet record.
Twitter actually broke. And Ellen’s Tweet broke the record for most retweets ever. At the time of this post, over 1.2 million retweets. And simply because Ellen and the Oscars took advantage of the global audience and the trend of selfies. Smart. Very smart. Seek out the opportunity in every event. There’s no guarantee you’ll break Twitter, but you can sure make an impact.
Here’s the epic tweet:
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
And here’s a Variety article to document the news:
3 LinkedIn Updates to Encourage You to Update Your Profile
While there has been a lot of fuss about Facebook lately, LinkedIn is quietly updating and upgrading its platform and is becoming incredibly valuable to its Members.
In this week’s video, I share with you three LinkedIn updates that should encourage you to check in with your profile and make some updates.
Click here to watch the video:
These updates are super helpful for those of us who want to keep an updated profile and make sure we are appealing to and connecting with the right people. The updates I discuss are:
1. Who’s Viewed Your Profile
This is the most viewed section of LinkedIn, and now they are giving us more information about who is finding you and more importantly – how people are finding you. Use this data to tweak your profile headline, summary and experience to make sure you are discovered by the people you want to connect with.
The snapshot looks something like this (will vary based on your own profile results):
You can now learn more within categories:
Industries of your viewers
What your viewers do
Where your viewers came from (how they found you, i.e. in a Group or via Search)
Keywords that led to you
Where they work
Where they live
My results definitely encouraged me to adjust my summary section! Please remember that your headline, summary and experience section should be peppered with your keywords, as these sections play in the search function and help you get discovered.
2. LinkedIn Opens Publishing Platform
LinkedIn has now opened their publishing platform to its membership. This provides all of us greater opportunity for exposure and to offer greater value to our network. If our articles consistently receive many views, likes, comments and shares, they we have the chance to become a LinkedIn influencer.
This is being rolled out over the next few months, but if you’d like to send in an application for early release (I did) then you can fill out a short form, provide two examples of the type of content you’d be publishing, and cross your fingers.
Apply early: http://specialedition.linkedin.com/publishing/
3. Encouraging Professionalism in High School Students
In August, LinkedIn dropped it’s minimum age for Members to fourteen. This was done in an effort to encourage students to begin thinking about their future, the moment they enter high school. LinkedIn wants to provide an advantage to ambitious students, recommending they follow university pages to connect with admissions and alumni.
One high school student wrote for the LinkedIn blog,
“I’ve discovered that the sooner you put yourself in the professional community, the better your chances of finding the opportunity you want.” – Rutha Nuguse
Perhaps this attitude will spill over into behavior on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, too. That’s why I love this push from LinkedIn. It reinforces that you are never too young to build your professional profile, polish your personal brand and manage your reputation.
This news has really made me think twice as to how I use LinkedIn and inspires me to be more proactive with my account. I hope it encourages you to do the same!
A Facebook Success Story
This week I enjoyed client visits in Orange County. And on the heels of my visit with Center Club, I wanted to share a Facebook success story with you.
As you may remember from my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, Facebook changed it’s algorithms. That means that the chances of our Page posts landing in the news feed of the people who like your page has changed. And what’s worse is that those chances have decreased. Facebook wants you to share content from big sources like Time Magazine or ESPN. Facebook wants you to share photos. And Facebook wants you to pay to get your content into the newsfeed of the people who like your page.
I worked with the Center Club team to determine how we could work around this. And here’s what we tested:
Increase the number of posts per day
Before the algorithm change, the Club was posting about 2 times per day. We increased that to 5-7 times per day. It is nearly impossible that any one of the people who like the Center Club page will see every post. That would be a nice problem to have!
Focus on the content
What’s the incentive for people to like, comment or share? While it’s nice to post more often throughout the day, it’s absolutely essential to make sure it’s quality content. For Center Club, the goal is to continually share content which helps Members take advantage of and enjoy their membership. Every post is Member-centric. And that also means that every department has a voice, so you see content from Membership, Private Events, Food & Beverage, Member Relations and spontaneous moments that are fun to capture.
Behind the Scenes
Members love interacting with the staff, and so the BTS type posts often perform very well. We geared up to share more BTS-type posts.
Contests
Simple trivia and photo contests are popular among Members. And it gives incentive to share the post on their own profiles. Our test period fell during Valentine’s week, and so the “Cutest Couple” contest was a big hit and certainly played a role in increased engagement. Center Club will post a simple contest each week.
Our team schedules their posts directly in Facebook (FB likes this more than third party apps like Hootsuite) and after two weeks of consistent posting, the results were in. We were delighted to see green arrows pointing up in all categories on our Facebook Insights
Page Likes increased 5.6%
New Page Likes increased 580%
Total Reach increased 172%
Post Reach increased 335%
Engagement increased 143%
The team is encouraged and excited to keep up their efforts. They now feel a positive challenge to reach out to the Members more frequently through the day and they are continually thinking about what they can share via social media. They are determined to “beat Facebook.”
My challenge to you is to give this a try and see if you enjoy similar results. Give it a week for your efforts to kick in for measurable outcome. Leave a comment to let us know if this worked for you. If you’ve found another way to work around Facebook’s algorithm change, please leave a comment below so that we may all learn. I’m sure there are plenty of you who want to avoid paying for your content to be seen and feel that we should have to pay for our content to be seen by people who have liked our Page. Especially when most of those folks are Members and who have a genuine interest (and need) to stay connected.
I’ll make sure to update this post in another couple of weeks and share if this method of more frequent posts continues to positively effect levels of engagement and reach.
Social Media Integration
It’s time for a confession. I’m a magazine junkie. Flipping through the pages of Vogue, InStyle, Real Simple and Travel & Leisure serves as my escape from the digital world. Even so, I often wear my marketing and communication hat while contemplating a time in my life when I might wear Prada. Sometimes that can be a good thing, because I’ve noticed that many magazines are using a full page to direct traffic to their websites and social channels.
But Glamour takes it one step further on their “See It, Share It” page. They call out the people who are pinning and posting, those who are interacting with them online. I love this. Glamour encourages social interaction with the incentive that your pin or post might make it to the pages of Glamour Magazine. Very smart. Glamour has found a clever way to integrate what’s happening in social media with their traditional form of communication. Here’s the See It, Share It page (note that this is a photo from the digital version, which you have to tap to read the captions):
And that is our challenge for this week: What can we do to integrate our social media activity with more traditional forms of communication like newsletters and magazine, websites and e-news? In this week’s video, I share tips for my clients – Private Clubs, Athletics, Greeks and Graduate Schools. Take a look:
The purpose of doing this is to encourage those online to visit and engage with your more traditional marketing pieces, and for those who are already avid newsletter or magazine readers to engage with you online. By integrating your social media with more traditional communication, Your are breathing life into all of your communication channels and rewarding those who interact with you the most. Your members and students gain recognition and reward, you grow effective brand ambassadors and highly engaged fans.
So now it’s time to tell me how you plan to integrate your social media into your traditional communication channels. Have you seen someone else do this really well? Leave a comment below and get this discussion started!
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JCPenny Missed the Train to the Super Bowl
These are four tweets that had everyone talking about JCPenny on Super Bowl Sunday, but for all the wrong reasons.
Here are the series of tweets in the order they were tweeted:
We're ready for the big game no matter the temp. Staying warm thanks to #TeamUSA mittens! http://t.co/xzB8FLljox pic.twitter.com/pqocEbkC9K
— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 2, 2014
Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0
— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 2, 2014
Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???
— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 3, 2014
Oops…Sorry for the typos. We were #TweetingWithMittens. Wasn't it supposed to be colder? Enjoy the game! #GoTeamUSA pic.twitter.com/e8GvnTiEGl
— JCPenney (@jcpenney) February 3, 2014
Apparently, the folks over at JCPenny thought it would be funny to tweet with mittens. It would have been funny if the weather had remained freezing and if their mittens had Broncos and Seahawks logos on them. But the mittens they used said “Go USA” and they used the hashtags #GoUSA and #GoTeamUSA. Not a mention of #Superbowl or #SB48 or even #brandbowl. It seemed they thought the “big game” was the Olympics? Hard to tell what they intended.
Apparently, Good Morning America was the only other brand who could find a clever way to respond, as that is the only retweet JCPenny made on the issue. The rest of us in the field of social media, branding and communication were talking about how far JCPenny missed the mark. Yes, thousands were retweeting and talking about JCPenny, but when most assume that the intern you’ve hired to do your social media posts is drunk because the tweets are so awful and off-topic, that is not attention you want.
Cutesy never works on Twitter, and ill-timed, irrelevant material works even less. I’m not sure why the JCPenny team didn’t have one more meeting before SuperBowl weekend to re-work their strategy, especially when the weather became a non-issue. Whatever their team is doing, they should read the negative sentiment as a major mis-fire and rethink the people on their strategy team. It just didn’t work. It is super clear that the marketing team doesn’t understand what does work during these types of events.
On a side note, Snickers took advantage of the situation and used the JCPenny missteps to boost their own brand, tweeting:
Eat a #SNICKERS, you’re not you when you're hungry RT @JCPenney Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0
— SNICKERS® (@SNICKERS) February 3, 2014
Now that’s how you do it. Timely. Clever. Funny. On point.
One of the other brand commercials who had their head in the game was H&M. Shortly after their first David Beckham commercial aired, they put up the “instant replay” on their Instagram Account. That was super smart. Want to see a lot of David Beckham again and again? Click here —> http://instagram.com/p/j7ycBBAUaN/ … It yielded high brand engagement for all the right reasons.
Finally, the Twitter feed for @Tide was on fire during the entire game. They found a way to integrate their brand with others. And yet they didn’t pay for a Super Bowl ad. For example, after the Cheerios ad, they tweeted a vine:
Adding a puppy to the family @Cheerios? Beware of puppy stains. @Tide #GetsItOut #SB48 https://t.co/hvKzXFm8q9
— Tide (@tide) February 3, 2014
And that was the opportunity they looked for in most of the big brand ads. From the Budweiser spots to some fun with John Stamos and the yogurt ad. Simply brilliant.
What was your favorite TV or social ad during the Super Bowl? Which ad was your least favorite? Leave a comment below and share with the rest of us. Unfortunately, I’m not sure any of the ads were strong enough to save us from the horror that was the Super Bowl! What a game!
Facebook Likes and Reputation Management
When I have the opportunity to speak with college students – student-athletes, Greeks or graduate students – I am always curious which point of the presentation will resonate most. Of course, college students believe they already know everything they need to know about social media and assume they are “doing it right.” So when I use examples from their own profiles, posts which are embarrassingly bad, they do tend to perk up and realize they have room to improve their communication skills.
This week, I was so pleased to speak with student-athletes at Cal State San Marcos. Athletic and Club Sport athletes joined me to learn how they can use social media and communication to achieve their goals.
During the presentation, I pointed out that one’s reputation also stands upon the types of posts and things you like and the people you associate yourself with online. Some of the students have liked more than 1000 Facebook Pages. I cannot even fathom what these Pages are, but with a quick glance over many profiles, they are not Pages which work to build a good reputation.
We also discussed the accounts they were retweeting. When Twitter handles like @ReallyStonedPanda and @WeedReport pop up in someone’s news feed, it’s a clear indication that they enjoy the content these accounts produce. Retweeting them is associating yourself with them and their content. And as you can gather from these two examples, this type of association does not work to build a good reputation.
Wouldn’t we love to believe that it’s just college students who do not take care with what they like and who they retweet? Many seasoned professionals have room to improve their skills, as well. So in this week’s video, I mention a few social networks and what you need to take care of to maintain a positive profile and manage your reputation.
A quick breakdown:
Facebook – Be mindful of the Pages you like and the posts you like, comment on, and share. Make sure your “friends” are people you actually know.
Twitter – Take care with who you follow AND who follows you. You are associated with both. Double check the Twitter handle and content of the accounts you retweet.
Pinterest – Follow people and businesses who have good content and who are reputable. Repinning pictures which are linked to “spammy” sites is not a good practice.
LinkedIn – Accept invitations from people you know, have done business with and who add value to your contact base. Remember my advice from my networking video – You want to be able to connect the people in your network. Help them in their business so they will help you with yours. (You can also check out the blog post on networking, too.)
YouTube and Blog Comments – Often overlooked, your comments on blogs and videos says a lot about you. What videos are you watching? What types of blogs do you interact with? If they are controversial on any level, your interaction with them paints you in a negative light. Your comments are discoverable online.
Finally, please remember that NOTHING online is private. It doesn’t take much to learn about a person with a simple Google search and a bit of browsing through social sites. When the recruiter or admissions officer, the media or your colleagues take a tour of your online profile, what will they find? And what will the things you like and the people you associate with say about you?
Tell me in the comments if you are a person who is diligent about managing your reputation. Do you already take care with what you like and who you follow? What other things do you do to protect your brand? Share your advice in the comments! Thank you!
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