And now, through the Ottawa Community Manager Meetup group started by Angelina Munaretto and me, I’m fortunate to be constantly meeting great homegrown community folk. Over 60 current and wannabe community managers in our little town, who knew?! It’s fabulous news because I happen to think community management is a really hot career to be in and I love meeting others in the same boat…
So thinking of all the awesome community people I know, there are many qualities we all share that I think make us all good at what we do. Here’s five I can pick out right away:
Social – Perhaps this one is a big “duh!” but I’m going to throw a little hook in it. By social I don’t mean popular or outgoing. I mean someone who can easily connect to others and is interested in meeting both like-minded people and those with different view points. Although communities are almost always formed around common interests, that doesn’t mean all the members are the same. In fact every community I’ve been involved in is quite diverse, and a community manager needs to be able and interested in relating to all of them.
Curious – In my mind, being curious means willing and able to learn quickly. A community manager need not start out tech savvy but if he/she is really curious about how something works, learning about it quickly is easy. Also back to the social point. If you’re curious about people it means you’re willing and able to listen and ask questions and that’s the best way to get to know your community members.
Boundless Energy – Have you ever looked at a community manager’s day book or agenda? A community manager thrives off being around people, both online and off. As much as I love the occasional lazy day in front of the TV, I’d never do it at the sacrifice of a good time. Even if a community manager has family commitments or otherwise can’t be available always, you will find him/her taking advantage every given opportunity.
Multi-disciplinary – While community managers come from all different backgrounds, many share similar skill sets that crossover into several disciplines. Perhaps a by-product of curiosity, but you’ll never hear a community manager say “that’s not in my job description!” (Though this could be because he/she wrote the job description).
Passion – OK while it may seem like a real cliche thing to say, it’s totally true. I’m not sure any of us could really dedicate so much to what we do if we weren’t completely passionate about it… Am I right?
I listed five for the sake of brevity, but I’m sure I could go on about this all day. However, I’d love to hear what you think… Either from other community managers, or those who observe them.. What would you add?
The more time you spend on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, the more benefit you derive from the experience. I often find it hard to describe a lot of the personal benefits I get beyond connections and fast access news, but after a little creative thinking I’ve put together five unapparent benefits to social networking:
5. An insatiable thirst for knowledge
I honestly can’t remember if I was like this before and it was amplified, or if it’s a new quality all together, but I’ve definitely noticed that I now crave knowledge. I need to learn more and I need to at least skim Twitter to see what’s happening in my community/country/the entire world. Even on weekends and days off I’m always checking my phone (when appropriate! Not in the rude anti-social way!)
4. A newfound willingness to take risks
Or perhaps I mean the ability to take more calculated risks; when you’re exposed to more, you can make better decisions. For example, if I wanted to start a business helping restaurants with marketing, before I would maybe look up a few web sites, makes some calls and try to get an understanding if there were a need for such a service and if my potential client base would be willing to pay. However, without a lot of money to do proper market research (let’s face it-most entrepreneurs definitely don’t have money for it), I’d have to rely on a very small number of opinions based on my limited time to do said research on my own. However, now I can simply passively research this info through Google and various social networking sites, poll or survey my Twitter followers and Facebook friends and I can get a better glimpse of the risky industry and whether or not my idea will fly. Sure it’s still not as accurate as proper research, but it’s a whole lot better than what I was going to do.
3. A humbled world view
I admit, I’ve often been a “big fish in a small pond” kind of person. I exceeded in school and many hobbies/sports but mostly participated in small communities, as is pretty normal in the offline world. Secondly I’ll admit I’m a bit of a competitive person, not in a malicious kind of way, but in the sense that I’m always looking to benchmark myself against others, so I can work on improving. Well online there are so many more people doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s humbling–which is awesome because it gives you a great sense of how *much* you can improve. And yes, on the flip side this can also be discouraging, but we all know the best out there know how to persevere!
2. A stronger sense of confidence
Especially as a writer (or any creative field) you always practice your craft with a certain level of vulnerability. You’re putting yourself out there. It’s scary. People will judge you. You might make a mistake. To me, it seems like whenever I’ve gone too far and lost my sense of what I’m doing, the community around me chimes up with words of encouragement. Even when things go wrong, there will always be someone backing you up and cheering you on.
1. An optimistic view of the world
OK maybe you’ve caught on that I’m generally an optimistic person… But I’m talking about something bigger. For all the awful things going on in the world, it’s amazing to see people band together for the greater good. There are so many great examples, but most timely is @unmarketing’s Tweetathon for Tanner (go on, read the whole story and try not to shed a tear!) it ends tomorrow at 9 pm and since earlier today has already raised over $8,000 for a very worthy cause. Also take any natural disaster–even the most recent floods in Pakistan, a simple search shows many tweets urging help and many have been retweeted hundreds of times.
Have you noticed the same? Do you have others I haven’t mentioned here? Please share! (Especially because I’m super excited that I finally have Disqus running on here! Yea, sometimes I’m not such an early adopter–and this blog gets neglected.)
No doubt you’ve seen the Old Spice Man on Twitter, responding to tweets with videos, exciting both influential tweeters, celebrities and regular folk alike and getting covered on pretty much ever blog and media outlet out there…
While I definitely agree with the masses that this was a well-executed campaign-it was funny, engaging and captured the attention of so many, but I’m still reluctant to declare it a resounding social media success story (yet?) for a few reasons. And more importantly, these are some factors to consider before you go out and try to replicate Old Spice’s success (since I’m sure already this will be a case study social media experts everywhere will be preaching to the masses):
Will it increase sales for the company? My guess would be quite possibly, but we don’t know yet, it’s simply too soon to tell. Aren’t we always whining about business outcomes and that success needs to be based on more than just eyeballs?
What about ROI? Sure maybe they’ll get fantastic results, but clearly they spend A LOT of money on this campaign.
Did Old Spice really take a big risk with this campaign? Well not really, the built it off an already successful ad campaign–which don’t get me wrong was a very smart move, but let’s all remember that when we’re trying to build our own loveable brand character.
Doesn’t social media require long-term commitment and ongoing strategy? Obviously they can’t keep up the videos for ever. where will they take it yet? How will they keep their new-found audience engaged? I’m not saying they won’t but perhaps we should wait and see before we declare this the most successful social media campaign of all time.
Maybe I’m just a little bitter because my man already wears Old Spice (long before Old Spice Man even) and now every man will smell like him? Either way, I love the campaign but I’m saying stop the madness–at least until we’ve had enough time to step away and see the whole picture.
And now, for your viewing enjoyment, the original Old Spice Man ad that started this all
The report made quite an impact. I don’t know about you, but I hear about it everywhere. As well, I’ve heard quite a few remarks from people who defensively claim: “I don’t tweet what I’m eating for breakfast!”
Ok. Fine. I get it. There are some people (usually outside of the social media bubble) who tweet silly mundane things all the time.
But here’s the thing, do you know what’s worse that finding out what someone ate for breakfast? Following someone who only tweets links. Unless you’re already a famous person or trusted source, you are not going to build trust and relationships but simply tweeting links to blog posts or news articles. Yes many of us have nearly or altogether replaced our RSS readers with links we get from Twitter, but we’ve done so because we appreciate reading links from trusted acquaintances who’ve we’ve come to know through our interactions, and yes, the occasional breakfast tweet. Not personality-lacking link bots. Twitter is not a broadcast tool. We have quite enough of those. Get out and interact, and throw in the occasional breakfast tweet (or cute thing your cat did, or whatever else might be dismissed as pointless babble). I will appreciate it.
This is my second year going, and I’m excited. So excited, that I anticipate to be tweeting about it… A lot. In fact, if you follow many people who are going, I can guarantee you’re going to get sick of hearing about it. (I remember the feeling in ‘08)
Good news for you, there are now a handful of tools available that will let you temporarily mute followers or keywords. Here’s a list from Oneforty…
However, if you *do* want to follow what’s going on at SXSW. Leave a comment and let me know what you want to hear about! I’ll do my best to accommodate.
Although the term was thrown around a lot at this year’s GTEC, Tim O’Reilly was the only one who thoroughly—and inspiringly—defined what it meant.
Given that I don’t work in IT, or in the government, I felt a little like a fly on the wall at this conference (that brings together leading experts from all levels of government to collaborate on what citizens want with a technology focus). However what drew me to it was Tim O’Reilly and he did not disappoint. One thing I really wanted to take away was a better understanding of “Gov 2.0” and what it really means.
The funny thing about buzzwords is the more they are used the more meaning they lose. Even the term Web 2.0 has many different meanings depending on who you ask. Since O’Reilly is at least partly responsible for defining the term, I have a hunch he knows what he’s talking about.
So what exactly is gov 2.0?
O’Reilly suggests it involves the following:
Citizen contribution and collaboration
use of social media
transparency
new methods of procurement
cloud computing
And what it all means is positioning government as a platform for citizens to build upon and help make better. The current model, which David Kettl explains is “government as a vending machine;” we put money in, and receive services in return. Straight foward, but is it effective?
The problem, O’Reilly states, is that the cost just keeps going up. An alternative model—that embodies the government as a platform idea—is to throw the door open to partners (i.e. citizens) and provide the data for them to collaborate and improve services. This would enhance efficiency and curb spending. It’s the gov 2.0 model.
I’m excited to see if this is adopted in Canada. Obviously our biggest concern (as usual) is privacy… Which, of course, someone asked about during questions. O’Reilly responded by quoting Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems who said: “you have no privacy, get over it”
Our parents and teachers spend a lot of time and energy enforcing good values on us. The most memorable–and important–is the golden rule:” Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Makes a lot of sense, right? Then why is it often lost in the business world?
In my general observation and experiences, most companies don’t follow this rule. Fortunately there are some fantastic examples (Zappos obviously comes to mind!), so not all hope is lost.
Here’s a few examples:
Do you enjoy receiving unsolicited bulk email? No, you don’t. No one does, so why send it?
Do you like when old high school friends (or whoever) send you mass Facebook messages daily to promote whatever it is their doing but never actually send a personal message? Probably not.
Do you like when someone follows you on Twitter, so you follow back, but then only floods your screen with self-promotional tweets and never engages in conversations? Not likely.
The positive side…
We can also look at it in a positive light:
Do you like being complimented? (I bet you do!) Why not try and compliment someone else every day?
Do you love your tweets being re-tweeted? Take some time to re-tweet whenever you can. (Hint: don’t always re-tweet people like Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki. They get lots of love already, look for the hidden gems.)
Do you love having an old contact/friend reach out to you randomly, just to say hi? Why not take the time to re-build some old relationships, you never know where you may end up finding a great business connection.
Just a random thought for the day. I’m sure we all know and understand this, but I think sometimes a little reminder can help us all. What are you doing about it today?
Every Friday, it seems my Twitter stream gets flooded by Follow Friday recommendations, from people who post tweet after tweet of a list of Twitter users with no rhyme or reason for the recommendation. I sent a tweet out asking if people actually even clicked through these types of FF tweets and got several replies that made it obvious others were a little annoyed.
Later in the day, one user I had previously unfollowed–but who noticed and made me feel bad about it, so I re-followed–was flooding my stream with such tweets. I sent the person a DM saying (nicely) that probably the reason I unfollowed was the Follow Friday stream invasion.
The person replied to me publicly basically saying I should lighten up. As someone who values the people I follow, I don’t like my stream clouded with insincere #FF tweets. It takes away from other valuable info I could be reading, I don’t think I’m being uptight about it.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people do #FollowFriday really well. For example, when they state what the people have in common (even as simply as also tagging #Ottawa to suggest they are fellow Ottawa Tweeters) or with a little more effort: I love @GiniDietrich’s approach, who posts her detailed recommendations on her blog and then links to it. But as far as just multiple tweets with something generic like “Cool people to follow!” It’s sucking up useless bandwith and taking up space that could be used for valuable tweets.
BTW-the person I butted heads with over it… I checked their stream, last Friday they posted over 60 #FollowFriday posts, all exactly the same, with a list of random names. I clicked through a few and some of the recommendations were even spammers! I went back a little further and saw the person only seems to post 2-3 times all week, and then the #FollowFriday recos…
Am I uptight? Or do you agree that’s a big waste of tweets?
I bet any company who’s fallen into the latter wishes they *had* been proactive…
I’m getting at companies that learn hard lessons from social media: take United Airlines–learning right now. In every one of these cases, (some other notable ones are Dell and Comcast) the company was infamous for bad service, but consumers were helpless. Particularly with United–which is often a cheaper flying option–I suppose United figures that since it has the best prices, it need not worry about offering good service.
A little over a week, and over 3-million views later, and lots of media attention, United has been scrambling to respond to media inquiries to deal with this crisis. More notably however, they have not engaged in social media.
While only dealing with tradional media will help get their message out, the reality is more and more people are accessing news and information online and even through social media (I can be guilty myself sometimes!) United risks not reaching many of those who caught the original story. (In other news, West Jet embraces the opportunity to respond via a Youtube video, though, it gets pulled down, likely because West Jet doesn’t have a perfect guitar track record themselves)
Dave Carroll, the maker of the Youtube video has publicly rejected United’s offer to reimburse for his guitar, and says he plans to make another two videos.
However, lesson learned here is that any company should be at the very least monitoring and tracking what’s going on online. The last thing you want is to be dumbfounded by a customer angry at you. While these types of stories (read: Motrin moms and Dominos) do fade pretty quickly, they still live forever online and likely leave a bad brand impression on many. It’s also a missed opportunity to show the online world you’re savvy and ready for whatever it can dish out.
This is a continuation of a class I did with the Algonquin College first-year PR students (The aptly named “Twitter party”). If you are one of the students–thanks for attending and I hope you’re able to continue to build your brand as well as understand the tools for practical PR application. Also, feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you thought of the presentation, or if you have any questions. If you weren’t there, well my hope is you’ll get value out of these resources anyway. Also, I’d love my readers to drop a comment and add any more resources that will help them excel with Twitter & LinkedIn.
And to recap, here are the 11 things you need to remember to succeed with Twitter.
11. Build a profile
The more information you can put in your profile the better. Try to load up your bio with keywords that will help potential followers identify what you’re all about and what you’ll be tweeting about. Do not worry about having complete sentences–it’s often better not to, so that you can get more info in. Also–put up a photo. It doesn’t have to be a photo of you if you’re camera shy, but at least find an icon or something that represents you.
10. Find people to follow
Once you’ve set up your profile and posted a few tweets, you’re ready to find people to follow, here are some sites to help you out:
Twellow is the Twitter yellow pages. Search for people based on info in their profile (user name, bio, location)
Twitter’s search function can be used to find people who are tweeting about a certain subject or keyword that may be of interest to you. Also you can use the search to follow a hash tag (#) that interests you and follow those people who are tweeting about it.
Mr. Tweet is your personal twitter assistant who will make recommendations on who to follow. All you have to do to get your personalized report is follow @MrTweet
9. Get used to 140 characters
That’s the limit twitter gives you, so you may find yourself editing to get your message across clearly and succinctly. Remember if you want people to retweet you, you may want to keep it even shorter (110 is a good guideline)
Also, if you want to tweet links you may want to use a URL shortening services,
http://idek.net is my favourite because it provides stats about who clicked on your link
http://bit.ly if you’re really serious about tracking and stats, bit.ly lets you create an account and track all your URLs.
http://is.gd creates the shortest links, so if you’re pressed for space it’s a good choice.
There are tons of these services out there, and you can drag them onto your browser bar for easy one-click URL shortening. Also if you do decide to use Tweetdeck, it has URL shorteners built in, so it’s even easier!
8. Listening vs. Tweeting
I recommend you spend 80% of your twitter time listening to what your followers have to say, and 20% tweeting. This will help you get more benefit from those you follow and help you avoid over-tweeting.
7. Ask yourself “Who cares?”
If you are looking to build followers, ask yourself “who cares?” before you post. You want to provide value to your audience with each post. This doesn’t mean you can’t inject a little personality, but make sure you’re providing valuable information.
6. Put yourself out there!
If you want to build followers, don’t protect your updates–if someone doesn’t know you, they will not likely request to follow your updates.
5. Promote cool stuff –and not just your own.
It’s perfectly OK to post links to your blogs, or maybe a cool project you’re working on (so long as it’s of value to your followers) but don’t *only* promote your cool stuff. If someone else tweets something you like, retweet it by putting RT @[their_username] and copying and pasting the original tweet. Also if you happen across a cool web site in your daily life, tweet it!
4. Join the conversation
To reply to another user: type @ before the user name. It will automatically link to his/her profile and show up in the side bar even if he/she is not following you.
If you want to join in a hash tagged conversation, just stick # in front of an established keyword or acronym. If you want to start your own, just stick # in front of a keyword of your choosing. To follow hash tag conversations, go to search.twitter.com and search the tag (note you can search inside Tweetdeck too)
One example of a regular hash tagged discussion is #journchat it happens live on Twitter every Monday from 8 to 11 p.m. EST. You can follow the conversation here–by typing in #journchat into search.twitter.com
3. Learn three ways to tweet
Stuck on what to say? Try these common types of tweets:
Ask a question: Twitter is great for asking question. Ask anything from “What Twitter apps would you recommend?” to “Where’s a good place for lunch in downtown Ottawa?” The larger your twitter network the more answers you’re likely to get.
Share a resource or wisdom – Post interesting facts, tips and quotes, people love them! Also, if you find a great website, share it with your twitter network. These types of posts can really add value for your followers, so go crazy.
Report on news and/or events – If you happen to hear/see something before it hits mainstream media, tweet about it! Some great examples of news stories broken on Twitter include the Mumbai bombings a few months back as well as the plane crash in the Hudson river.
2. Try some Twitter Apps
First and foremost, try Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allows you to create groups of followers to track separately from your entire stream. For example, you may want to create a PR group that includes your classmates, profs and other PR grads on Twitter.Tweetdeck also allows you to search,
Also you can use Twitscoop to see trending topics via a ‘tweet cloud” (i.e. a cluster of words of various sizes that shows you what’s popular on Twitter)
Also, for a ridiculously exhaustive list of Twitter apps, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki. At least take a few minutes to read through what’s out there. There’s an app to do just about anything with Twitter.
1. Be yourself & have fun! Self explanatory…
Tips for using LinkedIn
I totally agree with Andrea and strongly recommend you also join LinkedIn. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and here are some tips to get the most out of using LinkedIn–which unlike Twitter, does not require a lot of time commitment–at the very least sign up, create your profile and just leave it at that, but you can do much more with it if you choose.
Think keywords when building a profile. Like Twitter, before filling out your profile think of keywords that will describe you professionally. For example, don’t just say you’re a public relations student. Say you’re a public relations student interested in media relations, corporate communications and social media looking for work in the nonprofit or private sector. (Or whatever it is you’re interested in)
As a general rule, only invite/connect with people you’ve met/interacted with in real life. Unlike other networks, people like to keep their LinkedIn profiles with real life contacts. Some may allow “virtual” connections, but unless you’ve heard them say it, avoid adding someone you haven’t met.
Give–and ask–for recommendations. Personal recommendations not only help you look better, they help your profile turn up in search results. Also some LinkedIn jobs require you to have recommendations to even apply so it’s not a bad idea to ask for recommendations from former/current employers and colleagues. If you’re too shy/timid to ask, than recommend some people yourself, they just may return the favour.
When sending an invitation to connect, write a personalized message. Unless it’s someone you know really well, take a minute to write a personalized message in the invitation. This is especially key if you’ve met someone at a networking event where they might have also met many other people, if possible mention something you spoke about. (e.g. “Hi Fred, We met recently at the Night of the Roundtables event at Algonquin College. We had a great chat about doing PR in the nonprofit industry. I’d love to connect with you & stay in touch.”)
After collecting someone’s business card, add them on LinkedIn. Personally, I’m famous for collecting business cards and never following up (unless we discussed something to be followed up). However, now I treat LinkedIn as my personal contact database – I add someone after I meet them (with a personalized message) and then instead of digging through business cards if I need to get a hold of someone, I just look them up on LinkedIn. And *yes* almost everyone is on LinkedIn these days.
As we also discussed in class, both these tools are fabulous for promoting events and/or campaigns. However, if you start using them now–and not just when you want to promote something–you’ll be able to build a solid network of influence so that when you do want to promote something, you’ll have genuinely interested people who’ll listen and want to help you out!
Social media events in Ottawa
As great as online communication can be, it still doesn’t beat face-to-face communication. If you’re interested in social media and want to learn more, here are a few local events I’d suggest attending.
Social Media Breakfast happens about monthly and always features an awesome speaker. Costs $10, but well worth it!
Third Tuesday Ottawa – is a PR/social media event put on by Thornley Fallis. It’s free and always a great time. Don’t be fooled by the name though, it rarely *actually* happens on the third Tuesday. Sign up for the meetup group to get alerts when it’s happening.
Social Media Book Club – is put on by me and Scott Lake. About every 2 months we read a book and get together in a bar to chat about it. The good news is you don’t actually have to read the book, but it helps!
Good luck with the last few weeks of your first year!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=dda70246-f9ae-49e5-b5b6-6f4a33b0d984)