Avoid the Social Ghost Town: Five Tips

I’m presenting one of Actiance’s regular education webinars this morning, my topic is personal brand and how you can use social to build and maintain it.  I’m checking my slides, working through my commentary and I get to my section on establishing a brand presence.  The final bullet point on this slide is “No Ghost Town Here” and that makes me think that that’s actually one of the most important points about building a brand on social.

You’ve got to be consistent.  What point is there in building a community, building a brand and then letting it fall fallow, go to waste and have no content?  Building a brand is HARD WORK.  It takes a heck of a lot of time, commitment and often a lot of money.  Building a brand that is engaged and engaging is harder. And it takes serious commitment to maintain.  If you’re not serious about that, then I question that you’re serious about the rest of your life/business.

By the time you read this, I’ll no doubt have delivered my webinar (its 0900 pacific and you can register here, if you do perchance read this in time), but fear not dear reader, we’ll be recording the session, and as with all our educational webinars, we run them live at a minimum every two weeks, so you can listen to the dulcet tones of one of the Subject Matter Experts here at Actiance, and ask us questions live on air!

However, I’m taking this opportunity to share some tips on how to avoid your brand becoming the social ghost town:

1. Commit.  You can’t be half committed to social.  you’re either in, or you’re not.  So either commit the time, or don’t.  Be realistic about your commitment.  If you’re only going to share content once a month, then, really, Twitter probably isn’t the place for you.  Actually if you’re not going to engage with your friends, followers and connections, then consider if social is the right space for your brand at all.. if you want to lurk, you can do that anonymously.
2. Have a plan.  I know I should start this with strategy, but lets assume you have that.  Now get tactical and look at what you’re going to share, how you’re going to engage and with what.
3. Sort your content out.  Content is hard work.  So you need to look up to bullet point one, and then build content into that.  And this isn’t as hard as it first looks.  Every business has content.  Fair enough it might not be in 140 characters of less, but you’ve definitely get content, and face it with 140 characters, you’re cutting it down, not adding to it!
4. Associate your brand.  You know the values that you want your brand to have (whether your brand is a personal or a corporate brand), so associate it with like brands – re tweet, re purpose, share blogs, follow news feeds.   If you ask yourself the question “should I retweet this?”, then the answer is NO.  Associate your brand ONLY with those that will reflect well on you.
5. Crowdsource:  Work through my list.  If you associate your brand effectively you will find other good content.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the thousand other networks out there let you collectively share content, so look for what’s popular, what resonates with your network and your aspirations and work that crowd (baby).
6. Darn it, I said five in the subject right?  ok this is the bonus point.  And to my mind its often forgotten and missed in our desire to see our Klout score go up and our Kred extend… LISTEN.  (sorry, don’t mean to shout.. but sometimes, over all the noise, on social listening, and THEN engaging is the most important thing we can do.

What did I miss?  What’s your tip for ensuring your brand doesn’t become a social ghost town?

PS:  My graphic today comes from Bodie State Park, California – a ghost town apart from the park rangers, and well worth the trip, its a superb state park with some great stories!

LinkedIn Endorsements: What should you do?

Sarah Carter contemplates a particular new Social Network feature set, that is causing some concern in certain sectors.

You can’t have helped but notice all the new features delivered by the social networks in recent months.  As a point in fact, here at Actiance, we’ve tracked a whole lot so far this year.   In 2012, we’ve tracked 150 changes on Twitter, 178 on LinkedIn and a whopping 1272 on  Facebook.

In today’s blog entry, I wanted to touch on one of the recent new features from LinkedIn:  Skills and Endorsements – the very term “endorsement” raises particular issues in the financial services industry, so I wanted to explain more about how you can deal with this.

With LinkedIn, there are two elements to Endorsements.

1)      Skills

2)      Endorsements of those Skills.

SKILLS:

As a LinkedIn user I can add a skill to my profile.  Once I have added this skill to my profile, ANYONE that I am connected to can endorse that skill.  Right now, I have no control over who can or cannot endorse me.  I can however, hide that endorsement.    Once I have hidden that endorsement, there is no current way to unhide it.

In addition to skills that I might add to my own profile, any of my connections can suggest a skill for my profile, with this suggestion comes an attached endorsement.  This skill (and endorsement) does not attach itself to my profile until I add that to my profile.  In other words,  I have to take affirmative action to make this happen.

ENDORSEMENTS:

Any connection I have may endorse skills that I have against my profile.  As the owner of that profile, I have no control available over these people adding this endorsement to my profile.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONS:

1)      Specify in your social media policy that items such as endorsements are considered recommendations and are expressly prohibited.  Advise regulated users that they should NOT apply or accept skills on their profile and should hide all endorsements if any are present.

2)      Enforce your written policy with technology and do not allow individuals to add Skills to their LinkedIn profile (i.e. control with technology, moderate all profiles and ensure that these additions are rejected).

3)      Search all existing (relevant) users to provide a report on who has Skills against their profile.

4)      Request the removal of skills against those relevant users  and/or hide any endorsements that are present.

Actiance provides technical controls to report on the addition of Skills and Endorsements to LinkedIn profiles for regulated users, the Socialite platform also enables firms who require additional controls in this area to pre approve changes to areas of static content, such as LinkedIn Profiles.

Through a combination of teams at Actiance, from our Social Media Labs to our Social Engagement Team, Actiance provides alerts and best practice notifications to customers of changes on social networks, that positively or negatively impact a best practice approach.  If you’d like to speak to one of our social engagement team, drop us a line social@actiance.com or drop us a message through @Actiance