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!

Can you have a social army without a general?

Sarah Carter

I argued recently in a discussion on LinkedIn that the future of social is the distributed team , that 17% of us trust a brand and 70% of us trust individuals in our  network – the personal brands.

The growth of that personal brand is a key tenet in the paper that I put together in 2012 on the Six Principles of Social Success.  It’s actually the second principle – immediately following that social needs to be an integrated element of your organizations business plan, not a stand alone solution.

The discussion came about, because of a great article from Erica Ayotte – who writes for Social Media Today – Erica wrote about the recent phenomena of “firing all the social media directors”, when the latest new big shiny thing comes along.    Believe me you want to join this discussion, there are some great comments and dialogues going on.

I do very much agree that the growth of social is about the development of the personal brand, enabling the distributed team, empowering them, and making them brand ambassadors.  This is where I believe we will see true value from social, the individual brand that we all engage with. That said. They’re the army, the foot soldiers, not the generals. Without a general you don’t have a strategy, a direction or a battle plan.

Strategy and battle planning takes experience and in the brave new world of social battle worn, campaign hardy individuals are absolutely what we need.

If you’d like to know more about what it takes to build a personal brand on social, then why not join me at 9 pacific on Thursday 17th Jan for 30 minutes and you can find out more – I look forward to seeing you there!

Social media eDiscovery Webinar

It’s a new year, yet the social media train continues along its tracks.  As social becomes further ingrained in our daily lives, both personally and professionally, the legal community is quickly realizing that social media cannot be ignored for eDiscovery.  Increasingly, we’re seeing more lawsuits that are social media-related.  Although it’s a still-evolving area of law, the body of case law is steadily growing.

Actiance is excited to announce a new webinar series focused on social media eDiscovery.  You’ll learn about eDiscovery basics and what’s driving corporations and law firms alike to think seriously about their social media strategies.  We’ll discuss some of the key drivers for social media discovery and the technology solutions available to capture this type of content.

Our very own, Norv Leong, will be delivering the webinar.  He’s a licensed member of the California Bar and is also the author of the Actiance white paper, “Social Media and Litigation:  Outlining eDiscovery Issues.”  He’ll bring to bear his twelve years of experience in the technology and legal sectors to educate you on the key issues of social media eDiscovery and to share his insights on an effective social discovery strategy.

We believe that social cannot be overlooked for any organization’s overall discovery strategy, so please join us on February 8^th at 11am PT to find out why. Register at http://info.actiance.com/eDiscovery-webinar-2