Social Media to Aid in Employment

Each show consists of a conversation between a Career Moxie listener who writes in with a problem, the hosts, and a guest expert who offers tips and suggestions for how the problem might be solved. In our case, we had a wonderful person named Douglas who wanted to know how he could use his LinkedIn profile and blog (http://chicagopinot.wordpress.com) to move from a position as an administrative assistant to a career in the wine industry.

Listen to Our Conversation

You can listen to the full program below to hear how I used examples such as Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame to explain how to use the web to find and build an audience, and how that audience could help present Douglas as someone wine-focused organizations and businesses would want to take a look at connecting to!

(Click here if you cannot see the player in your feed reader)

What Else Could Douglas Do?

Would you add anything to my suggestions for Douglas? Leave a comment below?

Show Me the Data Stupid

Good marketers know the importance of putting emphasis on tracking performance. We’re data-driven people who need to show results for the programs we’ve made our leaders believe in (and spend money on!) Business owners are the same way in that they need to see what is working and what is just dragging down cash flows.

In the economy we’re dealing with today, if you cannot show a simple path to discovering what the ROI of social media activities could be, then it is almost a sure guarantee that businesses just won’t try it.

Five Simple Steps to Social Media ROI

That’s exactly what Eric and Adam provided in their presentation: a list of five simple steps to measure the ROI of social media activities. And guess what, it should look very familiar!

Here’s the quick list with my quick interpretation from the presentation:

1. Define desired outcomes – Just like any marketing program, what are your highest-level objectives for the business? And remember business objectives and marketing goals are two different items.
2. Understand your inputs – Identify what you are putting into the program in terms of people, tools, spending, etc. This is essentially your full investment in the initiative(s).
3. Find the tools and manage data flow – The importance here is on tracking and filtering everything. This is the the actual program in action with data being fed into your analytical tools.
4. Manage the team – Drive the program, manage the program, and support the program.
5. Do the math – What were your results? Measure, analyze, tweak, and repeat.

Fantastic job by these two and I am totally psyched about the future beta release of Argyle Social’s software. It’s core focus? You guessed it, tracking the performance and displaying the ROI of social media activities. Rock on guys!

Do you want to see their presentation for yourself? View the PowerPoint below or watch the video from the actual event.

PowerPoint Presentation on Slideshare

Video of Presentation on Vimeo

What Questions or Answers do You Have About Social Media ROI?

I’m a constant student and am always hearing about other individuals perspectives bout social media ROI. Do you have an answer to the question? Share it with us below in the comments?

Do you have more questions about social media ROI? Ask it below in the comments and maybe we can all come up with an answer!

• Can an outsider understand my business?
• Can a ghostwriter sound like me or like my business?
• Will it take more time and effort to manage a ghostwriter than it would to do the work myself?

All three questions can be answered in a word. “MAYBE.”

I ghostwrite for financial professionals — primarily advisors, accountants and attorneys. When someone asks me whether they’re a candidate for a ghostwriter, I ask questions of my own:

• Who’s your audience?
• What are your key messages?
• Do you have an editorial calendar?
• What’s the “voice” of your business?
  • Is it edge-y because the business develops cutting edge technologies?
  • Is it reassuring because it’s in health care?
  • Is it frisky because it sells to teens and tweens?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’ve got work to do before you begin your search for the perfect ghost.

Start with an editorial calendar

No matter what kind of product or service you provide, if you’re going to publish anything — from a newsletter to a social media update — you need a plan. Start with key messages and an editorial calendar. If you need help with this or other marketing/public relations tasks,  look for a writer who can provide that expertise.

A ghostwriter should have a working understanding of how search engine optimization (SEO) works, but beware the writer who tries to convince you to write in a stilted style to feed the search bots; this does not serve you well with human readers. If a prospective writer says something like “I  write according to a formula — I’ll put your top three key words in the title and front load the first two sentences with the top ten,” you’re not talking to a ghostwriter, you’re talking to a copywriter. There’s a difference.

Create a pool

Key messages and an editorial calendar in hand, tap your professional circles first. With so many corporate communications departments being downsized, domain experts who write well are a LinkedIn search away. I focus my practice on financial and economic topics because I know them best and don’t require any ramp up time. If someone called asking me to write about biotech I’d decline.

Whether a domain expert can effectively ghost for you is another matter. You’ll need to refine the search by chemistry, mutually-acceptable work styles, pricing, etc.

Audition

A good ghostwriter is in demand. Plan to interview a few potential writing partners and perhaps audition one or two of them.

Already writing a newsletter? Give the writer an earlier version and ask what they’d do differently. Never written one before? Give the writer three news topics and ask how they would propose to learn your voice before delving into the writing process. I use a voice recorder to interview my client on the topics (more on that below).

I will sometimes offer to do an audition piece on spec with the understanding that if the client hires me I’ll bill them for the work, but only if I feel the chemistry is right and there’s no risk on my side that they’ll love my work. If they don’t hire me they can’t use my audition piece in any shape or form.

Getting the voice right

If your business is more than “you” I recommend appointing a spokesperson for whom the ghost writes.  A spokesperson need not be a real person — think Geico gecko. The ghostwriter needs to slip into the spokesperson’s persona so if you don’t want to appoint a spokesperson you don’t need a ghostwriter, you need a copywriter.

I ask my clients to use a digital recorder when working with me; the digital file is easily attached to email. Listening to their recordings, I  glean from their inflection what matters to them most and pick up key words or phrases that they favor. I also find that people say more when speaking than when writing.  Clients may think they have two articles for their newsletter but when they start talking about the subjects I might “hear” three articles and a blog post.

One final note: In a ghostwriting relationship there’s a fair amount of front loading before the ghost can successfully get into a productive rhythm.  Hire someone who already knows your business/industry/profession so they’ll hit their stride more quickly. While a current staff member might be qualified for the job, don’t foist the job on an insider if they’re not the RIGHT person. The right hire will save time and effort.

For more on this topic, here’s my blog.

Good luck.

Tamela Rich, “An MBA Who Writes like an English Major,” lives in Charlotte, NC. Follow her on Twitter @TamelaRich or sign up for her monthly newsletter.

With the rise of social media (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) came the beginnings of the demise of traditional media (magazines, newspapers, TV, radio.) More advertisers are moving their marketing budgets from offline activities to online activities. A report by eMarketer projects that the online ad spending will continue to grow at a rate of ~1% from where it is today in 2009, at 9.9%, to 15.2% by 2013.

That begs the question of what affect this has on the media outlets that have always survived by garnering a large portion of a corporate marketing budget?

The Bleeding of Traditional Media

I call this the “bleeding” of traditional media. It was something that they actually saw coming, but seem to never guess would affect them and their $1,000,000 one page print ads. Traditional media marketing was always about hitting numbers. The number of impressions, the number of viewers, consistency, and frequency. Hit as many people as you can with your message and that will translate into a certain percentage of consumers converting to customers.

The problem is we’ve been marketed and sold to death! We’ve actually learned to AVOID ads. We walk, read, listen and look right past them! There are all sorts of reports and studies talking about “ad avoidance” from the likes of AdWeek, Huffington Post, and even the World Advertising Research Center! You people with Tivo, you know what I mean! Fast-forwarding past the ads! Shame on you!

But hello! This is the financial foundation of traditional media! So what are they to do?

Learn to Adapt or Die

Just like TV did not kill radio and video recorders did not replace TV shows, traditional marketing will not be replaced by the likes of social media marketing… unless they do not learn to adapt. It’s time for traditional media to move into the next phase of their existence. What that is we do not currently know, but what I do believe is that there is still a use of traditional media. They just need to figure out how to combine the concepts we love about social media: connecting and forming communities, relationships built on mutual trust, openness and honesty consistently communicated, and always looking for feedback that is applied not just requested.

These mediums are still great tools for connecting and disseminating information to large audiences of people. They just need to learn how to become a part of our communities of influence rather than trying to be the global dictator of them. So it’s learn to adapt or death is just around the corner.

What are your thoughts?

So what do you think? Do you think traditional media is dead? Dying?

How do you think they could adapt to form a sustainable medium?

Mark understands social media. He understands the lingo, the tools, and the opportunity in leveraging these tools to promote his business.  He understands what he needs to be thinking about in terms of his strategy for using these tools, and what he could expect to get out of their use. He understands that he should be tying in their use with promoting his ownership “story.” Mark understands social media.  He’s one of few business owners we know of who truly do. (Note: This is not a negative on those that do not understand, in fact, you’ll soon see how what I’m getting at is the failure in those of us that offer Social Media services in helping business owners understand what Mark knows.)

As a small business owner myself who teaches organizations how to develop and implement integrated marketing campaigns (including the use of social media,) I was both excited and a bit convicted when I read one of Marks’ recent blog posts called “Ideas for Social Media Types (from a Small Business Owner)” – Aug. 11th, 2009 – that gave thoughts about what small business owners actually need from us “social media experts.”

Most of us will pound the podium all day long about how you “have to be engaged in social media” and “social media is the new economy” or even “you’re old and outdated if you think traditional marketing is of any use anymore!”  Okay, okay… so I picked some statements from the extremists.  You get the idea.

There’s such a push as to why businesses need to get engaged with social media tools that we as marketers often forget that what they really want to know is how they get engaged and what they can expect from using these tools!  They’re business owners! They’re thinking bottom lines not connections and conversations!  They want accountability in their marketing and to know that pulling time out of their already busy day to engage people in a digital world is actually going to pay off for them in the form of either goodwill or what they really want, SALES!

What Mark posted really spoke to the core of us here at mPower Consulting who live and operate under the same rules of engagement with our clients that Mark spoke about.  Why? Because we didn’t start out in the realm of social media ourselves (yes, we’re older than you think!) and many of these were the same questions we had.  Owners need to know how to effectively use social media tools, not just why they should – no matter if everyone else is doing it or not!

Read Mark’s post, it’s fantastic insight for us marketers as to the mind and thoughts of business owners who we may be promoting the use of social media to!

So thank you Mark! Lessons learned!

If you want to share your feedback with Mark directly, you can comment on his site or connect to him on Twitter at @mark_hayward