You Screw Up Social Media Too?!?!?

I often have conversations with people who are new or light users of social media. I'm very frank in my conversation - as I am a complete Twitterphile you would think I'd tell everyone you must tweet to participate in social media. No, I don't in fact, I tell people to LISTEN before you get involved with social media. I also tell them when I'm learning something new that I screwed something up. They always reply "You screwed something up with social media? I'm so happy!" It's such a funny comment and it gives a window of perception of the newbies. They think that if you're using social media tools actively, you are always using them correctly.



Nothing is further from the truth! I just double tweeted at someone because I'm still figuring out the tricks to the newly rehashed Tweetdeck. I imported my Blogger Blogs to Wordpress and somehow overlapped my general market blog with my social media content - and it may have been the best mistake of my job search! (I may be selling myself short by keeping my social media content seperate from my general content - plus I could simplify my life down to one fewer blog? Great!) Why would I not want to make mistakes? I can't think of a reason to not make mistakes. My pro-mistake arguments are - 1st I'm human, we all make mistakes - (even if we don't like to confess to them); 2nd I learn from my mistakes; 3rd some mistakes make things easier for me and require moderate adjustments and I move forward with a brave new view of the world. Mistakes pave the path to innovation and they make you better than before. You may learn to do something differently, you may mistake your way into being more efficient and you can always mistake your way into more knowledge!

Make Mistakes - here is proof that the sun will come out again & the world will continue to turn!

There is only one disasterous mistake - that is not trying something! If you don't try something, then you won't learn anything about it and you may miss an opportunity to find a new world, a new hobby, a new love in life. So charge out, make mistakes, pick yourself up and make some more! If anyone has a problem, tell them I said it was okay!

No Room for Snobs in Social Media

I encountered a couple of snotty people at a social media-based gathering recently. It was one of those moments where an accomplished Master's degree-holding Marketer, wife, mother and pretty nice person in general slunk away ashamed that I'm more concerned with paying my mortgage than getting the latest iPhone. Ok, so I'm not ashamed at all of my priorities, but I did feel like I was missing out on a great secret to social media success without an iPhone or at least an iPod touch! I felt feeble for not having the data package on my Voyager Smartphone.

(Image taken from the apple store - thanks!)

It took me a few days to process just why these Gen-Y devotees instantly diminished my sense of belonging with the social media it-crowd du jour - they were being snobby. Serendipitously, a few days later I was sitting in a room of real social media it-crowders - people actually making money from it - and was buoyed instantly through a brief conversation with one of the panelists. He said to me "Social Media is not about the gadgets." Our conversation went in another direction, but he was right - my lack of a job begets my lack of a data package for my schlumpy voyager and it certainly is why I don't have my iPod Touch. I don't have a job, I'm a subsidized brainiac on the couch at the moment. Yeah Yeah, no secret there. I would have the gizmos if I had a guaranteed salary next week.


What I have working for me is the ability to churn out content and create relationships around this amazing technology. That is what social media is about. Now the snobby kids have one thing right - getting together over a shared interest in something is great...but looking down your nose at someone and immediately ousting them from your little cool crowd is a sure fire way to fail at social media. If Snobster & friends had really understood the value of social media, they would have branched out a little further and showed me the coolness of their iPhones. They could have set up one of the cooler features for me and let me play with their phone for a minute and engaged me in a conversation about it. Not only do I really want an iPod touch, but I really want to try one out first, so these people lost out on an opportunity to be true social mediaphiles and brand ambassadors for Apple. I'm fairly certain Steve Jobs would be dissapointed in their lack of innovation on this point!

Social Media Overload

So in an effort to make sure I'm keeping my talks relevant, current and otherwise engaging, I attended a panel at Clark University's Graduate Center right off route 9 in Framingham this morning. Oddly enough I knew two of the four speakers on the panel from other lives: Eric Guerin's sister and I were grade school buddies and Jeff Cutler and I worked together at TimeTo.com a short lived, money incinerating dotcom. Mike Langford and Cappy Popp were two strangers to me - but I knew of them in the Twitterverse.

The panel was great and highly consistent with the information I share when I give my social media talks. They had a business audience and thought they were great about giving the small business owners candid, actionable information. Cappy talked extensively about LinkedIn tools for the audience and he cleared up a few details that were foggy for me. Cappy won some major points with me when he warned the audience about LinkedIn LIONs (Linked In Open Networkers) who were essentially contact collectors. Nothing frustrates me more than the feigned relevance of people who are LIONs on LinkedIn. Their predatory use of their personal collections names as equity is just a clear abuse of LinkedIn as a social media tool. In the email world, these people are called Spammers.

I felt the panel lead the room and gave some great intelligence on the pros and cons of rolling social media into their small business marketing activities. The one thing that frustrates me to no end with these panels is that they are lumping social media into one blob of a topic and are not considering that to really educate people, lumping the "Big 3" (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) into one talk are in essence, useless! (Please note, I'm NOT blaming the panel, I'm blaming the people organizing the panels!) You are not giving your audiences enough time to absorb enough information about one of these tools so that they can go back to work and take meaningful actions towards getting their businesses effectively active in any of the tools. People that are booking these panels and talks are missing out on the big help they are trying to deliver...which is getting social media knowledge into the hands of the people who can bring these tools to their companies and help them build effective communities!

That being said, the panel did a great job helping the people in the room understand the effectiveness of social media is realized through the PEOPLE running the programs. They, in other terms, explained that push marketing would damage their social marketing efforts and the way to have a great community was to go where their audiences "lived" on social media and pull them in with offering meaningful content. I got it, but I'm worried that the room did not. I heard someone talking to Eric and Jeff after the talk and they still were stuck on building a mass community on LinkedIn. I can say it was a primary focus for this guy - the panel specifically answered his questions, but he didn't really have the time to absorb what they were saying.

I'm Officially Teaching Social Media

I have to pull together the marketing piece, but I will be teaching a class on "how-to" get started using social media. Obviously I'll be heavily twitter biased, but I'll be teaching people the secrets of building a network in Twitter and how to manage themselves online as someone who tweets.

Some of the quick deets:
Date: July 21, 2009
Time: 2:30-4:30
Where: Bentley CMT

Registration is limited to 35 people - so tell your Bentley Alum friends that need to learn to tweet that they should be ready to pounce when the registration goes up!

Twitter Trouble

I love Twitter, I'm always excited when I log on to see what the hot topic has fingers flying over keys each day. I also love social media - I'm one of the few people who think this is an amazing technology with years of development and new innovations ahead of us. While I'm fairly young (as in retirement is over 30 years away) I firmly believe that once I get back to work (stinkin' economy) I can ride out the rest of my career focusing on social media and the progression of thought generation from it. That being said - there is a content overload on Twitter.

Since Twitter is so new, there are a number of thought leaders that help ring in the next great things for social media. Boston has a number of people that have embraced this technology and have been such a great resource for me - some are other Bentley Alum - CC Chapman, Mike Lewis and Dan Schawbel. (In lieu of the standard twitter links, I pulled up their blogs - these men all have such great info to share and you're only getting part of the message through following them on Twitter.) I'm feeling an extra boost of Bentley pride today so I'm going to limit my name dropping to these three men (Sorry C.B. - I'm a big fan, but you went to the wrong school buddy!) Following these thought leaders on Twitter and through their companies or personal blogs will give you a great picture of the amazing and effective uses of social media especially Twitter.

Then there are the people that follow the thought leaders, secondary thought leaders and tertiary thought leaders then regurgitate it all over twitter. There's one in particular that is clogging up my twitterfeed and I'm thinking of clicking the "unfollow" button. He puts out good content, but he does it rapid fire, a few times a day and I can't dig through the bottom of his feeds to get to other people's content. As a result, I find ways to work around him. Part of the problem I have with him is that the content is mostly stuff I've seen and know about - sometimes things I've seen before. There are a few nuggets of great content that gets through to me, but his incessant (and automated) posting is driving me nuts.

Social Media has one of the fastest churns out there. The information is flying around constantly, so getting noticed can be very difficult. One thing about social media - that is a given - is that people want to get noticed, ahem, it IS called Social. So when I see this individual clogging up my feed - and I know some of my followers are also following him, it gives me pause. I have good content too - some may even think it's great content. So if I have the misfortune of trying to publish my content in the middle of one of his barrages, I'm likely going to get lost. I'm only one person, but when I post my content, it's actually me. I believe part of the power behind social media is the people driving it. So when I'm up against an autobot, I'm frustated.

Interesting (probably only to me) but as I started this post, I didn't know what I was going to do about this content cranker. But now that I've written it out, I've found my answer - I will be unfollowing him as soon as this is published. The thing is, he stands out, much like my Bentley trio mentioned above, but he does not give me that personal interaction that I get from the people writing actual posts on the other side of their @. And that is another way I will further refine my social media presence - by keeping it real...because we all know that's what it's all about!

Flexible Communication Styles are Essential

I gave a social media talk to a room that was primarily unfamiliar with the tools of Twitter and Facebook, but well keyed into LinkedIn. It's the stereotypical format of a networking group for the unemployed. Over 50 people were plugged in to what I was saying and had phenomenal questions. As for giving a talk in public, I'm feeling really confident that it went over well.

Always looking for an insight and personal learning, I had a frustrating conversation AFTER I gave my talk with a man who had a burning question about LinkedIn. He had a security concern and he kept asking me the question and I kept answering it. This happened at least 3 times and each time he asked AGAIN I tried to communicate with him in different phrases.

Two things were going wrong in the conversation - I was not giving him the answer he wanted and he was not stopping to digest what I was saying. Eventually I figured out the best way to get through to him was to answer the broader question about security first, and secondarily the specific area he was asking me to define. My original answers to him were addressing BOTH tiers of his questioning with the single answer.

While my initial attempt at answering his question would have been sufficient for some people, it was not working in our conversation at this point in time. We were clearly getting frustrated with each other, but once I gave him the answers in a format that he could digest, the frustration over the struggling conversation evaporated. I know what I told him gave him the correct information about his concerns, but I could also tell it was not the answer he preferred. It gives me a little more to think about and grow with in my social media quest and in my public speaking - I need to be able to accurately express myself in a number of ways and listening to the questions and really listening to the undertones of those questions coming to me are essential. Luckily my marketing career has given me the tools to communicate, but as with anything, there is always room for improvement!

Flex Your Social Media Muscles

New users to a tool like Twitter can be frequently discouraged. There is all this buzz, long-term users of the technology talk about how simple it is to get tweeting, and it seems like even your neighbor's cat has a twitter account (Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappo's cat has an account). So people are going to Twitter, signing up, following Oprah & Ashton Kutcher, sending them messages and getting no response. (Of course they aren't going to respond, they get dozens, if not hundreds of messages a minute - standing out is nearly impossible). It is easy to see why a person can get easily and quickly discouraged with their Twitter account right out of the gate.

Consider this - have you gone for a 26.2 mile jog from Hopkinton to the Back Bay on your first day out? OF COURSE NOT! People who run marathons start out small, running a mile (or less) their first time out. Eventually their body gets used to running and they go a little further and a little faster over the repeated days, weeks and months of training. Using social media is the same way. Not everyone who uses social media tools is going to be the marathon runners, some will be power walkers, others will be sprinters. The thing these people have in common is that they are doing this on a regular basis, day after day, practicing and getting better at it. They start off small, slow and eventually over time they create an effort that suits them, and they practice at it.

Adopting Social Media for New Users

I have been giving talks to networking groups in the area around Boston helping users get up to speed on the new Social Media technologies. I don't focus on the bleeding edge tools out there but the Elephants in the Room (pardon the cliche') Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook - the job seekers triple threat. I'm finding discussions out there that align with my best practices for starting with social media - especially Twitter.


Tyson Goodridge recently offered some tips I agree with completely:

Step 1: Social Media is exactly that, it’s social. If you are the type of person who likes to surround yourself with lots of friends and colleagues, you’ll find social media easier to digest and learn.

Step 2: Yes, it’s public. If you aren’t comfortable sharing parts of your life besides your name, resume and the name of your company, this may not be for you, and that’s perfectly ok.

Step 3: It takes time: Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t try becoming friends with everyone online. You can’t fake social media. If you’re not the same person (or company) online as you are offline, people will call you out on it.



He has captured a great rule of thumb for personal use, there are also business application considerations. The initial consideration is identifying the appropriate balance of social forum building for your business. This includes considering manpower (don't have your one Marketing Manager sink all their time into Twitter, don't have an intern manage Twitter by posting randomly and sporadically), using the appropriate tools for your business Facebook could be a great marketing tool for a teen audience, but you need to keep your efforts diversified with traditional marketing when you're considering the Baby boomers who are abandoning Facebook. (See Switched's May 27th article)



Companies need to take a careful, methodical approach to building their social communities. Throwing the idea of using Twitter at a traditional marketer is not going to implement this as well someone who is passionate about using this technology and bringing it to the general population. Utilizing a careful, methodical and dedicated approach with a marketer skilled in the critical thought process attached to the roll-out of such technologies is the best practice when implementing social media marketing tools.