Matt Charney

Matt Charney's Secret Social Stash

Archive for the tag “social business”

31 Jan 2012

Social Media Secrets for Small Business Success

Contrary to popular belief, not every big company is putting big bucks into spreading their brand and employer message via social media at work.

Most corporate social media functions have limited headcount, time and resources dedicated to social networks, demanding low-cost, innovative approaches for attracting and driving social media engagement, both current and potential.

That means the social media playing field for businesses has been leveled.

Small business recruitment strategies actually have a leg up when it comes to realizing the power (and profit) of social media. Breaking through the buzz doesn’t require a huge investment in manpower, tools or technologies. It takes dedication, creativity and experimentation to formulate and deliver the right message to the right targets on the right platforms – in other words, it requires a solid small business marketing strategy.

While there’s no “secret formula” for success, there are secrets that every small business owner should know when it comes to crafting a social media strategy. Here are eight social media secrets designed to give you a head start on the competition and capitalize on the conversation about your brand, business and bottom line.

Fax machines send the wrong message: Nothing makes your business appear behind the times more than advertising your fax number throughout your e-mail signatures, HTML newsletters, home pages and business cards. Ask yourself when was the last time you likely received an unsolicited fax which led directly to sales? More than likely, it’s back when you were jamming to an eight-track tape.

Secret: Exchange the prime real estate your fax number now takes up and replace it with links to your social profiles. Doing so instantly brands your business, signaling your willingness to engage with your customers and candidates. Besides, in the off chance someone needs your fax number, they’ll know where to find you to ask.

What the Hashtag? It’s a good idea not to jump into the Twitter conversation right away; it’s challenging to know which conversations you should follow when you’re starting out. Even harder is cracking the hashtag code.

WTHashtag.com solves both problems with one easy to use website that’s free (and you don’t even have to register).

Simply enter any hashtag into the search bar, and within seconds it displays top users, definitions, usage statistics and related resources. The best part, though, is its transcription service.

It easily captures a word processing-friendly transcript of all tweets using that hashtag over a user-defined period of time so you can read (and report) without constantly monitoring your feed. Why do that? Because you’ve got more important things to do.

Hint: For small business owners, popular hashtags include #smbiz, #smallbiz and #startup.

Blast Follow: Once you’ve found out which hashtags you’re most interested in, enter them into BlastFollow.com to automatically generate a list of all accounts referencing them. Put in your Twitter credentials, click blast, and you’ll start following all those users “en masse.’

You Don’t Have To Pay To Measure ROI: A growing number of corporations are using increasingly sophisticated tracking tools to monitor and measure the success of their social media efforts, paying a premium for advanced analytics, reporting and analysis.

While these technologies make sense for Fortune 500 Companies, your small business can generate more than enough data using free tools to maximize the influence and impact of your social media efforts.

When it comes to making friends on Facebook and YouTube, both channels provide self-generated reports for channel and fan page activity, respectively; this simply requires opting in on your business account to see analytics that are easy to understand and interpret. For Twitter, Twitter Analyzer is just one of many free options that provides advanced and accurate analytics. It’s a goldmine of actionable data, tracking unique readers, reach, retweet trends and most tweeted topics among its many reporting capabilities. When it comes to measuring your blog, Google Analytics remains the gold standard for its insights and interface.

Pipl.com: This “deep web” people search engine can help fill in the blanks about almost anyone. If you have a name, phone number, e-mail address or even a social networks username, this free tool will return all available online data within seconds, from public records to social profiles.

E-Mail Still Matters: Even with the rise in social media, most of your customers and clients, both current and prospective, likely still rely predominantly on email for communication. But for your message to break through today’s increasingly crowded inbox, you need more than a clever subject line.

For email marketing, check out Mail Chimp, which allows you to create, distribute and track customized HTML newsletter campaigns that can help small businesses make a big impact.

Their “forever free” plan lets you send up to 6,000 e-mails to up to 1,000 subscribers a month; if you need more, their pay for performance model guarantees you get what you pay for.

Case Studies Are Learning Experiences Social media’s all about transparency, which means that many companies make valuable information about their social media objectives and strategy publically available.

Reading case studies not only highlights real-life examples of social media initiatives that really work, but more importantly, what doesn’t. Two of the most comprehensive sites for social media best (and worst) practices are the Social Media Business Council and SmartBrief on Social Media, with new cases delivered daily to your inbox.

Finally, there are no secrets in social media…and that’s the point.

But you didn’t hear that from us.

Posted in Social Media and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
19 Jan 2012
1 Comment

Company Culture and Social Media

Culture Club

Company culture is a lot like meetings and memos: it’s an inescapable, and inevitable, part of the employee (and candidate) experience.

But with the rise of social media, virtual employees and global teams, new business paradigms mean that when it comes to communicating culture, it’s anything but business as usual.

At its core, every company’s “culture” is defined by its workforce, from CEO on down.

“Your company culture will be created accidentally or on purpose,” says Kirsten Ross, President of Focus Forward Coaching, LLP. “Your culture is your team machine,” she adds, “it either works efficiently or it has a lot of malfunctions.”

That’s why “fit” is so important to talent acquisition and development; but what does it take for employees, their managers, executive leadership and customers to engage with, and thrive, within a unique company culture?

Meghan M. Biro, CEO of TalentCulture, suggests that for HR professionals and executive leadership, culture is often a top down directive. Yet it’s the front-line employees who truly define the corporate culture within the organization. With the growing ubiquity of social media tools and technologies, they do so externally as well.

The good news for employers and talent managers: when it comes to reinforcing and even reinventing workplace culture, social technologies represent a powerful tool. If leveraged properly, it can help companies gain the winning edge when it comes to acquiring candidates and retaining top talent.

Social Media and Corporate Culture: 3 Strategies for Success

Here are some of the top corporate culture considerations and strategies to leverage social media that can help transform your workplace culture into a competitive advantage.

1. Conduct a Social Media Corporate Culture Audit: While you may think you understand your employer brand and employer value proposition, look to social media for more of the story.

Monitoring social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, along with discussion forums like Glassdoor.com and Quora can help identify some of the recurring themes and conceptions associated with your company culture and employment brand.

Comparing these comments with your employer branding materials and value proposition is an important first step. Listening to what the marketplace is saying (if it’s saying anything at all) also provides the evidence and insights necessary to build a business case and gain internal buy-in. A social culture audit should also help you identify the most active, and influential, voices who are discussing your workplace culture online.

2. Tap into the “New Water Cooler”: Corporate culture is no longer a centralized, uniform concept, given the increase in global teams, multi-national workgroups, and in many companies, increasingly siloed or specialized business units and functions. It has become the amalgamation of often dozens of drastically different workplace experiences and expectations.

Analyzing how these experiences differ across the enterprise can help you identify internal best practices that can be replicated throughout the company and highlighted in internal and external communications.

In the past, this sort of data was culled through anonymous employee surveys. In the new age of talent management, social media platforms present a “virtual water cooler” where employees can communicate about their unique experiences and perceptions of your company’s workplace culture.

Start by creating a destination, whether on an internal platform like Sharepoint or a secure external social network, where access is limited to employees. Populate a few questions or conversation starters, (e.g. “Suggestions for Improving Efficiency,” “How Can We Improve Internal Communications?” etc.)

Employee disengagement and dissatisfaction is largely driven by the perception that leadership and HR doesn’t value their input and feedback. An internal social network is one way to show that you’re listening and actively engaging around issues that matter to their employee population.

Of course, this sort of forum is only as effective as it is interactive. Be sure to monitor and respond to employee comments in a way that’s consistent with the company’s social media, employee communication and privacy policies.

3. Empower Employee Evangelists: Just as internal referrals can be effective means of employee sourcing, your employees can be powerful advocates in conveying and amplifying your corporate culture and employer value proposition.

While the message of almost every career site or corporate collateral espouses some form of “our people are our greatest assets,” actually highlighting these employees and letting them tell their own story, in their own words, sends a powerful message that goes beyond buzzwords.

Some HR and recruiting professionals block social media in the workplace, believing that it makes employees more visible, and thus susceptible, to talent poaching.

In fact, empowering top talent not only sends a powerful message externally that individual employees are valued and recognized. It also acts as a powerful employee retention tool. An employee who actively advocates your corporate culture effectively links their personal brand with your employment brand, creating a social media win for everyone.

Posted in Social Media and tagged , , , ,
12 Jan 2012

A Dose of Special +K

If you’re doing the obvious stuff when it comes to social media recruiting or engagement (Facebook fan pages, branded Twitter account, blog, etc.), you’re fighting an uphill battle.

It’s a crowded space out there: after all, if there’s a fundamental reason for social media’s appeal as a business and marketing tool, it’s the truism that everyone’s on it.

And with upwards of a billion users speaking dozens of languages updating millions of closed, interdependent communities (which is, pretty much, the definition of that ‘network’ part of ‘social networks’), it can be hard to make your voice heard.

If a tweet fell in the forest, and no one was around…

It’s not enough to be active on social media; that activity must meet specific business objectives or outcomes and, like any activity, must be measurable, scalable and sustainable.  But too often, in its nascence, social business has been treated largely as a necessary, inscrutable evil, like trust-building exercises or Successories posters.

It’s not a best practice just because everyone’s doing it.

This may come as a news flash, but social media, like talent management, is a process-oriented and metrics driven discipline that, when implemented properly, has a presence in every part of the employee life cycle, from recruiting to transitioning.

It’s also a discipline that’s predicated on winning the hearts and minds of top talent through building relationships, and that talent’s value is predicated primarily on the power of their referrals and references.  This is, coincidentally, the entire point of a talent community in the first place.

So how do you make your message stand out in the noise, and turn communities into candidates in a space that’s crowded with a litany of consultants, competitors and competing agendas?

Give a man tweet, you get content feed for a day.  Teach a man to tweet, and you get content feed for a lifetime.

Over a series of articles, we’ll explore some effective, largely untapped approaches to online engagement, that are more likely to get noticed than a “like” and more likely to get a response than @ replying:

Give Klout: A Special Guide for Special +K

You can question the value of having Klout, the accuracy of its scores, but the fact remains that influence, perceived or actual, is something that everyone wants, and that it’s crucial on social media.

And for the first time in human capital history, we’ve got the ability to quantifiably track and measure “influence,” while delineating the most influential members of any given network.  Including your employee population.  While the kinks are still being worked out, Klout has emerged as the market leader in the emerging influence analytics industry.

Register with Klout and you’ll be able to track your influence – and effectiveness – and how it stacks up against competitors, candidates, clients and your own internal benchmarks.  Signing up is one click using the Facebook Connect feature, and the basic product is free.

Once registered with Klout, you have the ability to give +K (Klout’s equivalent of a like) to up to 5 people a day.  ‘Klout’ is given for specific areas of expertise, like “recruiting & staffing,” “HR” or “talent management,” so it’s an easy way to engage (and search) around specific skills or subject expertise. 

Plus, you don’t have to be linked or networked with someone to give them Klout, however, the user will receive a notification with a link to your profile, so it’s also a good way to build your network, too.

The other great thing about Klout is that you know the relative influence and reach of the user before giving them a +K, and while their formula remains a secret, here’s something that’s not: those with the highest scores are also extremely likely to be regular Klout users.

That means they know that since users can only give Klout five times a day and there’s no way to automate it, it’s a highly selective, and highly personalized, engagement tool.  Plus, giving Klout actually plays a role in building a user’s Klout score.

This score actually means something to a lot of top talent; having your employment brand help build personal brands of clients, candidates and influencers sends a powerful message about your employer value prop and corporate culture.

Not to mention, like all worthwhile networking, the gesture’s more than likely going to be reciprocated.

And ultimately, influence is the difference between an accepted and rejected offer.

Matt Charney on Klout: http://klout.com/#/mattcharney

Posted in Social Media and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

Post Navigation

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: