As with any potential new job there are many questions & many unknowns in regard to one in social media. And to make it worse, I believe that there are many more because the space is so new.

I have been advising both employers and job seekers for quite awhile. Here’s a review of practical things to consider when you’re on that emotional high of having received a job offer:

1. job expectations? Do you know what your role will be? Has it been defined adequately? Be wary of a job that is too open-ended. Overall, make sure that the expectations are communicated from both sides.

2. a good fit? What is the culture of the company? How open are they to change? Social media requires a culture that has open communication and a focus on the customers.

3. salary? Only you know what you need, but don’t undersell yourself. I hear of too many companies expecting a lot of services for little or nothing. On the flip side I think that some investment at the beginning on your part can prove to be very fruitful. As with anything one must gain experience. This is an opportunity to show you skills. You can influence this by requesting that your status be reviewed in a shorter period of time than the usual year (which is really too long in the online world because things are changing so quickly).

4. how will you measure your efforts? This is imperative to plan for. You need to benchmark where the brand is at then you’ll be able to compare your efforts against that going forward. This will have a direct impact on salary. If you can prove that you’re efforts are having a measurable impact then you’ll be that much further ahead.

5. contract or salary? This really depends on many things. Contract work allows much more flexibility. I think that a more important question is what are your job requirements based on? hours or deliverables? My recommendation is that deliverables is much more flexible and suited to the role.

6. work remotely? More and more people are working remotely, but I don’t think that employers are trending toward this yet. I’ve worked online remotely since 2006. And before that I worked for a decade remotely because my Director was 75 miles away. I also supervised 7 library sites spanning 80 miles and it was no problem. We had phones, email, and transportation. Now I have IM, airports and my blackberry. It’s all the same and I believe that I’m more effective working from where I live.

7. should you relocate? This is also related to salary. What is the cost of living in the new location? Can you mediate the risks involved? Many people that ask me are considering going to work for startups. I loved working with startups so don’t get me wrong, but there are some inherent risks along with the excitement.

I hope that those provide you with some questions to ponder as you seek your ideal job. What did I miss?

It’s a busy time of year! Next week I’ll be in San Francisco for two events. I’m doing a 3 hour workshop at Enterprise 2.0 on Frameworks for utilizing social media. The diagram in my last blog post outlines the potential that a community manager offers an organization.

I will share how to use social media to:

This diagram summarizes what I have learned over the past year about how my role as a Community Manager influences the sales funnel. We are in agreement that social media efforts need to be measured. I will contend that the role of community manager or social media specialist requires you to show how you contribute to your organization’s business objectives in order to justify your presence (and paycheck).

I created the diagram to help us as practitioners describe our position and influence in the sales funnel. The concepts apply to B2B sales as much as to B2C. Too often I think that Community Managers are viewed as caretakers of forums and having the voice of the company. I will argue that it is so much more.

The Community Manager influences the sales funnel in a three dimensional way. We are everywhere: before consumers enter the sales funnel, assisting them as they move through it, holding their hand as they convert, and providing ongoing service after the purchase.

Building Brand Awareness before consumers enter the sales funnel:

This is where everyone sees Community Managers interacting with everyone. They make social media marketing look easy while they build brand & positive PR. They truly are the voice of the company as they deal with the positive as well as the negative. And they’re at events making things happen!

Assisting with the Conversion as people move toward the purchase decision:

A Community Manager is the industry expert. They have in-depth knowledge of the products and their application. And most importantly they’re very connected with the customers. Community Managers can be the Salesperson’s best friend when they need some extra assistance for the challenging questions. A Community Manager can also help with customer support issues both before and after the sale. This builds trust and confidence about the product/brand. If people know they’ll get good service they’re much more likely to purchase.

CrossSelling and UpSelling:

Our culture requires that we provide excellent customer service after the sale. So that’s considered to be assumed. The cone gets larger for a specific reason. Community Manager’s have many opportunities to educate customers about new features, additional products and provide resources. Many customers appreciate hearing about additional products or higher levels of service. It’s easy to work hand in hand with sales to provide for customer’s needs.

Product Improvements:

The opportunity to influence product development is a very important aspect of the Community Manager’s role. Working directly with the customers and sales provides much feedback as to what’s working, what’s not & ideas for improvement. As a Community Manager interacts with thought leaders and others involved in the industry they are well prepared to advise the executive level. And the final area is staff training & HR. A Community Manager needs a team. HR has the ability to empower the organization so that they can interact with customers. This will require staff training and the Community Manager to lead that & be the go-to person.

This is not to say that we need to forget social media best practices and push our message. I believe that Community Managers need to work in synch with Sales and provide assistance as needed. My experience has been that we had so much to teach each other. Once we hit our stride and realized how the two roles complemented each other we were able to run with it.

What are your thoughts? Does this help justify a Community Manager/Social Media Specialist in your business?

If you’re interested in reading more:

Responsibilities & Goals of the Community Manager Role

How We Grew Our Startup 840% in a Year

I covered the following:

• Which objectives to consider when defining your social media monitoring (SMM) strategy
• What types of tools are available
• How to make sense of the data that is gathered
• The ROI and benefits of social media monitoring

During the webinar it was interesting the exchange of Twitter usernames transition to  requesting to continue the conversation in a community. It underlined how people with a similar affinity will want to gather! Everyone is welcome to join our Community .

One of the challenges that I have in presenting webinars is that I feel like I’m talking to an empty space. But that wasn’t the case in this one. There was a lot of conversation happening in the chat box. I had 5 poll questions and that generated more conversation on the side as well making much more interactive. Here are the results:

Many of those that chose ‘Other’ posted their background in the chat.

I found this to be very interesting that the majority were B2B’s!

This explains why we’re so busy. Social Media monitoring isn’t mainstream yet. People are still learning.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, and there were a lot of questions about language capabilities.

It’s really important to know what your objective is for listening.

I will post a link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.

THE Reason You Should Be At Blogworld 09 is the people.

As much as I enjoy working remotely there is a huge value to meeting people in person. The power of connecting face to face is incredible.

Last year’s BlogWorld was a turning point for me. I had the opportunity to meet many of the people who had influenced my work & inspire so many of us.

I was also very impressed with how warm & down-to-earth bloggers are. At the Techset party I stood a few feet away from the group around Chris Brogan. I’m not shy, but I tend to watch & listen when I’m at events. I will never forget how Chris paused his conversation, walked away from his group and gave me a big hug! And disrupting Brian Solis’ camera time for a quick chat was also memorable. He told me that he had quoted me in his book. Over the course of the event I met so many people! I had an amazing conversation about community with Lionel Menchaca of Dell. When we were on the verge of leaving I was talking with Des from Australia & someone said ‘where’s Connie’? I have to meet her! What a great way for Jason Falls to introduce himself!

You need to go to BlogWorld so you can have your own stories like that. It’s the ideal event to meet everyone in an educational and a social setting. I have a list of people to meet this year. Bryan Person, Keith Burtis, and a number of others are on my short list.

If you’re there tweet me @cbensen because I want to meet YOU! I’ll be there Thurs and Friday morning and at the Techset party Thursday night. We’re doing a panel on social media monitoring on Thurs morning to kick off things. So join us!

And if you haven’t figure it out yet, social media isn’t about the technology. It’s about the people! See you at BlogWorld 2009!

Everyone needs to stake their claim online for a number of reasons. In this case it allows you to post a comment that stays at the top. My guess is that more functionality may come. Best practice in branding says you should own your own domain & all related.

On Saturday I spent 2 hrs fighting with it to get that green box to show up. I installed Sidewiki in Flock. Then in Firefox. It was so frustrating! I am very stubborn when it comes to technology. I was almost ready to ask my sister even! (she maintains my blog – don’t EVEN assume that I do!).

So tonite I invested another half hour. And I found the answer! The instructions that I was reading left out one *ahem* major point. And it’s my duty to save you the time & pain.

1. Install Google Sidewiki if you haven’t.
2. Install Google Webmaster Tools if you haven’t previously done so. (yes, you need to put code in your blog*, but I was able to figure it out, so just do it.)
3. Open your blog/site, click on the Sidewiki icon and there you go! The option to claim your site! I see that you can add up to 1,000 sites That link provides examples. I’m going to add other pages on my site.
4. The last step is to write a note there for future Sidewiki users. Bill Hartzer has a couple nice examples (but his instr’s leave out step 2).

And I’m quite pleased now. I asked my Twitterati to test it. We all like comments, huh? Now you can gather Sidewiki comments too!

* If you’re using WordPress, click on Editor on left & then click on Header on right.

Look! It works!!

(Sister, Heidi & @SecretSushi – are you guys shocked & amazed?!!   )

As a community manager it is your job to uplift the brand. Do you have the right to uplift your own brand?  Peter framed his post around concern that people are building their personal brands in social media in the guise of building a corporate brand.

Stepping back I think the bigger question is what if your brand is strong and built of your own accord. How much value does that provide your company (and their brand)? Doesn’t that indicate that you have some successful brand building skills?

My bigger concern are all of the people that are claiming to be social media experts based on self proclaimed skills and that haven’t been involved in building a corporate brand. And my favorite is when a conference organizer invites me to speak at an event & then rescinds it because I’m not an independent consultant. (Yes, I do work for a brand and I believe in being a practitioner as much as contributing to the industry in a greater sense.)

Peter Kim asks these two questions:

Are you represented by a carefully crafted digital presence?

Or are you the sum of who other people say you are?

If you focus on branding then you have a long term plan, but I think that it’s important to evolve with your brand (whether personal or corporate). So the ‘careful’ part needs to include flexibility so that you don’t get stale & boring. I personally push myself to grow and learn but intertwine that with my brand in a consistent way.

And I am the sum of who I am + what I’m striving to be + what others perceive me to be.

That last piece is what keeps me humble. Generally when I read someone’s perception of my work or sense it when I meet them in person  I’m reminded how important my community is and that I always need to be giving back.

I believe that we must build our individual brand as well as uplifting that of our corporate brand. If you’re going to build community then you’re building equity on both accounts. That’s supposed to be your specialty as a community person so you may as well shine at it!

Am I all wrong on this?

Two days ago Slideshare sent me an email about my Case Study for using Twitter for Lead Gen:

Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

Today I received another email that said:

"Twitter: a Case for Lead Generation" is being tweeted more than any other document on SlideShare right now. So we’ve put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the "Hot on Twitter" section).

It was odd because I had tweeted a link, but Twitter was quiet (or so I thought…). In looking at the stat’s on Slideshare I saw that SocialMediaToday and it’s sister site, MyVenturePad had published my blog post and were receiving a LOT of traffic. There were almost 1500 views between them. Next question, what was driving the traffic? A quick search for the phrase, “Twitter Engagement”, that’s a part of my blog title showed that there was some serious retweeting happening on Twitter!

Slideshare is an active community with great shareable features

For the past three years I’ve been studying why things happen in social networks. Then I unravel them and share the steps so that you can apply them to your situations. And this one is easy to replicate. It will work for YouTube as much as Slideshare too!

First, a quick explanation of Slideshare. Skip this if you’re familiar with it.

Slideshare is a free site where you can host your powerpoint decks. It’s a really active community. They totally understand the concept of ‘shareable’ which is so imperative for word of mouth (some call it viral). (This is one of the main principles that Andy Sernovitz asserts and I highly recommend that you read his book, Word of Mouth Marketing.)

The secret sauce is that it allows you to embed your presentation in your post and others can download it and also embed it. They also offer a nice widget that I’ve put on the side of my blog AND are integrated into Facebook and LinkedIn so my friends there can see my newest decks.  It can grow legs! and Slideshare keeps track of the number of views. The community in Slideshare can favorite presentations and comment on them. So Slideshare has done a great job of helping their users connect!

How can you make Slideshare + SocialMediaToday + Twitter = Viral

I’ll list the steps. You provide the ideas

1. Create your content and post on a shareable site such as Slideshare or YouTube
2. Write a blog post and embed the content
3. Syndicate your blog to great communities like SocialMediaToday.com, MyVenturePad.com, etc
4. They and many others tweeted the link x 180 + times!
5. Engage with the communities on Slideshare, Socialmediatoday & Twitter. Here’s an article I wrote on syndicating your blog. (That post is how I got my job at Techrigy)
6. Watch the ripple effect afterwards and thank those that blog about it and further share my content.

Here’s the stat’s on this adventure 24 hours after publishing my blog post:

On Slideshare.net (note that it’s been downloaded 48 times)

SocialMediaToday.com – 1529 views

MyVenturePad.com – 1147 views

Tonite I was asked a question. Will this work for a company and their brand? Of course! I realized yesterday that Dell had followed me on Slideshare. And their decks are quite interesting! Check out the So So Social Media Strategy. (Note that my deck is also branded & has my contact info.)

Another point is that you don’t need the reason of speaking at events to create and post slide decks. There are also people in Slideshare community that have never posted a deck (but what fun is that?!)

So what are you waiting for? Get busy, and make a slide deck. Link it up here. Need ideas? Go explore the decks in Slideshare.

Special thanks go to Beth Harte & Ann Handley for inviting us to share Techrigy’s story in Marketing Prof’s Twitter Success Case Studies and again at their virtual event! (It forced me to make the slide deck!)

And thanks to Adam Helweh @SecretSushi for his thumbs down on my first draft. You can thank him for his honesty & for pushing me to be more creative!

Now I want to see your work!

Here’s some additional commentary to go with the slides:

One year ago I was contracted for a few hours a week. Two months later I went full time. As a community manager, I relied on social media marketing. We had an ambitious team of 5 and no marketing budget. (I learned new words like ‘boot strapping’).

When I started demo’ing SM2 there was a huge learning curve if the attendee didn’t know about wikis, twitter, etc. So, after doing some ‘listening’ I realized that people on Twitter were early adopters and had achieved a certain level. In addition many were asking, ‘What should we be using for social media monitoring?’, How do you do it?, and the pro’s and con’s are debated.

Twitter was ideal because users are:

• early adopters & understand the basics of social media
• actively seeking information and options
• specifically interested in our service
• happy to share information with others which builds word of mouth
• very happy to see a listening tool actively engaged

To use Twitter for lead generation, listen for people expressing a need for your product or service. In our case I monitor for the phrase “social media monitoring”. If you’re a financial institution, then you may want to monitor for “mortgage calculator”. And a photography software company may monitor for “taking photos” and join the conversation.

After the presentation I hung out on Twitter and chatted. I saw my colleague, Jim Reynolds, confirm that we quit cold calling. He joined Techrigy two weeks after I did and is avidly involved in the conversation on Twitter.

And I caught this testimonial by @GavinThomas. Our goal is to provide value and we’ve made a lot of friends there. This underlines the idea that people don’t mind the connection on Twitter.

The whole Marketing Prof’s conference is available for 90 days. Enjoy!

At the end of the presentation I listed a number of business objectives that can be realized using Twitter. What have you found effective?

Here are three common misconceptions about speaking:

1. Speakers are well paid
2. Speaking is easy
3. Speakers are chosen on their merits

Misconception #1 – Speakers are well paid

I always cringe when people assume that speaking is a profitable thing.

The majority of events that I speak at don’t provide travel/housing reimbursement. So it’s an expensive venture. But it’s great for brand building and networking. And if you’re consulting then those are good expenses when it comes tax time.

There are some that don’t believe people should agree to speak for free. They feel that that undermines our professional standing. I guess that I disagree. The industry is very young and sharing your knowledge doesn’t translate into being compensated. I appreciate the opportunity to attend the show and network. Event organizers are always so appreciative and have limited funds. (Putting on an event has to be an amazing effort).

Misconception #2 – Speaking is easy

I tend to put a fair amount of time into my slide decks. I put a few hours into the one for the 10 minute case study for Marketing Prof’s. The outline always takes a bit to work through. And then translating that to a slide deck is another process. And the delivery requires a lot of energy. (I don’t want the attendees falling asleep!) I’m generally drained after a workshop. For panels I’ve been taking my netbook with me and interacting with the audience as well as participating in the Twitter stream. I’m not sure how many etiquette rules I’m breaking in doing that, but it adds a nice twist!

Misconception #3 – Speakers are chosen on their merits

This is a sticking point for me. I see some conference organizers that fill speaking slots from the sponsor list. I understand why it’s done. And in working for a vendor I’ve been pitched at too. Sure, we have a speaking slot for you… if you sponsor. I guess my question is, “Are the attendees getting a revised version of the exhibit area?”

What misconceptions have you realized that people have about speakers?

If you would like to speak, start local. Check with your Chamber of Commerce or university. What organizations would be interested in social media? You may even end up with some consulting! And definitely submit you ideas to conferences: Writing a Session Proposal for a Conference