Silicon Valley Tech Women held a panel at the shiny new SalesForce offices in downtown San Francisco entitled Leveraging Social Networking to Advance Your Career. See the photos  from DJ Cline here.

I moderated this panel of tech rockstars.

• LaSandra Brill  Sr. Mgr., Global Social Media Marketing,  Cisco Systems
• Marilyn Lin Director, Product Intelligence & Enablement, Salesforce.com
• Erica Lockheimer  Sr. Engineering Manager, LinkedIn
• Jana Messerschmidt VP of Business Development & Platform Relations, Twitter

Takeaways from the discussion were many, and largely about developing a professional brand, creating real networks of people who are interested in the same topics, staying in good standing in the community and supportive of others in their extended networks.

With a panel of professionals like these women it wasn’t a surprise to hear they all struggle with time management and balancing professional and personal interests or that they are constantly experimenting with tools and networks to fine-tune their personal brands online. Some felt it was a good thing to have different profiles for different aspects of their lives. Even Jana’s puppy has a profile!

Efficiency
Most of the panel chunks up time throughout the day to manage their social networks. Checking networks in the morning, the evening and a few times throughout the day rather than spending all day surfing networks.

Not every social network is a good fit for everyone, finding the platforms that resonate with you and where you find the most people in your area of interest is just good sense. It’s a lot easier to pick one or two you are comfortable with and stay focused that spread yourself too thin and use everything.

Quality over quantity
The size of your network should not be a primary focus. Quality over quantity was agreed on across the board as the best strategy. Find people who can teach you something or help you find relevant news and information should be the goal on any network.

Look at social media networks for the movers and shakers and learn from them. Ask for advice and share information to become a resource.

Where do you want to go professionally?

Use social media to educate yourself on where you want to be, not just where you are.

Find out who is influential in a topic you want to get into, who do they follow and talk to?

Emulate the people working in the areas you want to be in, both so you fit into the culture and so it is easier to get to know the influencers there and learn from them 

Twitter
Everyone on the panel uses Twitter regularly. Some for news and research, others for team communication, professional development and keeping an eye on the competition.

Jana uses it as her primary news source (as do I).

Using Twitter’s advanced search find people working in the places you want to be. Get to know who they are and who they follow. You can learn a lot about an industry and a company by doing searches and creating lists around your areas of interest. Then use those lists to stay up to date.

We talked a bit about Vine and how it is being used by a broad scope of people, from filmmakers to big brands and marketers, even some Twitter and Vine resumes or request for product information.

h/t & love to dear friends @meghanscibona @monkeyprime @smixel for helping w/ my #TwitterResume vine.co/v/b6wxtwrwP7P #HireDawnSiff

— Dawn Siff (@dawnsiff) February 20, 2013

Linkedin
Linkedin is becoming a more vibrant place with richer content.

Keep your profile up to date.

When your position changes within the company or a friend’s position changes, that’s a good time to reach out to people for recommendations and/or support them. People may remember you but not the specific skill sets later. Get those recommendations while they’re hot.

Browse company pages to learn more about the company, who works there and what matters to them. Is this a place you want to work?

Use the new Contacts   feature to browse and manage your contacts and keep in touch with them.

Keep your profile up-to-date whether you’re looking for a job or not.

Now with more and more content going through LinkedIn there is an opportunity to be seen as an information resource for your LinkedIn connections.

Share and share some more, all pertinent to where you want to go or where you are right now.

Quora
A great place to post questions in the space you are interested in working in, or answering questions about which you have expertise

LaSandra mentioned her husband getting requests from journalists for information and they re-post with attribution

Google+
Not many on the panel are super-users, but the power of having a presence on Google+ for local businesses, adding the authorship tags to your blog to establish your authority on a topic can’t be ignored.

Facebook
This is where more casual relationships are maintained. Personal friends and family. Though Cisco does maintain a number of pages they have a lighter side to them than business pages.

A show of hands for who would follow a Facebook page for a recruitment company yielded practically no-one for a Facebook page, for Twitter, 60% raised their hands, and on LinkedIn 80%.

Internal networks
Use your internal corporate networks and tools like Chatter or Yammer to reach out within your organization to others of like minds.

Be a resource within your organization. People will look to you for answers and soon you’ll be the go-to girl.

What networks are people using within your organization? Look for the rock stars here too, get to know them by starting a conversation.

 Social media isn’t about you

Think about more than how you can use social media for your personal benefit, think globally. How can you help others? Reach out to the world!

Last night I moderated a very interesting panel for the San Francisco American Marketing Association on marketing automation. It was an great group for this kind of discussion and I wanted to share some of the takeaways with you. Anyone interested in digital marketing needs to understand these concepts, whether you use automation tools or not.

On the panel:
Jason Miller – Marketo
Kim Stieglitz – Vertical Response
Lindsay Mahoney – Silverpop
Sean Stoffstall – Ozone
David Mitroff – Piedmont Avenue Consulting

I’m not going to go in depth here, (you should have come to the panel, it was awewsome!) I’ll just list my favorite takeaways for you to ponder. Please do post questions or feedback on the panel and I’ll do my best to get you answers. Content Marketing

• Overall everyone on the panel agreed that content is crucial to your automated marketing, but not just any content will do. The content must be relevant to the target market it’s intended for.
• Content must have a high level of quality. If you can’t write it, find someone who can copy edit for you.
• Services like Ebyine.com and WriterAccess.com can bring you a talented writing team for custom work.
• Make use of content curation tools to share great content written by others.
• ALWAYS give credit to the original source of a piece of content.
• Automation doesn’t mean you can “set it and forget it” with content marketing. You need to pay attention to what your prospects are telling you, either directly or by their actions.
• That means you have to listen. What content generates the most interest? Do more of that.
• Content must be continually fine tuned, updated and split tested with various channels to find a good fit.
• The same content may appeal to multiple channels, either intact or slightly modified to fit the needs of that interest niche.
• Collect an email address or just offer it up for free, gaining their interest and showing them a peek at what you have to offer is sufficient to start.
• All of the content you offer doesn’t have to be unique. One piece of content can be re purposed in a multitude of ways.
• Chunking up content–like a webinar for example–into short segments that demonstrate particular tools, techniques or strategies allows you to use that webinar for multiple audiences and extend it’s value considerably.

Segmentation and testing

• Use a system to identify characteristics and buying patterns of your customers so you can fine tune content that fits their needs.
  What content is getting you the best results.
  Why?
• Each level of the campaign needs to have messaging relative to where the prospect is in the campaign.
• Potential customers may enter at the top of the sales funnel, and at this point you want to give them something that will be useful to them and you don’t want to make them jump through too many hoops to get it.
• As you see what actions people take you can guide them to richer offerings based on what they did.
• A and B testing of emails and landing pages is crucial to success. What worked for one demographic may not work for another, and what fails for one group may be successful for another.
• Test, test, test!
• Great content can be found in places we take for granted. Look to your internal team for success stories a, tips and tricks or unique uses for the product and let them tell their stories.
• The same goes for your customers. Listen to customer service and find out what the sore spots are for the customer, then speak to those issues in blogs, videos, FAQ’s they can use as a resource. Solve their problems in public so others can learn from them.
• If your team doesn’t have a flair for writing find someone who does.have them interview the team and write the story. Do video instead. find out who your heroes are and show them off.

Tracking and measurement

• Set goals to measure success or failure, but be prepared to adjust as times go by and you get to know your prospects better.
• Assign values to various actions, such as visiting repeatedly, responding to an email, calling for more information or making a purchase.
• The more information you can gather the better. If your automation system shows you even the most common statistics such as email views and opens, time on a landing page, repeat visitors or traffic through your website, you have more to work with.
• If they follow up with giving you more information such as social media contacts by sharing your landing page, you can begin to learn more about this prospect and start to offer them customized information that hits home with them.

Email Marketing

• With the advent of smart phones, tablets and smart email apps your email title and first sentence is crucial. Recipients may read the title and the “from” and even if they don’t click open, the association between the sender and the title remains in their mind. Make that title work for you.
• The same is true with that first sentence. Try adding a link or a statement that there is something great if only they open it to read more.
• Use an anchor link to link to content below the fold to draw readers to action.
• Sending too many emails can be worse than sending not enough. Only send emails when it will be valuable to the reader.
• Focus who you send emails to. Segment your lists as much as possible to get them just the information they want.
• Personalization is huge, but don’t over-do it. One mention by name is sufficient. More than that can trigger spam filters.
• Set up some filters for “off” names that people put into forms as a joke. It may not be so funny when you call them that.
• Consider the timing of your emails. When do you get the best response? It may surprise you that one segment responds at one time and another is different.

Oh boy, here’s a hot button topic for you. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)  was created with good intentions. When it was passed in the mid 1980′s it was intended to protect us from fraud by making it illegal to use someone else’s password for a social media site, a website or even their computer (even at their request).

What’s the big deal? Well, if you work for your clients on multiple accounts on social networks, websites or even log into their computer as a support person, you could be breaking the law right now.

The House Judiciary Committee wants to toughen the law as it stands instead of re-writing it into something that makes sense now. Oh, and the tougher bill may go up for a vote next week, even though it’s barely been discussed in public. Here’s a draft of the proposed bill.

So I and a whole lot of other Internet Defense League folks are joining Fight for the Future,  along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation,  Reddit, Boing Boing and others to encourage congress to take another look at  the CFAA and make some sane revisions for this decade.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m for finding ways to control mis-use and prevent abuse of our privacy but I think this bill needs to be updated to the way we really use the internet now, not from back in the ’80s. Let’s intelligently reform this bill instead of responding fearfully.

Please contact congress and tell them what you think.

Klout recently announced the addition of Instagram interaction and Bing searches to their algorithm. While I don’t take Klout scores as the be-all end-all of social value, it’s still a useful metrics tool when evaluating how much an individual or a brand engages with the rest of the world.

I see that my Klout score did jump a bit when they made this change, though Bing is not showing up yet in my score. Actually I use Bing very rarely, I prefer Google, even after I took the Bing Challenge. Even though Bing now offers Bing rewards, I still prefer Google.

But this post isn’t about Bing. It’s about Klout’s new additions. Does it make the ranking site more relevant? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. In the meantime I did a short video on Klout’s analytics. Has your score been impacted? Tell me how, and if you think it matters. Think your stats on Klout are incorrect? There’s a tip in the video to correct that.

A social business could be most simply defined as a business which engages with it’s customer base socially. It used to be all businesses were social. You made friends in the neighborhood and responded to their interests or you failed. Today we may think it has to mean they use social media, but there’s more to it than that. Just having millions of followers, fans and “interactions” on social networks doesn’t make you social.

Talking to your customers, listening to what their concerns and ideas are and responding to them is what being a social business is about. You don’t actually need social media (gasp) to do that. You could make your business more social by talking to them directly at the point of transaction, calling them on the phone, doing door to door interviews or focus groups. All of these are social activities too. The problem is, they’re labor intensive, expensive and not very scaleable. This kind of interaction can also severely impact the ability of your business to expand past arm’s length.

Social business and evangelism

Sure, your customers will still tell other people how cool it was you reached out to them and actually listened to them. Those friends will tell their friends and you will gain some customers and maybe even an evangelist or two. But the exponential growth experienced by companies large and miniscule using social media can’t be denied. Social media enables you to reach more people more often and with better reach to their extended networks. It also creates a way to drive genuine organic traffic to your website through the value of social SEO.

The old adage that you have to “touch” someone 7 times before you convert them to a customer still holds true, but now you can do it efficiently and effectively through sharing carefully targeted information with your networks to encourage them to share that information too; thereby reaching extended networks you may never have seen much less been connected with.

Now before you jump on all the social sites spewing out canned marketing messages in the vain hope people will see them and flock to your business let me reiterate. You must talk to your customers. Engage them, inform them, entertain them. They couldn’t give a flying crap about your marketing message. At least not if it doesn’t solve a problem for them.

A truly social business is constantly listening to social media for opportunities to engage potential and current clients. Start there and you’re well on your way to a social business.

The Social Business infographic created by Online MBA

photo credit: postaletrice via photopin cc

The popularity of Instagram is clear, and if you are inclined to snap photos and share them with your friends and customers on social networks you can make your business more social and build a powerful sharing community on Instagram quickly.

Why does Instagram work so well? Because we humans are most inspired by visuals. According to our friends at Hubspot, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.

Instagram is easy to use and inspires us to share moments with our friends, be a part of political movements, activism or to help nonprofits save the world.

How to use Instagram to grow your visibility
This post is really about how to use Instagram’s power to raise the visibility of your brand or cause using simple contests. Take a look at a couple of cases here, and then skip to the bottom to see how you can use the power of photos.

Learn from some successful Instagram campaigns

In February Diet Coke asked users to share photos with the tag #Showyourheart and for every upload Diet Coke donated $1 to support women’s health programs. On Instagram it generated 5,274 uploads and the Diet Coke Instagram account topped 22,000 followers.

The win
Coca-Cola aligned their mission with women and heart-health and the fans produced all of the content. They gave away less than $6,000 (based on $1 per upload) for a whole lot of goodwill.

Comodo 
Comodo NYC leveraged our obsession with photos of our dinner. Sure it’s annoying, unless you are as food-obsessed as I am. Then it’s just fun. They set up the hashtag #Comodomenu, put it on the bottom of the menu in the restaurant and online, and asked guests to both share their photos and tag them as well as browse the tag on Instagram to see what dishes were most popular.

The win
This video has 127,217 views. Almost 800 photos have been tagged on Instagram #Comodomenu. Had you ever heard of Comodo NYC before? Yeah, me neither. But now you have.

Jaguar
The automaker leveraged Instagram for the launch of the F-type during the Los Angeles Auto show. Users were asked to post images on Facebook and Instagram and tag them #CaptureaJag. Images were displayed on Jaguar USA’s Facebook page and voted on there as well as by a panel of judges.

The Win
There were over 700 entries on Instagram alone, and according to their Facebook stats, went from 14,487 to 66,032 “People talking about this” during the end of the contest in February. Impressive, even for a big brand.

Can YOU do it too?
So great, these brands are running campaigns and getting attention. How can you create an effective Instagram campaign? Notice these aren’t all big brands. You can do something creative and fun even with a minimal budget. You just need to plan for it.

Start with the basics
Set some goals. What do you want the results to be? What can you ask people to photograph and share that will get results? How will you measure those results?

Really think about what you have that people will want to talk about. Food is easy. So is travel. Did you write a book about something? What could they upload pictures of that would be fun for them?

If you are running this as a contest, think of a prize that people will relate their images to. It doesn’t have to break the bank, sometimes just having fun is enough!

Make it easy for people to understand what they need to do, what the hashtag is and why they should care. Make it very clear you will show their photos off to the world!

Use multiple platforms
Hashtags exist on several platforms. Even though they’re not official on Facebook we still use them there as well as Pinterest, Twitter Tumblr, Flickr and Google+.  If you really want to get mileage out of this, use it on as many networks as you can, but only the ones where you already have a valid presence. Building community while running a contest can be challenging, and sometimes fool-hardy. If we go there and see you don’t have much to say we are less inclined to follow. Use the platforms that already work best for you.

Talk to everybody
When a brand talks back to people it creates a bond. We’re happy you think enough of us to talk back. Respond to comments and questions. Ask questions about the photos and draw out the people who shared them. Be human. We are much more likely to talk about the campaign if we feel you are engaged instead of watching from a distance. In addition, commenting on a photo and having more interaction on it will increase the potential for that post to make it to the coveted “explore” tab within Instagram. When it shows up there it’s shown to people outside your personal netwok and offers the potential to reach whole new audiences.

Measure and track
A lot of the statistics we shared with you here came from Statigram. If you’re not signed up go do that right now. You’ll get a lot of great information before, during and after the contest. Statigram also offers a contest toolkit. It’s a paid tool, but you get a landing page for the contest to live on so you can list rules and show off the best of the best, allow people to vote and much more.

Don’t stop there though. Measure the other networks too. I use Tweetreach for Twitter reporting, but you can use TagsinAction for reporting across multiple social networks. It is super-easy to use and instantly search multiple networks.

Thinking about running an Instagram contest of your very own? We can help you with that. Learn more.

By Frank Strong
His sleeves were rolled up. His tie was loose. He swore.  It was all public.

It may sound like a recipe for disaster for any CEO edgy enough to take center stage in a content marketing strategy…except when it works.

Armed with $9.8 million in new venture funding, Dollar Shave Club CEO Mike Dubin spent some of that money on a YouTube video that cast him in the leading role. The company earned an incredible amount of media coverage which put the company on the map. As of the time of this writing, about a year later, that video has racked up some 9.4 million views or about as many views as venture capital dollars invested.

While many senior business leaders shy from this type of public role, Dubin is embracing it. A quick look at his Twitter stream will demonstrate, it’s not just lip service, he’s actively engaged. Just this week his engagement earned him an unsolicited compliment from an Advertising Age editor, who also appears to be a subscribing customer.

The lesson is clear: CEO’s that are active in social media and content marketing efforts ignite conversation. And now is the time to engage, because the competition is scarce.
Objections from a publicly traded company
Critics will say a public company could never engage in this manner or face the wrath of investors or regulatory authorities. Tell that to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors which is publically traded and personally took The New York Times to task for a review he flatly called “fake.”

In a short period, Musk took a lot of criticism for his approach. A Forbes contributor wrote that “Musk reacted to Broder’s story the same way that a proud father would if he heard someone call his daughter ugly at the school play.”

Musk held his ground and earned what amounts to a correction of sorts from the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan. Speaking of the reporter that wrote the initial story she said:

“Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially. In particular, decisions he made at a crucial juncture – when he recharged the Model S in Norwich, Conn., a stop forced by the unexpected loss of charge overnight – were certainly instrumental in this saga’s high-drama ending.”

Writing for the MediaBistro’s 10,000 Words, Lauren Hockenson might have summed it up best when she wrote about three takeaways, “Never underestimate the power of social media to become a megaphone for a cause.”

Arguably, Musk earned the attention by virtue of his position as CEO.  While I think there’s truth to that, I’d also point out that Musk has 148,000 followers on Twitter.  That didn’t happen overnight, it happened because he’s actively worked to cultivate a community long before he needed to rally that community to his cause.

He gave something before he asked for something back.

Social CEOs drive results
These anecdotes are powerful indications that senior leaders can drive business outcomes with their participation. There’s also data to support this assertion.

Brandfog, a marketing consultancy, published a survey of employees that found engaged CEOs both add value to a brand’s visibility and galvanize the work force:

The survey found that social engaged CEOs are either very effective or somewhat effective at:

• Raising a brand’s profile (87.5%).
• Increasing brand loyalty (83.9%).
• Communicating a company’s mission and values (82.5%).
• Attracting new talent (80.9%).
• Increasing purchase intent (80.8%).

There’s a caveat to all this, however, in that the magic doesn’t happen overnight.  Rather it requires dedication and consistency. As marketer, sales trainer and author, Scott Stratten says, publishing a few posts on Twitter once a month is about as effective as showing up to a networking event, saying hello, and then turning around and leaving.

A matter of priorities
It’s an understatement to say that senior executives are busy. The time demands of the top executive at a publicly traded company are unquestionably taxing. It boils down to one question: what’s the best way to spend time to deliver results for a company.

Executives often look at this problem as a dichotomy:  they can run a business or they can evangelize. Some businesses are addressing this by either hiring another executive to either focus on operations or evangelism.

In either case, it’s always a matter of priorities and the top executive has the latitude to set those. Even if Apple doesn’t embrace social media, Steve Jobs led that publicly traded company and also found time to answer customer emails,

It’s a far fetch to say that CEOs that do not engage in social media will be out of business in five years. On the other hand, those that do can – and do – drive results for their business.

After all, everyone admires a senior leader willing to roll up their sleeves.

Frank Strong is a classically trained PR professional with new media savvy.  Find him on Twitter, Google+ or read more from him on his blog:  Sword and the Script.

Oh boy, another “how to grow your Twitter following” post! If you came here looking for an easy way to get thousands of followers without lifting a finger, move on. You’re in the wrong place. If you really want to grow a Twitter following that has any value as a network,  there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to work for it. That’s OK though, because what I’m going to tell you here is really the fun part. You grow your network organically by talking to other people who really care about the same things you do.

What’s a Twitter Chat?
Before I get ahead of myself I should define this thing. Twitter chats (AKA Tweet Chats) are simply a group discussion that takes place on Twitter. Generally at a set time and around a set topic.  The idea is to find a topic that everybody wants to discuss. Sometimes it’s an interview with a celebrity or professional who is willing to answer questions and share their expertise for about an hour. Sometimes the questions are selected in advance by a moderator, who poses 3 or 4 questions to the group or to the guest being interviewed.  Before you hold one of your own, it’s a good idea to join some chats and see how to effectively participate in a Tweet chat.

Why  a Tweet Chat?
Let’s say you’re building a business in the food or wine industry Participate in a few chats as a brand representative, or sponsor some chats and you’ll see your followers increase with people who actually care about the topic. Invite the right Twitter influencers and you can easily see mentions of you and your brand dramatically increase. This gives you an opportunity to deepen your relationship with these influencers through conversation and invite them to engage in other ways.

Bookmarket Chat
If you’re an author and you want to learn about how to market your book. Go hang out in the #Bookmarket chat.  Even if you miss the chat itself, you can learn a lot by clicking on the hashtag and reading past posts to get a feel for who is driving the conversation and people you’d like to engage. Want to know who is using the hashtag? You can go to Hashtweeps and find out who is using that Hashtag the most and learn more about them. It’s likely you’ll want to get to know them better and strike up a conversation.

PR Chat
If you’re in PR and you want to network with your peers in that industry? Then you’ve got to hang out in #PRChat, one of the older and best run chats there is. Productivity experts, and those of us who learn from them, participate in #ProdChat .

There are a lot of chats out there, you’ve just got to find the one that fits you. Here’s a list of Twitter chats to browse. I can’t guarantee they are all active, but go look and see what’s there. Something will strike your fancy.

What do Tweet chats have to do with business?
That’s where it gets really interesting. When a business sponsors a tweet chat around a tropic relevant to them they can get a lot of interest going about their Twitter account. It is customary for the sponsor to post 1-2 (no more) promotional tweets during the chat and for those tweets to be shared by the participants out of courtesy. If the chat is well run and you’ve done your influencer outreach well in advance you can see your hashtag reach into the millions, and that’s just during the chat itself! All of those tweets related to the hashtag end up being indexed and shared, sometimes dozens of times and the relevance of your brand to the topic of the chat grows quickly.

Frequent Tweet chats encourage people to identify the brand with the subjects of the chats, and before you know it you’ve got regular discussions going on with your brand before, during and after the chat. That’s a win for everyone.

 Locating the right influencers
Obviously that starts with doing some listening and some influencer research. Who talks around the same topics? Do they participate in chats or hold chats of their own you could join?  If you are joining somebody else’s chat be respectful and just chat without putting forward your own agenda. Be a part of the community, engage people and move the conversation forward. Then if you feel you’d do a better job or talk about it differently, you can schedule your own chat and invite some of the people you’ve gotten to know. Please do that in a different time slot on a different day. It’s bad form to hijack a tweet chat, people will be more receptive if they don’t feel like you’re competing.

Need help? Tatu Digital Media offers influencer outreach and chat moderation. Contact us to see how we can help you build your community through Tweet chats.

The Pew Research Center recently released a phone study conducted by PRSAI of over 1,000 users in the US. The report that states that while 2 out of 3 Americans are Facebook users 61% of those users have voluntarily taken a break for a period of several weeks or more.

• 20% of those surveyed said they used the site once but no longer do.
• Only 8% of those who don’t use Facebook now are even interested in using the site in the future.

So why did so many users take a self-enforced tile out on the dominant social network in the country?

• 21% said they just didn’t have time
• 20% said they got bored or there was no compelling content
• 9% said there was too much drama
• 8% said they felt they were spending too much time on the site and they needed a break.

Oh, and just in case you swear to never leave, Business Insider posted 13 reasons you’ll never leave Facebook. Download the full report here as a PDF, or read the overview on PEW’s site. Just out of curiosity I did some searches for people who talked about their own Facebook vacations. Here are a few posts that I found interesting:

• Steven Crandell on his son taking a little time off from Facebook
• Expat Hiatus on her personal litmus test.
• Joy on giving up Facebook on raising kids without distraction
• Paul is paying his daughter to stay off Facebook for 5 months
• The Daily Mind gives us 8 ways to beat Facebook addiction
• Convinced? Wikihow shares 7 steps to quit Facebook

OK, so what’s your story? Would you, could you, give up Facebook?

I was part of a discussion on Twitter this morning around this post of George Snell’s.” Community Management Isn’t Content Creation. (go read it now and come back).

Now,  I don’t 100% disagree with him that not all community managers are suited to create content. But it’s such a gross generalization.

To tell great stories you have to stop having your community managers produce your content.

Really??

Some CEO’s can’t create content either, and they let their marketing person do it for them. Is that content the real reflection of the brand and it’s value? Right. Not always.

Let me take you waaay back in my own history to when I was a chef. I wore a lot of hats and worked my way  from night baker to executive chef. If you’ve worked in the restaurant business you know that very often it’s the sous chef or someone on the line who creates the menu on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes the best dish on the menu came from the rank and file. They’re the ones who are deep in the trenches. They know what the clientele likes, they know what’s freshest. They have the freedom to play with the ingredients while the executive chef is in the office chasing spreadsheets.

How does that relate to community managers and whether or not they should be creating content?
I’m getting there. I work with a talented team of community managers and I know many more through speaking, conferences and social media. The one indisputable thing I can say about community managers is; they’re a diverse group. Some are great conversation wranglers, shit-disturbers even. Some are analytical thinkers and know how to extract ROI from a stone. Others do everything from moderating forums and Facebook pages,   Twitter engagement and influencer outreach to creating e-books and blogging for the company. Many have a passion for the topic of conversation central to the brand they manage. Others are generalists and know more about creating memes than they do about the core values of the brands they represent. Some have advanced degrees in business while others are self taught. Are there some robotic drones? Yep. There are in every job aren’t there?

Big brands have a tendency to think community management is a rank and file position. Fer god’s sake, really? That just shows how little respect they have for the community. Yes, community moderation is a skill set that may not jive with writing white papers, e-books and deep thoughtful content but it doesn’t mean community managers aren’t capable of it. After managing a community, digging out answers to questions from the engineers, marketing and the CEO don’t you think your community manager knows about your brand? A good community manager is thinking strategically about how to deliver content that reaches the right people and inspires them to learn more.

I work with many mid-size companies who don’t have the luxury of hiring a person for every position. Often the community manager is also creating blog posts, e-books and re-writing the content on the corporate website to better reach the market. They are an integral part of the team. A smart CXO at least talks to the community manager to discover what content needs to be created to suit the market. They’re the ones with their finger on the pulse.

Community managers? What say you?