MediaSnackers

5 Years Of MediaSnackers : Thanks, Reflections, Regrets & New Horizons

DK — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:02:50 +0000

Time to take a break

This is the 1,000th blog post on here.

Today is also the fifth anniversary / birthday of MediaSnackers.

Add the fact I’m emigrating to New Zealand in a couple of weeks time, leaves me in reflective mood…

THANKS

There are three groups of people who need some deep waist bows from me…

First up are the deliverers / associates / colleagues who basically have been involved in serving up all our social media services over the years plus those ‘backroom staff’ you never see, without which, we’d be back pulling pints in the local (in alphabetical order as to ensure fairness) :

Adele, my book-keeper : for crunching the didgets and handling my receipts
Alun, my Dad : for doing my payroll (what a great Father)
Barney Grenfell : good luck in being a fantastic teacher pal
Bobbie Gardner : brought some class to the whole outfit
Chris Unitt : congrats on the new role and for being so fab / tall
Emily Littler : a positive spirit who has graced our work at times
Guy Parsons : was brief but definitely fun
g : mentor, ass-kicker and general shepherd to my thoughts
Jess Chan : brightened up any gig with wonderful energy and enthusiasm
Kieran Masterton : for sorting out all the web stuff and headaches we’ve encountered over the years
Lee, my brother : for providing counsel, gentle nudges and other expertise
Malcolm, my accountant : for keeping us square with the authorities and for answering endless questions about VAT
Mark Mapstone : an honour and privilege to have had you involved, truly inspirational
Matt Hinks : you never let me down
Neil Cocker : humbling to have the opportunity to work with such a fantastic soul

Next up are the clients, who have basically kept us all clothed, watered and off the streets for the past five years, but more importantly, gave us the opportunity to share our stories and insights into why social is so inspiring.

And last but not least, you guys, the media snacking community. You who read our stuff, listen to our podcasts, watch our vodcasts, subscribe to our email digest, retweet our tweets, meet us for mint teas and generally ring / email when you fancy a chat.

Heartfelt and humbled gratitude.

Thank you one and all.

REGRETS

They say you shouldn’t have any but just for fun here are a handful which spring to mind :

not going public with the ‘TED For Youth’ idea—this was an idea myself and good friend / colleague Magnificent David McQueen pitched to the guys at TED over three years ago, back in February 2008. Two years later, in 2010, the TEDx franchise was launched. Inspired by us or just great minds thinking alike…?
not keeping the email exchange of trying to get Chris Anderson (not the TED one) to do a podcast—six months later this Wired edition came out with no reference or hat tip our way (the email exchange was lost due to a hard drive crash, now all email goes through gmail so there’s always a backup / archive).
not closing the deal with Jack Dorsey (Tiwtter Founder) to do a podcast interview back in 2007—this was before Twitter was what it is today. Now he doesn’t answer my emails (and quite rightly so, busier than the queen that man).
calling Sir Ken Robinson a ‘scally‘ when i first met him—simply rude and a reaction of not knowing what to say to break the ice (luckily he didn’t take offense and we did a podcast with him soon after).

REFLECTIONS

Building a business from nothing but an idea is hard.

Making it a six figure turnover company has been so draining.

Managing every aspect of its development has been immensely overwhelming.

But man, it’s been a rush… my biggest challenge in life. The maker of me. The tester of my spirit. The gauntlet to my soul. The vehicle that enabled me to visit five continents on the planet and speak in front of tens of thousands of people. The thing that is now bringing tears to my eyes as I type (I’m not too proud to share).

Anyone who has given everything to an idea / project knows what I’m feeling. It’s too great to sum up and definitely too vast to pick out just a few relfections from this journey.

Simply put, it’s the best chance I ever took.

NEW HORIZONS

The other side of the planet is my next stop (after spending some time on the West Coast of USA). A new role awaits (as Social Media Manager for CORE Ed) as well as a new partner for MediaSnackers (same people who are given me the new role).

It’s the end of the beginning.

The next chapter.

Really excited about taking all those years of experience, those insights and ideas gained from working with all those different people / organisations / brands, and crafting a new set of services, again, with one goal in mind : to inspire people to learn, work & live differently with social media.

PLUS to work without me.

Even though I tried, MediaSnackers has never been a sustainable business that works without me. Taking guidance from my new partners and other folks, it will have this structural core to ensure a solid foundation for growth and scale.

This is going to be fun!

EPILOGUE

It’s time to take a break.

Due to the emigration plus settling into my new life and working out the finer details of the new partnership arrangement, there won’t be any new content on here for the coming months. Nor will our Twitter profile be updated (you can always follow my personal @justadandak one though).

RSS feeds won’t be read and emails will be sparingly accessed.

Time for a little breathing room.

Thanks again to all of you.

Next stop, Christchurch, New Zealand and my new life…

MS Vodcast Episode#27 | Mario Sundar, Social Media Manager for LinkedIn

DK — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:21:04 +0000

How the social networking guys do social.

Our fifth in a new series of video podcasts (vodcasts) focussing on those interesting folks who manage social media for their brand / company / organisation.

Mario Sundar is the Senior Social Media Manager (Global) for LinkedIn, the professional online social network.

0.00 intro
0.15 about LinkedIn
1.05 day-to-day activities (LinkedIn answers, LinkedIn blog
03:36 rolling out a strategy across 12 countries
06:16 measuring impact and tracking success of their Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter profiles
13:43 advice for other companies
16:33 the future
17:51 outro

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TRANSCRIPTION

00:07 Mario Sundar: Hi, this is Mario Sundar. I’m Social Media Manager at LinkedIn worldwide and I’m just happy to be here today.

00:15 DK: Brilliant. Well it’s a pleasure to have you with us man. Thanks for giving up your time. Let’s ask you a quick question about LinkedIn and for those people who live under rocks and never heard of it. What do you guys actually do?

00:27.0 Mario Sundar: Yeah, I would be surprised if a professional in particular hasn’t heard about LinkedIn. But for those who haven’t or for the very few or for the one guy who hasn’t heard about LinkedIn, we are a, the worlds largest professional networking site. And we have over 100 million professionals on LinkedIn today. And basically what these professionals do is LinkedIn enables them to 1) find a job, you know get a, and secondly be better at their job on a daily basis. So those are the two broad areas. And there are a lot of more specifics and I can talk about a little bit more in detail as we go through this interview.

01:05 DK: Okay, brilliant. Well that’s a great overview. I know you guys have been going as in LinkedIn for eight years. You recently had a birthday because I checked out the blog post; I’ll stick that in the blog notes. And I know you’ve been there since 2007. So what’s your day to day activities from a social media managing perspective for LinkedIn?

01:26 Mario Sundar: So yeah as you just described, LinkedIn’s been around for eight years and I’ve been at LinkedIn for half of that time. And I’ve been really lucky because half of that time has been quite an exciting journey for LinkedIn as well as for me obviously being a part of that, right. So as I mentioned, my role encompasses worldwide social media management. What that entails is both defining the strategy for social media for a social media company which makes it all the more exciting, as well as the tactics at implementing them. So for the first year or two when I first started, my primary role was defining what are the areas that we need to be a part of and engage with our community of users. What it meant was finding out where exactly are our users today globally. By that, I mean, which social media sites are they a part of? Obviously LinkedIn is kind of like the central point where we started whether its LinkedIn groups or LinkedIn answers. And at that point it was more LinkedIn answers. But then since then the idea was to start, lets say having a central presence on LinkedIn’s own blog, which is where I started, which is setting LinkedIn blog. And today we have a presence on five different social media channels besides LinkedIn which is where I engage with our community of users. So to answer your question, the first part is defining the strategy from the get go, where exactly do we engage with our users. And the second part on a daily basis is engaging with those users whether it’s commenting, you know exchanging information with them etc. And the third part is educating users on how best LinkedIn works as well as educating companies on how LinkedIn works which has taken up a bulk of my time. And in addition to that, of course my role given that its more of a worldwide, global, social media role is also replicating what we’ve done in the US; best practices, tips and tricks across the globe in many of our companies that we have, I’m sorry many of our centers across the globe whether its London, Dublin, Sydney, Mumbai, etc.

03:36 DK: Because I know you guys have 12 offices, over 1,000 employees. I’ve done my research. And I just kind of want to take you back a little bit talking about the strategic focus that you have. You know there’s a lot of people working for you and across geographically lots of centers. Kind of how do you roll out a strategy of social media management or social media use for all those guys and girls?

04:03 Mario Sundar: So I think its, the way we approach it is we had a tried and tested method in the US. Like as I said, when I first started, our goal was lets, as a pilot project, lets see what works best here. You know obviously more than half of our user bases in the US so that was a great place for us to start. And then once we figured out what that is, you know once — the blog by the way is focused on the US. But a lot of times we try to bring in as much international content as possible. Right now I’m in the process of redesigning the blog for global purposes. So basically it’s going to be in as many languages as LinkedIn is in today. So to answer your question, yeah, we started there, we figured out what are the best practices both in terms of the tools that we use whether it is a blog or whether it is YouTube or all of social media channels that we have. We figured out what the editorial strategy is keeping the US as a base. And now that we have — and then third part of is course the relationships that are built with our communities, in the US in the groups that they are in today with all of the five social media channels. Now that we have those best practices, my goal is to replicate them in all of our international markets. As it becomes very easy rather than try out different techniques all across the globe, it is we figure out what works and now my goal is to find out whether that works and these, whether it works in Asia, the APAC region and then fine tune it accordingly because each region has its own nuance as you’re probably very well aware. And so the idea is to test it out, see what works best in that market. So in some places for example, twitter which is one of our channels may not be as effective. Or maybe our community is not on twitter and it’s only on LinkedIn. In those cases, we may reduce the number of social media channels from five to four and then figure out how best can we both integrate that with our blog content as well as engage with our users better on those channels. So that’s basically the goal is to refine, fine tune, basically tweak it and then try out different techniques in each of these markets that I just talked about.

06:16 DK: Okay, thank you for that. So lets ask you specifically how you’ve been doing this for four years, I would imagine a lot of that time at the beginning was bedding in and strategic and on your own and out and that’s great. How do you measure success with social media specifically?

06:33 Mario Sundar: Yeah, I think that is an important question. If — are you asking specifically about ROI?

06:39 DK: Yes, both for you know from a LinkedIn strategies perspective when you have to probably feed back to the big girls and guys upstairs. And then probably from a personal perspective, you know how do you know when you’ve rolled out what’s worked in the US, maybe in Mumbai, kind of how did you know that that has succeeded?

06:59 Mario Sundar: So absolutely. So I think that the metrics are definitely a must have. I think every company, every team and every large fortune finder or small business has, need metrics in order to prove the viability of a specific social media strategy. Initially as you said, yes, the goal was let’s get a blog up and running, let’s figure out how can we engage with our users both on our blog as well as outside of the blog? Since then as I said, we have added four more channels. We have a twitter page as you’re probably aware, Facebook page for where our users are. And each of these chan — YouTube as well Flickr. So those are the five channels that I just described. And each of these channels has a specific purpose. The blog in our LinkedIn group, and I didn’t mention LinkedIn because that’s a give. You know we do have a presence on LinkedIn where it’s to engage with our users on whether its groups for the most part or answers whether you have questions about LinkedIn. Now with each of these cases — and of course I have to mention LinkedIn Company page which if you have checked out in the recent past, is improving by leaps and bounds regularly. So to answer your question, I think each of these channels has a specific — there is a specific goal for each of these channels. So for example, the blog is where we pull in all these different content and give it, sometimes we give lets say a real time live feed of what’s happening at LinkedIn. So the birthday party which you mentioned before, the blog was a way for us to bring in content from Flickr, you know Flickr had all the pictures, YouTube had a video summary of what the event looked like and then the blog is where we brought in all this content and we engage with our users basically to, you know to tell them, “Hey, this is what happened at LinkedIn, what do you think about it? We just want to share our celebration.”

In some other cases we, again, we use the blog to share the, you know sometimes we do a lot of analytic stuff on LinkedIn about ho — what is it that our users are doing on LinkedIn? Like what are top ten LinkedIn buzzwords among professionals for example. So we have these really cool graphics that we share with our users so they get to see and know what’s happening internally on LinkedIn both on the site, as well as what do we as a company do. So to answer your question, I believe each of these channels has a specific purpose, a specific target audience. So let’s take Facebook where we have a bunch of our users. We have roughly 60,000 followers on Facebook , 70,000, actually 95,000 on twitter; we have two twitter pages. On LinkedIn roughly again close to 60,000 followers on our LinkedIn company page. So as you can see, each of these has a specific purpose. So LinkedIn’s company page for example is probably the only one where we can reach out to our employees as well as to our users; both employees and users. Probably the only social media channel that you can do that on. And it’s consisted of a mix of feed that’s pulled from our blog as well as tweets that come in from twitter, etc would be for anyone who follows LinkedIn’s company page. On Facebook for example, we share a lot of photos, of events that happen at LinkedIn. Also the audience is slightly different, the audience is also for whether you’re a college grad for example, the chances are that you may stumble upon LinkedIn’s page on Facebook . Twitter is a mix of both LinkedIn as well as Facebook where twitter does more — there are a lot of marketers on twitter, folks who are you know — if we want to reach out to that community, then twitter is a good place for us to have the presence.

10:40 DK: You’re a popular guy.

10:41 Mario Sundar: Let me just get rid of that. Hang on. So as I just mentioned, each of them have a specific purpose. Now the cool part is speaking of ROI and metrics, each of these tools have especially LinkedIn and Facebook , has its own suite of analytics, an insides data that allows you to find out how successful your engagement on that channel has been. So if you go to LinkedIn, you’ll notice that both under the careers tab which is where you engage with potential employees, prospected employees, as well as if you go to the products and services tab, you’ll be able to basically check out the analytics on how exactly the content that you’ve shared on that page has been viewed, consumed, and engaged with by your followers. You do the same on Facebook’s page. You — they also have like an insides tab for example and we’re able to see how our engagement has peaked or has improved month by month. So those analytics are very helpful to take back to the team and say, “Guess what, we spent x amount of time on these channels and this is what the payoff has been in terms of our engagement on those channels.” So from a brand perspective it’s very easy to track that. And then we have kind of like a running list of what has been the editorial on twitter as much, the same way you would on the blog for example to see how effective a specific tweet has been, who have been the people that have retweeted it, and how exactly has that coverage been for example. And then the last thing I also do want to mention the blog. Google Analytics is how I kind of plug that into the LinkedIn blog to see how widely the blog has been received. So we have annual, annually, we have millions of page views which has actually increased 100% year over year this past year alone. We also do have the ability to see geographically what are the countries that are checking out the content that we have on our blog which is a metric that I’m using right now while we redesign the blog for different regions, for different languages. So, these are just some of the tools that we use as I said out of the total of five or six social media channels. And each of them have a social media measurement tied to it. Now, that said, I think part of my role is also bringing it all together on under an umbrella and overall over arching team and to figure out hey, our ultimate goal is to be more engaged with our users in x number of channels. Our ultimate goal is to you know get you know this particular community or audience understanding LinkedIn better. And we have the tools necessary to figure out how each of these specific tactics or each of these specific social media tools is enabling that to happen. So I know it was along form version of an answer but that is basically how we measure the effectiveness on these social media channels.

13:43 DK: I think it’s a great answer. You know a lot people want to know specifics like that and especially some raw clients and just people we speak to anyway. Then that’s brilliant, so thank you for doing the long form not, “Yeah, we look at numbers.” You know so that’s great. Don’t worry about it. Some of the clients we work with are like CEO’s who have a certain attitude towards social media. Most of them do have a LinkedIn profile even though — I call it like a gateway social network. You know you can use LinkedIn and you can start to explore the functionality and then a lot of functionality you can find on other social networks as well. So it’s kind of a gateway you know to other spaces. So people get comfortable. You don’t want to say be comfortable and (inaudible). But lets come back to the questions anyway about, lets ask you specifically about what piece of advice, one piece of advice you would give to other companies out there who are just entering social media spaces from a social managing perspective? What one or two things that these brands or organizations be focused on?

14:42 Mario Sundar: Well, so absolutely. I’ve been saying this to, for a long, long time ever since I got on the speaking circuit. I think it is important for every company or every brand to start with two things in mind. One is, what are you trying to accomplish here? You know your goal is always comes first. And second is, what is your target audience and where can I find them, right? Because a lot of companies get excited by the hype. You know a lot of people say, “Hey do you have a Facebook page or do you have like you know, how many fans do you have?” And these really do not matter at the end of the day if you do not have a specific goal that you’re driving toward. And the third thing that I would add which is also very critical is how best can we integrate these tools, social media techniques with our existing marketing strategy, with our existing PR or HR strategy? Because that is often missed as well. So you may have, you know your audience may be completely you know not on the web which is highly unlikely but you know maybe its just you have to mail them. You know snail mail may be the best way to reach your audience. But by creating a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn company page you don’t accomplish that. By the same token its important to understand, if your audience specifically is B to B oriented then you want to just focus all of your efforts or as much of your efforts on LinkedIn as possible because that may be the best channel for you to reach that B to B audience. So back to just summarize what I just said, I think there are three things that are important. First figure out what your goal is, what your target audience is and then thirdly if you want to be able to — hang on. We’ll just get rid of this. And thirdly, you want to be able to integrate that as effectively as possible with your existing marketing or PR or HR strategy.

16:33 DK: Great, great advice. So let’s wrap this interview up with a future question. What are you from a personal role perspective, what are you focused on in terms of the next months and year or so and then kind of from a LinkedIn perspective, what are you guys hoping to achieve?

16:51 Mario Sundar: I can speak for the first one obviously. My goal over the next few months or in the immediate future is how best can we replicate the success we have had in the US without social media channels globally? We already do have some great pieces of content for example on the blog for specific markets. But as I said redesigning the blog is an area that I’m really intensely involved in right now. So hopefully at the end of this process, no matter which part of the world a user is, if they’re using LinkedIn in any specific language, we’ll be able to provide them content. Social media content from LinkedIn from our team globally in each of those different languages. So globalization of our social media strategy as well as tactics is what I’m currently focused on. And so by the end of this year, or you know in the coming months you’ll start seeing a lot of cool content from LinkedIn on each of our social media channels that is both global and targeted for your part of the world.

17:51 DK: Brilliant. Well, thanks Mario for giving up your time to speak to MediaSnackers. I really appreciate it. Thank you fell.

17:57 Mario Sundar: You’re welcome, and thanks for having me.

How To Deliver Kick Ass Social Media Training

DK — Thu, 26 May 2011 07:00:44 +0000

A blueprint

What we deliver in our social media training has changed over the past five years but the principles have stayed the same (more or less).

As the industry becomes dilluted with every man and his guinea pig pimping their own brand of social media offerings here’s our differentiator.

I know what you’re thinking : we’re crazy to give this stuff away… without arrogance we know not a lot of people can do this and certainly no-one can deliver it like us, so we’re cool :

Be nice—right from the outset. Be warm. Be engaging. Be smiley. Be likeable (and BEware not to appear smarmy).
Have a wicked slidedeck—you have to impress from the start and create an emotional reason for participants to engage (above and beyond the fact that their boss has asked them to attend). This is not a powerpoint slide with bullet points on what they will learn, but a call to arms, a challenge, a haka, a throwdown…
Know your ~~shit~~ stuff and how to communicate it to queens and paupers—setting up a blog is not the same as knowing how to blog nor is it the same of enabling others to blog. Learn the difference and explore all the ways to communicate them.
Be confident and self-aware—not a fan of standing up a room of 20 strangers, then move on. If you don’t have the balls to laugh out loud, share what inspires your soul, cry (seriously, some of our sessions have been known to get that emotional), then you won’t give, in turn, permission to those participating to do the same.
Contextualise often—being a jane-of-all-trades is a must (unless you’re only serving a specific industry, although even then you’re missing out as to go forward look sideways). Polymaths rule in markets which constantly overlap and bleed into each other. Hit the books and learn the differences between how music venues speak compared to local authorities etc.
Challenge—training is about expanding brains and pushing at the limits of existing knowledge. This might mean telling people they currently suck at something or are doing it wrong (in a social media context). Always be ready to back it up though and you better also have the solution at hand as well otherwise things could get ugly.
Inspire—show people the goal. Highlight through stories how much impact this stuff has. Illustrate through personal insights and corporate case studies the outcomes of using these platforms (from a monetary saving perspective right through to a cultural shift into authenticity and customer engagement).
Play—this is your greatest weapon. Creat spaces and cultivate the environment of play. Our golden ticket to get high levels of engagement throughout the day.

Now sprinkle in the content, some funky missions and learning styles then you have yourself a blueprint of how to deliver a kick ass training session. We’re constantly tweaking and changing this but you get the idea.

Now think of the last training course you went on—anything like this?

Did I miss anything?

MediaSnackers Training

Google Docs Saves Money And Time

DK — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:36:20 +0000

And why you will never use it

Think about how many meetings happen in your business / organisation. Here’s a guaranteed social solution to save both time and money :

Lets say that one person spends about 2 hours a week writing minutes / notes relating to meetings they attended (that’s outside of actually attending the meeting in the first instance).

We will be generous and say this person gets 4 weeks off a year and therefore that’s 48 weeks x 2 hours = 96 hours spent per year on the taking of notes and minutes related to meetings.

This equates to £1,632 (the average wage in the UK is about £24,000 a year / £17 an hour approx).

Now, here’s the solution—at every meeting someone just creates a Google Doc, adds the attendees in as contributors and writes the notes / minutes there and then.

The impact this would have is :

no need to go back to the desk and write the minutes up
no need to send emails out with the attached minutes as the participants already have access to them
no need to print the minutes out for distribution (saving more time / money / trees)
no need to send emails out if someone makes an edit as people will be able to see on the document itself

(If you don’t know what Google Docs is then check out the helpful video below) :

Totally realise the above calculation is rougher than a badgers undercarriage (numbers are really not my strong point) but you get the idea.

Do a quick number crunch and see how much time you could save yourself if you switched to using google docs and eliminated the accumulative time currently spent on the original method. Then multiply that by the people in your company who do similar things to you. What figure did you come up with?

I’ve been using the simple example above for ages in all our masterclasses / training sessions and yet, hardly any businesses / organisations I know have adopted it.

Why?

Well maybe I didn’t communicate it well enough could be one factor. But I think the issue is institutional or cultural.

There is a deeper barrier to adoption for these ideas and the others we share in our sessions, however, the habitat for the innovation habit does not exist.

To cultivate a culture of progression and openness to new ideas is about aligning the motivational factors of the individuals to the purpose of the organisation. If the people are all for new ideas and the company is not, then there is no adoption (and vice versa as well).

This is the biggest challenge to seeing social media being explored and then used.

Inspiring individuals is easy. We’ve been doing that for over five years. But organisations and company wide, now there’s a challenge, one which I’m going to be taking on in my secondment as the Social Media Manager for CORE in Christchurch, NZ.

MS Podcast#155 : SSG Dale Sweetnam, U.S. Army

DK — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:43:54 +0000

HOOAH and social media

The MediaSnackers podcast focusses on individuals, organisations or companies who are simply impressing us and which are crying out for more discussion.

SSG Dale Sweetnam is the non-commissioned officer in charge of the Online and Social media, the US Army’s Online and Social Media Division.

0.00—0.24 intro
0.25—1.33 Dales role and use of social media in the Army
1.34—4.21 the Social Media Army Handbook
4.22—6.35 negative comments
6.37—9.27 managing 122 YouTube / 266 Twitter / 205 Flickr / 930 Facebook pages (full list here)
9.28—12.00 being human
12.01—13.37 future
13.38—13.49 outro

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TRANSCRIPTION

SSG Dale Sweetnam: Hi my name is Staff Sergeant Dale Sweetnam. I am the non commissioned officer in charge in the online and social media division, the Army’s online and social media division. And I’m calling from the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

DK: Well it’s brilliant to have you with us Dale. And tell us a little bit about what you actually do in that role please.

SSG Dale Sweetnam: Absolutely. We’re part of the social media division which is a five person staff. And essentially what we do is we use social media assets to tell the Army’s story. We use Facebook, and twitter and YouTube and these various resources to tell the story to a broader audience. Because it’s not just about newspapers anymore, it’s about telling your story and bringing it to the people where they look for their information. So a lot of what we do is we daily use these resources. Go up on and do Facebook posts, and do twitter and do tweets. Set up YouTube videos and then we also educate which is incredibly important. In the Army us being very operations security sensitive a lot of the information that we need to keep classified, need to keep secret but at the same time we want to be transparent. So we take the resources we have and we tell that story and we go out and we educate people on how to use these resources correctly when they use them on their own so that they don’t make mistakes and put solders at risk. So it’s kind of a two fold effort, to use resources to tell a story and to educate, to make sure that nobody makes you know any mistakes that can put us in danger.

DK: Fantastic. Now I found you guys because we did a post on MediaSnackers which featured your US Army Social Media Handbook which you put up on Slideshare wasn’t it? So that’s in a sense when I first came across it for one US Army Social Media Handbook and then secondly I followed the digital breadcrumbs, found you at twitter and then after a couple conversations and emails, we connected and we’re now talking. So that’s the digital breadcrumbs of the background. But in a sense, the handbook, I would love to just go into in a little bit of detail, not too much, because it’s online. We’ll put the link so people can see it. But reading through it is really interesting. You’ve touched on the OPSEC which is maintaining operational security and stuff like that. And in a sense it reminded me of the corporate entities that we work with about managing their intellectual properties and stuff like that. So you’ve already said that you go out and educate people. Tell us a little bit about what, how that manifests? Is that actual training courses for now staff and soldiers?

SSG Dale Sweetnam: What we try to do — and the genesis that handle quintessentially we were going out and speaking to small populations at the pre-command course in Fort Leavenworth Kansas and to the Defense Information School in Fort George G. Meade Maryland. And we’re speaking about social media to small audiences and there’s a lot of questions that continued to come up. Now like I said, being a small fiver person staff, we wanted to reach a broader audience so we saw that there was a need for more education, there was a need for further explanation of social media as that’s resources and how to use them correctly. So we ended up putting together the handbook which is about 36 or so pages that deal with everything from how you start a Facebook page, how you register it, all the way through how do you make sure that you don’t post secure information and how you do this correctly. And the intent was once you get this out there and being a digital media like we are is to go out there and basically hit as many people as we possibly can. So we loaded up on Slideshare. And then upon loading it there, we then tweeted it out on twitter and put it up on Facebook and put it up on the Army Live Blog to make sure that the maximum amount of people that were looking for the information could find it. And we got lucky in the respect that a few news media resources, our news sources out there picked up on the story, posted it and drove even more traffic to that site. So like I said, I mean, outside being very key, it was a focus of the handbook. And we actually intend within the next few weeks to actually create an update to the handbook to include more OPSEC information and more how to information so that this continues to grow. Social media in essence is very evolutionary, continues to grow day by day. So we’re trying to stay if not ahead of the curve, stay on par with the curve and make sure that we are getting information out there that’s the most updated and the most accurate.

DK: And I know within the handbook you got kind of ideas about launching specific platforms like twitter and stuff like that but also how to kind of manage negative responses. And youre quite progressive in a sense you don’t delete negative comments. Particularly I can imagine as a political entity in the sense, you know in the military entity, you guys probably do have to manage some of those reactions from the public and stuff. How do you actually go about that from yourself in the division there but also how do you enable other people to do that?

SSG Dale Sweetnam: Well, you know as the Army, we are fighting for you know freedom of speech and the freedoms of our country. So we want to make sure that we’re providing a forum for individuals to come and actually have engaged discussion about Army activities and to make sure that we’re not censoring because that’s not our purpose. We’d rather them be talking about the Army on our Facebook page rather than starting up a forum somewhere that we don’t have any visibility of because we want to engage as well. So but yes, there are some restrictions and we approach those restrictions through the policy or through the posting policy that we have on our Facebook page which very specifically details what you can and cant do. Obviously we’re not going to go out there and censor opinions that don’t necessarily agree with the Army. But we will step in you know when there is obscenities and direct personal attacks and things with that nature. And that’s all very clearly outlined in our policy, in our posting policy. And that you know is — and in addition to that, it’s not so much that we police it because we typically don’t. I mean, Facebook provides a lot of resources where you know if an obscenity pops up we have, our Facebook will actually block it for us. But something that we’ve noticed is that the population that comes to Facebook and the population that engages through these social media platforms is very self policing. If somebody comes up there, makes a negative comment or makes some sort of negative claim, the Facebook community or the social media community will actually get on there and comment back to that individual. So it’s not necessarily us doing all this damage control, jumping on there and responding to negative comments. We actually just sit back a lot of times and watch the community itself engage. So it’s actually very exciting and its very empowering too I believe.

DK: That’s lovely. And I know it’s not just you doing this because youre empowering all your little divisions and all your battalions and whatever you call them, sorry to be ignorant there. But I jumped on your site and I know you got a site and I’ll put up the link which lists actually all the social media spaces you and all your Army divisions are in. And I totaled them up, there’s 122 YouTube, there’s 266 twitter channels, there’s 205 Flickr accounts, and 930 Facebook pages. Now that is just awesome. And in terms of a number, I see a scale of that. and if youre a business entity and got all those subsidiaries if you like, how do you go about managing them in respect because you still, the buck stops with you guys because social media, youre heading that up.

SSG Dale Sweetnam: No absolutely. And in order to get on the social media directory that you referenced, we have some admission in our registration, our procedure essentially. And we have a standing operating procedure that goes through the details as to what a Facebook page, you know an Army Facebook page should look like or what a twitter page should look like. That way they have an opportunity to kind of put it in the right position and then submit it. Upon submitting it, we review and we make sure that they have a posting policy in place and we make sure that they have information or command information on place and make sure that there not making any tremendous mistakes as to some of their initial posts or things of that nature. So we clear it first and then the ads are taken down which is really important is we submit all these registrations to Facebook and they take the ads down off the side. Because as a government entity, we cant endorse any products. And then once that’s pulled down, it appears in our directory. And like you mentioned, yes, that is a substantial amount of Facebook pages, twitter accounts, Flickr pages, all that; there’s a lot out there. And again, being a five person staff, we’re not out there scrubbing it everyday to check to make sure that there aren’t huge mistakes and gaps. And that’s where the education comes in. Each week we produce a social media roundup. Essentially it’s a 15 slide PowerPoint presentation that goes into very specific detail of a social issue or a topic at hand. And we distribute that to all of the individuals that have registered their sites. So there is, it’s not just once they’re up there, we forget about them. It’s that once there up there, they’re continuing to get education information from the social media division so that maybe they’re making a mistake and we’re not aware of it. But the social media topic comes up and it’s addressed in the roundup and then they can adjust fire, make sure to make those changes. So where there’s not that constant interaction with the pages and us constantly looking at all 900 plus Facebook pages, there is an effort to continue to maintain contact with those individuals who are managing those sites.

DK: Yes, it’s a nice little thing you got going there. And I’d love to ask you a question about the, almost the etiquette behind social. You know its conversational, its human, and I love in the handbook just to go back to that. You actually in the frequency, frequently asked questions, the FAQ at the back, you do say about mixing it up, having fun, being human. I’d love to get your take on how that does manifest itself, you know and some nice light hearted things coming out of, that you’ve seen on Flickr or whatever, YouTube channels.

SSG Dale Sweetnam: Yeah, there’s a lot of ways to do that because they Army is in and of itself a very specific large organization that has no face. You know it is the Army, it’s the largest service branch in the United States. So it’s huge and it is big and all encompassing and just this massive machine. But there’s a way to find a tone, you know there’s a way to pick a tone that you can use in your social media platforms to keep it fun and to keep it interesting. A twitter account for example is very dynamic and it has a tone, and it uses the word “Hooah” a lot which is an Army specific word that everybody in the Army associates with us. Its one of those words that means a hundred different things. So to use that and kind of maintain that conversation in a pleasant tone and to give that face to the Army. In addition to that you look for photos of soldiers doing unique things, you know picking up puppies and you know interactings with populations in different cultures and to show the human side. And there’s also, there’s a lot of fun things we can do as well. A few weeks back on April 1st, we actually decided to do an April Fools day joke which was very well received. And we ended up talking about how the soldiers here, we wear berets, that’s our headgear and we were going to change it to the Stetson which is more of a cowboy hat that is worn by the First Cav. And that created a great deal of buzz and increased the traffic to our Army.mil site, it increased a great deal of traffic to our Facebook page, twitter, what have you. And it also showed, hey, you know we’re not afraid to make a little, you know make fun of ourselves and have a little fun. It was very well received and it increased the traffic to our Army.mil site a great deal that we’re still experiencing now. So little experiments like this, little efforts to have a little fun, and to show a human side can be incredibly valuable to a population that you know maybe a little bit apprehensive about the Army or just doesn’t know much about it period. So there’s a way to have fun, there’s a way to experiment. And as long as youre doing it, you know with good intentions.

DK: Yeah of course. And lets wrap this up with a short question about what’s the future for you guys now especially in the division social media as you said is evolutionary, its going to change. How do you envision that impact on not just what you do but the Army as a whole?

SSG Dale Sweetnam: Well what we’d like to do is you know, we’d like to continue to move with the actual culture itself. We want to be right there in the front and to be aware of the changes and to be aware of the evolution of social media. But something we say here a lot, myself and the director when we go out and speak is you know if we do our jobs well, we won’t have one you know in a couple of years. Social media is getting to the point where the better we do our job and the better we educate, eventually, this is going to be common knowledge and each individual organization out there that’s using Facebook, that’s using twitter is going to be self sufficient and they’re going to be able to do this on their own. This is just the way we communicate now. I mean, social media is about bringing news to the person rather than the person seeking out the news. And the Army recognizes that and a lot of the Department of Defense recognizes that as well. You know when you don’t go out and look for a newspaper anymore, you go out to a website as often as news finds your newsfeed or news finds your twitter feed. So I mean, that’s the direction that we’re going and we’re going to continue to enforce that and continue to promote that and to show the value of using social media. And eventually it will get to the point where its common knowledge and I’ll be doing something else somewhere else. But our hope is to do our jobs well enough that everyone’s going to know what they need to do and how they can maximize their efforts with social media.

DK: Brilliant. Well I just want to thank you for giving up your morning to speak to MediaSnackers Dale; I really appreciate your time.

SSG Dale Sweetnam: No, it was an absolute pleasure. I’m happy to be here.

Happy Twitter Birthday To Me

DK — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 07:06:11 +0000

35,053 hours – 1,461 days – 48 months – nearly 9,500 tweets – over 3,000 followers

Four years ago today I joined Twitter.

Iit’s still basically a status brodcasting service (or micro-blogging platform as some people call it) but for me, here’s how it’s had an impact :

gotten me paid gigs in many countries
reconnected with old friends
established new ones
answered questions and queries when things baffled me
allowed me to disseminate my knowledge to others
offered research opportunities regarding topics of interest
given me real time insights from the audience during my speaking / masterclass gigs
gives mediasnackers.com a third of all its traffic

In the past we’ve covered how newbies make mistakes, tweeting babble is good, how to find customers / clients / audiences and how even big brands get it wrong, but basically it’s just like a real room full of real people and the only benefit comes when you put time and energy into it.

So here’s to the next four years, breaking through my 10,000th tweets and continuing to reap the rewards from participating in a vibrant and global community through a simple online and mobile platform.

Recently I have started a new personal Twitter account, follow me as I prepare to emigrate to New Zealand.

Image credit

Why Social Media Shouldn’t Be Outsourced

DK — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:51:36 +0000

Dare you to disagree!

Headlocks, wedgies and chinese burns to all social media agencies / freelancers who manage brands and organisations social spaces and communications.

Please stop!

When our clients and others talk to us about outsourcing their social media activities we used to say : “it’s not wrong, just wrong for us”, now we’re saying something different…

At the centre of any decision to outsource are the two main reasons :

don’t have the time
don’t have the skills

Lets take them in turn :

Time

Most organisations and brands devote time to develop their staff and new skills. To broaden the touchpoints they have with those who (potentially) buy from them. To become more efficient. To cut print and operational costs. To deepen the knowledge of their sector.

Social media does all this.

Add to that, it can save you an enormous amount of operational time (see below under ‘Internal Benefits’).

Skills

Anyone can learn how to use social media (an opinion based on five years experience, delivering across four continents, to hundreds if not thousands of people (we’ve lost count), across countless of industries and sectors).

We have yet to find one person who couldn’t click a few buttons, be inspired to use online platforms with the technologies they already own plus see the value and benefit it would bring to their role.

The golden rule of social media use : it’s just like being in a big room, full of real people.

Everyone already has the skill to be human.

***

There are other reasons why outsourcing is the wrong approach to take :

Internal benefits

Social media is a set of tools to make everyones life easier. Operations smoother. Quicker. Cheaper.

It’s as much as an internal function as an external one and understanding how to use these offerings effectively would negate the need to outsource due to the savings in time and money.

Social networking is just a small piece of the social media pie (those agencies / freelancers never tell you that do they).

The consumers / clients / customers

Most people use social spaces to connect with other individuals. Their perceptions of seeing brands and organisation in social spaces creates an expectation that communications would be from people working for said brand. If it’s someone else then that’s a little bit like cheating.

If anything it’s more about adding benefit to your brand name by giving away knowledge and insights. It’s about relevant content creation. It’s about responding personally to tweets. It’s about logging into forums and offering insights. It’s about adding value to current conversations out there. It’s about giving others stuff before expecting their time and money.

This approach is cheaper than any hiring of a PR agency in the long run (who couldn’t do half this stuff anyway) as it’s more authentic, honest and empowers businesses to distribute the message they want, unfiltered.

Check out our vodcasts with social media managers and hear from the likes of Ford, Kodak, SEGA, All Blacks Rugby on how they approach it all.

For me it comes down to this : however much money you throw at people to manage your social spaces for you, I guarantee they won’t have the passion, the understanding of your industry / sector or even the amount of energy to make it a success than you do. Period.

Ongoing cost

How much does it cost to pay that marketing / pr agency who now happen to do social?

How much time does it take to put together the briefs, manage the relationships, go through the reports, feedback on new messages / tactics etc.?

Going social is an continual investment and not a one-off purchase. The fuel you have to keep putting into the car after you bought it. Outsourcing means paying for a driver as well as the fuel (only a few can afford it, it’s simpler to do yourself and even if you don’t, most people think “why can’t you just drive yourself, lazy show-off?”).

Another thing most social media agencies fail to tell you is social media is really bad for selling stuff. Social spaces are being populated by those pumping their marketing messages through it with no understanding or regard to the essence of the medium.

So many businesses ‘sprinkle’ social media into their marketing, expect immediate results and then dismiss it, thinking that it doesn’t work for their sector. This is absolute nonsense and highlights a failure to understand how the digital world has changed, and how they need to change to keep up.

Social media is not going away and failing to invest properly in it this time will mean a reinvestment further down the line.

Epilogue

A few social media agencies started following me on Twitter recently and I asked them directly for their thoughts on this—none of them got back to me… what does that tell you?!?!?

A message for those thinking about outsourcing :

If you care about your business / organisation and believe in what you are doing, tell your own story, explore how social media can be used internally to save you time & money and please don’t outsource it.

A message for social media agencies :

You’re hurting the industry. You’re polluting and corrupting the spaces. You’re doing it wrong.

The only caveat to the above is for those individuals and agencies helping others start their social media journey, assisting in the start of the process and ‘holding the hands’ of those involved to transition to the client doing it for themselves—this is cool.

Think I’m wrong? OK, leave a comment. I’m open for discussion. Maybe there is room for both offerings in terms of freelancers and agencies managing social spaces and their messages plus other people like us helping people to do it for themselves—if someone can convince me to change my mind then I will happily write a rebuke.

MediaSnackers—not doing anyones social media communications and spaces since 2006—thank you.

How To Be A Company In Social Spaces

mark — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:50:12 +0000

If you’re going to be ugly. Be ‘Clint ugly’.

The more businesses I speak to the more I come across individuals that aren’t comfortable being the ‘face’ of that business. Social media fails if you are just broadcasting, operating under a company logo and not interacting with your audiences. There is a way though that you can still be beautifully effective, even without a pair of eyeballs as an avatar.

Here’s a few steps you can take to delivering some humanity into your corporate communications:

Name the contributors
List the employees on your profile bio or Group / About / Fan page eg: @Dave, @StacyM & @MightyMike

Indicate who is replying
End your tweets with the initials of the responder, eg: ^D, ^SM, ^MM (Dave, StacyM & MightyMike) Or make sure all blog posters have a user account under their own name.

Emote
Use language of a human being. Do you convey how much you care (or not) about something? You don’t have to be perfect, just behave as if you were in a real life conversation.

Have opinions
Don’t sit on the fence, take a stance, be it good, bad or ugly.

Interact with others
If you’re not replying, you’re not trying.

Stop broadcasting
Pumping out blog post titles and press releases is not being social. There’s nothing to stop you, but don’t expect any one to care about you if that’s all you do.

In short – if you’re not going to be a person, the least you can do is start behaving like one. Start today by asking your audience what they would like to read about on the company social space… the answers might surprise you.

Does this list help you? Do you care about your company image in social spaces? What’s your biggest beef with social spaces for your business? Drop a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If this list still isn’t helping you, add ‘mediasnackersmark’ on Skype and lets chat about it.

MediaSnackers New Zealand

DK — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:55:22 +0000

The short version…

In June I will be emigrating to Christchurch, New Zealand.

I will take up the role of Social Media Jedi/Manager for CORE Education, a not-for-profit educational research and development organisation with an international reputation for support and promotion of the use of new technologies for learning across all education and training sectors.

MediaSnackers will be coming with me and relaunched with CORE Education as equity and delivery partner (they will remain separate brands).

We are currently exploring options to retain a working office in the UK with Mark continuing to kick ass across our service range.

The long version

For the past five years MediaSnackers has been my passion and focus.

All my energies and devotion has been poured into building up the business from nothing to a six figure turnover company.

It has offered opportunities to connect with amazing individuals I would’ve never had the chance to, influence countless organisations and brands in their social media use plus experience journeys across five continents.

So why the hell am I moving…?

Put simply, I’m hungry for adventure and the other side of the planet seemed a good place to start.

New Zealand is an amazing place full of wondrous landscapes and even lovelier people. I fell in love with it (especially Christchurch) when visiting at the end of 2009 (delivering several gigs : Ulearn09 conference, Global Focus Aotearoa, Palmerston North Library and Parehua Country Estate).

After making the decision to move the original plan was simply to set up MediaSnackers NZ, although after chatting with several contacts in the country an opportunity developed through CORE Education. A few investors were interested in taking up the reins for sustaining UK-based operations and lots of meetings / emails / discussions were had, however, even though the figures offered were substantial, none offered a solid match with our core values.

After an immense and emotional journey of sharing that decision with those in MediaSnackers, discussing its impact, working out the options, chatting with close friends and family plus edging my way through the NZ Immigration system, I was officially granted my New Zealand residency right at the end of February 2011.

The new partnership with CORE Education not only ensures the brand values which are instilled in MediaSnackers remain (that of inspiring people through social media to learn, work and live differently—not doing it for them) but their guidance / input / resources will strengthen the offering into a scalable business model.

My new role will give me the opportunity to put into practice what I’ve been telling other people to do all these years and for the first time in 8 years the idea of having a boss is totally exciting and weird in equal measure.

There are two months or so of delivering to and for outstanding clients, speaking at several events (sorry for those who have been trying to book me for the summer and beyond, you can see now why I couldn’t commit) and delivering a couple more training gigs before the off…

USA Work

The proposed emigration timetable allows for some time stateside delivering a few social media sessions for some clients there en route to NZ :

LHR ✈ LAX — 16th June, stay one night
LAX ✈ SEA — 17th, attending TEDxOverlake
SEA ✈ SFO — 19th, chilling plus lunch at Google
SJO 20th, lunch at Google
SFO ✈ AUK ✈ PMR — 23rd, weekend chilling before…
PMR ✈ CHC — 28th, new home

Get in touch if you would like to meet or have a gig for me.

And finally

Even though this is a goodbye to the UK it’s not a farewell to MediaSnackers. However, I do feel a few hat-tips are needed :

Thanks to the several fantastic freelancers, affiliates and associates who have become a part of the MediaSnackers family—you have all influenced and helped grow the brand more than you know.

Deep waist bows to the vast array of clients I’ve personally had the opportunity to deliver for. The experience has enabled me to grow and develop my skills as a speaker / training / leader / provocateur etc

Head nodding gratitude to you the readers / followers / friends who have connected with me across all the social spaces. You have challenged, entertained and educated.

And last but not least, humbled appreciation to Mark who has supported, inspired and guided the building of this little business. I have no doubt this will continue.

As stated, we will continue to work hard to sustain a UK operation and look forward to growing our client base on this side of the planet—we’re still very much ‘open for business’.