Employees are using social media. How should businesses handle that? They can take a hard approach or trust their employees, but which choice is best? Watch my video below to learn more.

In my previous post, I talk about what you could do to stand out when going to meetings. With social media, it’s different because to stand out in a social media you really have to be on top with the content you offer, more so than in-person where appearance can be just as important a factor. But great content alone won’t work unless you’re also consistent in your activity. So this means you need to plan on posting on a social media network regularly and also keep track of who’s responding and what someone is saying.

To stand out in social media also involves personalizing your posting. It’s very easy to post to multiple sites at once, but not always advisable, especially if the audience differs on a given site. And personalizing your postings also means you keep on top of responses on the actual sites those responses occur at. So for example, if you get a response on your Facebook page, make the response on Facebook, and make an effort to visit your page a couple times a day, just to check if someone has commented there.

While it’s true people want content on social media, they also want social interaction, so make it a point to be social and comment on what other people are writing about. It gives those people a better feel for who you are, which is always nice, because I want to know that I’m interacting with other people.

Finally, when it comes to standing out in social media, make the effort to move communication beyond social media to other mediums. I’ve met several people I was initially connected to through Linkedin, and by making the effort to meet them in person, I was able to learn more about them and also explore some business possibilities. Don’t limit your contact with someone to social media. A person will definitely remember you more, if you make the effort to contact him/her offline as well as online.

The other day at one of my chamber meetings, a fellow member remarked on my hat and noted that even if people didn’t remember my name, they’d always remember my hat. I think he’s right, because it’s a fairly distinctive hat. In fact, that’s one reason (though not the only) that I wear it. I know people will remember me by my hat and that if they ask someone else about me, chances are that person will also remember if the hat is alluded to. Of course, I also dress up and I make it a point to have a memorable tag line, because I realize that sometimes it will be some of that information that helps someone find me.

Still appearance alone isn’t enough and neither is a clever tag line. What will really make you stand out is showing people you can walk that talk you give out. So be able to back up what you do and you’ll be pleased with the credibility that also gets associated with the image.

What do you do to stand out to the people you know? Each day, I meet lots of different people. Some of them are new, most of them I’ve already met a couple times. What makes someone stand out to me is going to half involve appearance, and half involve what they actually say. Afterwords I’ll research them and find out more, and see if my initial impression is confirmed or disproved. Depending on what I find a conversation may follow or it might not. That’s what I do to check up on people who stand out to me.

There’s also a social media component to this and I’ll cover that in the next post.

Book Review Social Media 101 by Chris Brogan

Social Media 101 is chalk full of useful tips and suggestions for how to leverage social media for your business. Best of all the writing is not only approachable, but its to read a couple of chapters, put it down, and then come back to it later. I’ve found numerous useful tips that I’ve tried out, from the book, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is wanting to learn more about how to use social media for business. Then check out Chris’s blog, which will have more useful information for you.

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Social Media coach radio:  Is social media a vocation? In this episode, I ask if social media is a vocation and offer evidence that it is.

Social Media Coach radio: Is Mobile overrated? In this episode I ask if mobile is overrated.

Interview with Eric Radtke of DNS.com about geo-location and DNS safety. In this interview I discuss geo-location technology and DNS Safety issues with Eric Radtke, as we learn more about how geo-location is changing the internet.

Recently Jeremiah Owyang did an interview with Greenpeace about their social media activism and how they had used social media to get companies to change their policies and activities, while also raising public awareness about what the companies are doing. As Jeremiah explains, activist groups such as Greenpeace have been using technology for a long time to aid in their activist work, and social media is no exception. In fact, I would suggest that businesses should study such activist groups and learn what they are doing right. Then businesses can co-opt what the activists are doing to develop closer relationships with the clients they serve.

I think businesses should study how other types of organizations are using social media to communicate with their constituents, donaters, supporters, or whatever you want to call the people that these organizations are communicating with. Its clear that some of these organizations get results in their activities, and its worth studying what they do, and then reverse engineering it. For example, what would have happened if Nestle had been transparent about their activities and actually solicited advice from their fans about what to do? They might’ve gotten the public support and been able to leverage it with Greenpeace. Instead Greenpeace leveraged their response against them and forced Nestle to pledge to make changes. Clearly Greenpeace understood the social psychology involved a lot better than Nestle did.

Ideological movements will trump corporate cultures in a public setting, because if everyone can learn about the effect that corporate policies are having, and those people start to care, corporate culture won’t be able to justify their continued actions or lack thereof. Consequently social media activism comes down to leveraging social influence…finding the opportunity and people who will take up the cause, raise public awareness and effect the bottom line of the company. And it’s very important to understand that its the bottom line that matters the most to a company, often to the detriment of that company because people can rightly accuse the company of only thinking about the money.

If a company were to re-orient themselves in terms of thinking not only about the bottom line, but also the social implications of the activities they use to feed the bottom line, that company might find that the long term cost of focusing just on the bottom line would be a lot more expensive than the short term gain justifies. And this is why if companies study how organizations such as Greenpeace are using social media to raise awareness, they can start asking some tough critical questions about their own practices and how they can be socially transparent with their clientele. The result is that they can then leverage that social influence to get client support for the changes they are making. It’s a different approach, but if companies were to employ social media activism to themselves, there’d be a lot less upset, because they’d be using what the activists were trying to use to promote socially responsible change.

What do you think? How should companies learn from Greenpeace and other organizations that are using social media to raise awareness and public outcry for change?

I clicked on a link to an article on a website, and quickly found myself irritated when I realized that in each article the person wrote there was a link to the book he’d written. Additionally, he had a link to his amazon wishlist, if you found his article helpful…the premise being that you would buy something for him. It was clear to me that while he was offering valuable information, he was also going overboard on the advertising of it. Instead of interesting me in the book, I became less interested, because it was clear that he wasn’t offering information to be helpful, so much as to get people to buy his book.

I think making an occasional mention about a product you have to offer is perfectly acceptable. You want people to know about your products and ideally they will buy from you if they see value in what you offer. But if you always are trying to get people to buy you will turn them off pretty quickly  because it will be clear that all you really value is their money.

I usually make an offer once a week on this blog, in regards to the DVD tutorial videos I now have available. You can watch the videos and learn how to use different social media sites. In fact, by mentioning them here, I’m making my offer for this week. But for the majority of my posts I avoid doing this. I do post affiliate links, but I also make it clear that they are affiliate links so that you can knowingly make a choice.

When you are blogging or writing articles you want to develop trust, and develop a relationship. Cutting right to the sale doesn’t enable that to occur. It just tells you the person is more interesting in getting your money than actually helping you with your problem. When I visited the website where the person was trying to sell his book with each post, what I saw was too much advertising with an attempt to disguise it with content. He probably does get some sales, but how many people don’t come back to the site because they feel like he’s more interested in selling than actually helping?

It’s important to know who your audience is, what their needs are, and what social media sites they go to, in order to get those needs met. No one size fit all strategy works with social media because different sites cater to different needs and different target clients. Watch the video and tell me if you agree or disagree.

When Linkedin set it up that people could connect their Twitter accounts to Linkedin, little did they know they would unleash a wave of spam on Linkedin with the result being a lot of status updates that have little if anything to do with professional or business updates. Fortunately Linkedin has also taken on some of Facebook’s better features and you can hide the updates from people who haven’t mastered the art of only posting relevant information to a given social media site.

Why would you want to clean up your Linkedin page? If you’re primarily interested in keeping up with professional activities that other people are involved in, on Linkedin, hiding the people who are posting non-relevant information can be useful because then you aren’t reading their Twitter updates. For the most part, people have linked their Twitter accounts without really considering if all the updates are relevant. They can modify the connection by choosing to use the #in, but for the most part I don’t see this used.

Below is an example of status updates, some of which are relevant to Linkedin, and some of which are not. Most of the updates are coming to Linkedin via Twitter.

To hide an update you no longer want to see, hover your mouse to the right of the status update, and you’ll see the word hide appear.

If you want to undo hiding someone’s updates, you’ve got one chance after you hide them. You’ll get an announcement that the updates of the person are now hidden. Click undo to unhide the updates or click X to remove the announcement.

This is one way you can clean up your Linkedin front page, from unwanted Twitter spam. You’ll still be able to get messages from the person, but cutting down on this kind of clutter can streamline your overall time and focus on Linkedin.

In a talk I recently did, it was suggested that social media is mainly about posting content as opposed to actually being social on social media. Both perspectives have their merits, as I’ll explore below.

Social media is about posting content

For some people social media is about posting content, which means posting information. Sometimes a link to a website or blog is included and sometimes it’s just a simple tip that is included. The overall purpose is to push information out, with an occasional offer thrown into to entice followers. This is how many businesses use social media and it does seem to work rather well, especially if you have service or product you want to offer. And these same businesses can and do interact with followers, but generally the focus is on getting those followers to a place where they will buy a service or product from the business.

These same businesses will also use social media to monitor and manage what is being said about their service and product. By doing this they can get on top of potential negative situations and ideally resolve them quickly, while also capitalizing on positive mentions of the business.

The one disadvantage to this approach is that while producing content can be helpful it doesn’t necessarily show that you are engaged. While it doesn’t come off as blatant advertising, pushing out content isn’t as much about cultivating relationships as it is about getting business. While getting more information is definitely helpful for people, it’s still not so much about the people you follow, as about the business you want from them.

Social media about being social

For some people, social media is about being social. While there’s still some pushing of information, the emphasis is less on the information and more on cultivating relationships, which means that the person comments on other peoples’ posts in order to have conversations. This occurs less often on social media, when businesses do it.

When social media is treated as a social medium the focus is on building relationships, which means showing interest in more than just the content you push out. The interest is in what other people are saying, and what they are sharing, with an eye toward contributing to the overall conversation.

The disadvantage to this approach is that depending on the social media site, most people may not be doing it and consequently won’t be interested in responding. On the other hand, by being more social you might cultivate a relationship where the person is willing to help you out.

Neither approach is wrong or right. Each person (or business) needs to evaluate each approach and how it fits with their objectives. One exercise that might be useful is actually trying each approach for a month and then comparing the amount of traffic and conversion to sales that each approach provided.

I’ve been writing a lot about the social aspects of social media and also thinking about what makes social so important and I’ve come to the conclusion its social context that interests people. What I mean by social context is context where the social relationship is established before the business relationship. Social context doesn’t just occur in social media, but in social media it needs to be more developed because many of the visual and verbal cues are missing from text.

People do business with people they trust and in part this means that people do business with someone who has established some social context that enables each person involved to feel like they know each other enough to feel comfortable doing business. In social media, to establish social context involves recognizing that the majority of it will be established through other mediums, but that some of it will also be established using social media. For example, initial impressions are essential for creating good social context. A well written invitation to connect can help a lot, but what also helps is demonstrating consistent social interactions on social media sites.

When I see that someone has decided to follow me on Twitter, I check out his/her account and usually can tell if the person is just trying to sell something or is actually engaging people socially by the amount of responses or lack thereof the person makes. This holds true for other social media sites as well. Looking at how people are using sites will tell you how interested they are in establishing a relationship as opposed to pushing a product.

Social context is important in every type of relationship a person has. We owe it to ourselves to consider how we can build social context in social media in order to open the door to more business and closer relationships. In the case of social media building social context means framing the conversation around learning more about a person while also appearing consistent in how you interact. If you do that, you can develop trust and from that create opportunities.