A few weeks back I presented a session at an HR conference on Talent Mining using social media.  After doing a little research beyond the general HR elements and investigating the particular requirements of talent mining, I prepared the following presentation.  The conversation was lively and as usual we had people who were either brand new to social media as well as those with some very interesting insights.

If this is your field, please have a look at the Slide Share presentation.

By Charlotte Kemp

Many large businesses actively discourage their staff from using social media during working hours.  This is due to a number of factors:

• A real and perceived threat of a waste of time
• There being no value proposition to the employee being on a social media platform
• The company not having a social media goal or strategy in mind
• A concern about band width
• A concern about staff posting negative content

Besides the incredible value of tapping into the employees’ databases of contacts in order to spread the marketing message of the company, here are some internal value propositions too.

1.     Effective employee communication

Using internal channels and communications methods, management will be able to communicate with staff quickly regardless of where they are located.  This effectively means that all relevant employees and branches can receive the same information simultaneously rather than outlying divisions and lower hierarchical departments perceiving that they are less important because their information filters down over a period of time.

2.     Dealing with unsatisfactory posts

One of the big concerns of many companies is that of what happens if staff post negative comments about the company or industry on their social media.

The issues to consider here are as follows:

• If a staff member is not happy, then they are likely expressing that dissatisfaction offline, regardless of whether they are online or not.  If there is a risk of damage to the brand, then it is going to happen anyway.  The only problem is that comments made offline can seldom be traced, recorded or in fact even known about by the company.  So damage is done without knowing what has happened.

• When someone makes any comment about your company online, simple tools like Google Alerts and other media trackers, can let you know that your company has been mentioned.  You can then drill down to the relevant post, assuming it is public, and see what has been said.  If the comment is positive then you can thank or acknowledge the person who has endorsed you.  If the comment is negative and inaccurate then you can address that situation and present the correct facts.  Where it is negative and accurate, well that brings us to the third point.

• Often the things we are afraid of seeing online happen to be the things we know are the truth.  Whether it is something negative about our company, or just a negative expression from a staff member, then it is time to deal with the matter at hand and fix it.  It has been said that the majority of scandals in modern politics are not about the original issues themselves, but about the cover ups.  So when something is wrong the best solution is to fix it rather than try to hide or get it offline.

Please see the Woolworth SA Facebook page as a good example of a company that now handles the customer complaints line in public.  Although there are lots of complaints, the staff handling them are unfailingly polite and responsive and there are still positive posts in between from satisfied customers.

Should a company choose to allow staff to post online, and have a proper strategy in place, then they would be alerted immediately when one of their staff generate a negative or questionable comment.  It is then the responsibility of management or HR to deal with the individual in question, address the issue that raised the negativity as well as coach him or her in better ways to express their frustration.  Then again, those communication channels should be available already.

3.     Be heard!

In the HR division it is important to recognize and educate other departments, that the employee is not paid by his or her pay cheque alone.   Beyond the financial aspects, we work for recognition and reward and that comes to different people in different ways.

When staff have done a good job and gone further than expectations, they should be recognized in a public forum such as on an internal bulletin board or blog.

They should also be afforded the respect of having others pay time and attention to their legitimate concerns expressed in forums such as these.  Steven Covey calls it
“finding your voice” and it is the biggest yearning of otherwise satisfied people.

In terms of employee engagement, this is an essential consideration.  Staff that are on a good career path, appear happy at home, are relatively financially stable, could throw in their jobs because they are dissatisfied with something that no one at work was even aware of.

While you do not want an internal social media platform to become a posting board for dirty laundry, a well trained HR professional would be able to discern potential problems and deal with them off line before they become a problem.

Most importantly though, is the fact that just by raising small issues of dissatisfaction and having them acknowledged and then hopefully addressed, is sufficient for many people.   If they have been heard and acknowledged online, then they can accept that some things in an organisation just aren’t going to change because they don’t like it and get one with the job.

But deny them the opportunity to be heard and that small issue may fester into something that becomes a defining concern.

4.     Get feedback

While being heard is about personal or more emotional issues, Getting Feedback is about updates of a more practical nature in the business.

As the business moves or grows, those changes need to be communicated to staff on an ongoing basis.  Besides feedback being the breakfast of champions (Ken Blanchard) it is also the antidote to being kept in the dark and growing anxiety amongst staff.

An anxious work force leads to dissatisfaction, poor performance and high turnover.  Simply by providing regular feedback through posts would assure them of what is happening, the time line the company is working on and plans going forward.

When staff make suggestions or are part of a project, having feedback on their roles, makes them know that they are still valued and that their contribution is still being counted in the much larger picture.

All of this can be achieved in person of course, but by doing so in a public, or at least internal and semi-public online forum, means that the means of communication is more efficient, timely and can work across company offices and even countries.  Furthermore, there is a record of communication for the enlightenment and encouragement of other staff as well.

5.     Reach across hierarchies and Break down silos

Two of the typical complaints in larger companies is the inability to communicate with staff from different divisions and an unawareness of what is being done in their divisions, or what projects they are working on.

Social media forums would a social community where staff can communicate online across these departmental boundaries, building trust, engagement and enhancing creativity.

6.     Facilitate new hire orientation

Online support for new hires is very valuable.  While staff may go through formal orientation procedures and have hand books given to them, it is often the informal structures that eventually provide the information and support that they are looking for.   In a busy office where people are in meetings and deadlines loom, having a place online for support would be a boon for a new employee.  Information, both formal and informal, can be accessed from company blogs posts and he can connect with new colleagues and begin to recognise the names and positions of people he works with.  This level of confidence should not be underestimated in the ability of the individual to begin to perform at a high level of efficiency and integrate well in the company.

7.     Enhance awareness of company brand

Lastly, by encouraging and actively engaging and training staff to use company endorsed social media platforms, the company will encourage them to spread the brand and support the work of the marketing department.  Online each staff member has a wealth of value in terms of access to a database of contacts and influence.  By tapping into that and encouraging the dissemination of marketing material online, the social reach will be greatly enhanced and the work of the marketing department made easier!

Beyond that, the staff will feel validated that their worth is not just in the small role they are employed but as ambassadors for their company too.

Engaged and validated employees, representing their company online.   Plus six other good reasons to invest in social media.

Author

Charlotte Kemp is a speaker, trainer and author and a social media strategist who has worked with many HR professionals as well as other industries over the past few years.  She has seen the benefit of using social media and coaches businesses on how to implements successful strategies.  Charlotte can be contacted on 082 491 9252 or charlotte@nichetraining.co.za.

This article originally appeared on the Human Capital Review site.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Broadcast vs Connect

“It’s social media.  Not broadcast media.”

Alan Stevens, The Media Coach.

Let’s unpack this a little.

To broadcast a message is to transmit or communicate it over a channel to a wide audience for general use.  You may have an idea of who the audience generally comprises of, but you don’t specifically know who the individuals are.

To connect it to bring something or some people together into contact so that some form of link is established and further communication and access is facilitated.

Mass Media vs Social Media

Our broadcast mass media include television, radio and newspapers, and social media provide the same sorts of technologies to anyone with access to a computer and the internet via YouTube, podcasts and blogs.

But the real power of social media, the element that makes it distinct from mass media, is the ability within this framework, to connect with individual audience members and to get feedback and have a conversation.

Newsfeeds vs Messages

Our newsfeeds in applications like Facebook (Newsfeed or Wall), Twitter (list of Tweets) and LinkedIn (All Updates) allow us to see what others have broadcast – the content that they have shared and is visible to anyone following them or searching for particular terms.

Twitter is particularly effective at this.  It is used primarily as a broadcast medium.  On Facebook we often scroll up and down our Homepage / Newsfeed and see everyone else’s Status updates before checking out individual profiles.  In fact the biggest chunk of the average Facebook user’s time (27%) is spent on the Homepage and the rest of the time is spread across viewing Timelines, photos, messages, other content and possibly games.  And LinkedIn is at the other extreme.  The broadcast effectiveness of LinkedIn, while there, is not nearly as powerful.  We spend little time on the Home Page and the All Updates (the broadcast element) is below the line there and overshadowed by other news reports and statistics.

So while we often talk about broadcasting information to demonstrate your expertise, become known as a collator of good information and to remain top of mind, different sites need a different tactic.

Different tactics

So if Twitter is great at broadcasting, how are we best supposed to engage on LinkedIn?  For LinkedIn, our recommendation is to actually connect or engage with other individuals directly.  Allow the normal updates (WordPress blogs, Twitter status updates etc) to happen in the background.  But your best return on time in LinkedIn is to go directly to your client’s or prospect’s profile, read up all about them, see how you can connect and then chat with them through the message system.  If you can leverage that (possibly) into an offline meeting and business, then you have made effective use of that tool.  Don’t rely on the broadcast method to help you here.

Broadcast has its place and should always be running in the background, but for social media to work effectively you need to remember Alan Stevens’ advice above – be social.

Way back in about 2007, I read Sam Horn’s book “POP – How to make your message Purposeful, Original and Pithy.”  I made a bold promise to myself that if Sam ever did a training session on this content, that I would attend it.  So just a year later, I flew to Washington and was coached by her in a small group, on the principles of this technique.  I was going to train it here in South Africa, but my training took a different direction.

The book is very good, so simple and really focuses on helping the reader to understand what will get someone’s attention.

The three words are insightful.

Purposeful:  Don’t waste the audience’s time with superfluous information in case you start to bore or distract them.

Original:  We are enticed by what is new and novel.

Pithy:  Great word.  Keep it short and succinct.  Make it memorable.  We have an ever decreasing span of attention.

I have a few copies, and I am delighted to say that Graham de Kock of Gauteng has won the March draw for the book.   Graham is a seasoned Toastmaster and member of the DA.  So I am sure that he can put these ideas to good use, as well as pass them on to others.

I have also sent a copy to Cheri von Wielligh of Three Peaks in KZN and Candice Warr of the Pietermaritzburg Business Chamber, for their novel support in getting me to reduce my email inbox from a staggering 180 emails down to 14.  If you are one of the 14 that I haven’t replied to yet, I do apologise.

Do you have a budget for your marketing spend?  (Hint: You should have a figure or percentage in mind.)

Then on the same lines, do you have a budget for your marketing time? (Hint: Again, there should be some figure of time that comes to mind.)

The reason we say this is that it is one of the most oft stated complaints that we hear about social media marketing: It’s too time consuming.  It’s going to take too long.  I am going to have to do it after hours after the ‘real’ work is done.

If you decide to use social media as a marketing tool then you need to do a few things:

• Recognize that it is a tool, and as with all tools, you need to develop your skill and efficiency with learning / training and with practice.  Don’t expect to be effective the first week your Facebook Business Page is up.
• Invest the time into doing the marketing well, as well as giving it time to take hold.  Momentum comes with time, not immediately.
• Understand that while you need to do the work of your own business, if you don’t stop occasionally to market that business effectively, when you are done with the current work, there may not be more lined up.

So just like with money, where we take a percentage of our income and we save and invest it for our own future, we also need to take a percentage of our day or week and invest that time into our futures.  The time you spend on marketing yields its return in weeks and months to come.  But it is one of the best ways to use that time.

Click this link on Facebook and get us to donate a tree.

We thought with Earth Hour on the 31st May this would be a good time to announce our Environmental Policy.

Because of the amount of travel we do to train clients on social media, and to speak at various venues around Southern Africa, we have decided to donate trees to offset our CO2 use.

We are going to use the services of Food and Trees for Africa for this purpose.

We will calculate our tree-cost on a quarterly basis, but to kick off the campaign, we will donate an extra tree for every 5 Likes of this comment on Facebook.  So click and get us to donate, or invite others to click for a tree. *

*Yes there is a limit to the number of trees we will donate.  We have seen viral campaigns go wrong this way, even though we don’t have a huge global audience.  We can donate a few trees, not a whole forest.

Have you ever met someone who doesn’t take their own advice?  Well I have been extolling the benefits of SlideShare for some time now and yet I never took the time to update my account nor upload a presentation, until yesterday.  And I was very impressed with the results.  Lesson learned!

SlideShare is an application that allows you to upload a PowerPoint presentation into your account, and then share it across applications.  It is a visual representation of work that you do or speak on, and great for illustrating and demonstrating your expertise.

So for example, if you present a talk or do a generic sales pitch or proposal with slides, you can upload these to SlideShare, link it to your LinkedIn account and both update both Twitter and Facebook.  You then have the benefit of your one piece of work continuing to work for you, across multiple platforms long after the talk is finished and the delegates have gone home.

The trick is to remember that you need to edit the slides a little for a reading audience.  When presenting a live PowerPoint illustrated talk, you want to have clean slides, bold images and few (please!) words.  Too many words on a slide will totally distract your audience from you, bore them, and make you look unprofessional.

However after the talk, go back and add some words in for someone who now has to read it instead of hearing you talk around the subject.  Guy Kawasaki has a 10/20/30 rule for pitches where he says you need 10 slides, 20 minutes and a 30 point font for words.  While that is good advice for a presentation, you are going to need to fill in the blanks online or else your 10 slides are going to take 3 minutes instead of 20.

One of my favourite social media words is “Re-imagine”.  It means to take one set of content and re-imagine it in different formats.  One concept can be shared as a long blog post, an article for another site besides your own, a short Twitter status update, a Facebook update with an image or a link, an audio podcast, or in this case, a visual PowerPoint presentation on SlideShare.

So last week I did a presentation at a professional HR management conference on Talent Mining using Social Media.  After presenting the topic, which is not part of my normal repertoire, I wanted to make sure to get as much benefit from my research as possible.  Besides the other things I will eventually do, getting it onto SlideShare was the first step and easiest.  I also Tweeted the presentation as well as updated my Facebook Business Page and LinkedIn.

Then the next day I received an email from SlideShare letting me know that the presentation was a ‘featured’ presentation on their homepage.  In much less than 24 hours it has been viewed by over 96 people and downloaded 8 times.

Not bad for work done once and continuing to work for me while I sleep.

More information about SlideShare and audio and visual presentations will be taught in the upcoming How to be a Social Media Rockstar course.  It is being redesigned to add some amazing new features.

This particular SlideShare presentation can be viewed here and if you have an account, please follow me and I will follow you back.

We are happy to announce the lucky recipients of last month’s book prize.  Antoinette Van Rooyen receives the copies of “Streetwise Millionaire” and “Escape the Rat Race”.  And our good friend, Hilary Teal of Corporate Network also receives a copy of “Escape the Rat Race”.

This month’s book is “POP” by Sam Horn.  Fantastic for business and marketing.  Anyone want a copy?  Please post your request on the Niche Facebook Page.  The draw will take place at the end of March.

With only 6 initial seconds to make an impression online, presenting yourself or your company with spelling errors or casual text language is going to affect your brand and your sales.

Consider how we respond to spam 419 emails filled with dubious promises and inconsistent tense and language.  And even my daughter can identify a phishing email ostensibly from a leading bank but suspiciously containing spelling errors that are simply too unprofessional to be legitimate.

If you are trying to apply for a job, or represent yourself on LinkedIn, a spelling error in your career title or using lower case on your own name, just smacks of a lack of concern for detail that will have employers toss your application aside.

I have a few eagle eyed English Majors in my networks online, and occasionally one of them will send me a message with a note about my word selection or American vs British spelling choices.  As much as my initial reaction is annoyance, I respect the fact that they do know more than me and are simply looking out for my brand as well as demonstrating theirs.  Because let’s face it, Microsoft Spell Check is notoriously unreliable.

Ode to a Spell Checker

I have a spelling checker
I disk covered four my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot see.

Eye ran this poem threw it.
Your sure real glad two no.
Its very polished in its weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a blessing.
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when aye rime.

Each frays comes posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The checker pours o’er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.

Bee fore wee rote with checkers
Hour spelling was inn deck line,
Butt now when wee dew have a laps,
Wee are not maid too wine.

And now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
There are know faults in awl this peace,
Of nun eye am a wear.

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaws are knot aloud.

That’s why eye brake in two averse
Caws Eye dew want too please.
Sow glad eye yam that aye did bye
This soft wear four pea seas.

–Author Unknown

I have found it helpful to explain the connection and relation of websites and social sites, to some of my clients like this.

You can consider your website to be your virtual head office.  This is where the important corporate information resides, where people can find out who the staff and management of your organisation are, your physical location if you are a location based business, and also discover such info as your vision, mission and policies if you wish to share them.

Although many people talk about social networking sites taking over and replacing the need for a company website, I think that there is much value in maintaining your own site, with a blog, to ensure that you control your content.  When you post to other platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn etc, you are bound by their rules which could change at any time.  You must control the source and output of your social marketing by keeping it at head office – on your own website.

However, since people really are lazy about returning to sites, even ones that they are interested in, we need to make a website and the content available to a client on their preferred platform too.  So when they find your website, allow them to easily discover where else you post.  If you have a Facebook Business Page, you need to provide a clickable hyperlink that will take them directly to your Page.  Not to Facebook.com where they then have to search for you, but directly to your Business Page.  If you have a Twitter account, a Pintrest board or a YouTube channel then you can do the same.  And if you are on LinkedIn, consider your business, number of staff etc, and then create a link that directs them either to your personal profile, a company page or a Group on LinkedIn as appropriate.

Now you are allowing your clients and prospects to engage with you on their preferred platform and the links are there between those sites and your website so that they can return to your virtual head office should they need to do so.

Your other platforms; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc, have now become your virtual sales offices.  It is like in South Africa, having a head office in Gauteng (your website) and sales offices in Cape Town, Durban and Bloemfontein (social sites).  The client does not only have to do business with Gauteng but can find the info that they need in the source closest to them, or the office that they prefer dealing with.   In fact if you set up the right tools, they can even makes sales in Bloemfontein or order or book via a webstore from a tab on your Facebook Business Page.

So that is one more reason to ensure that your marketing is done through different channels using social media to reach more people who prefer to engage in different places.

Image: Kookkai_nak / FreeDigitalPhotos.net