10 SM Resources for Hospitality Customer Service

Why does social media matter for those in hospitality? A Google search for "hotel" turns up 3.1 billion (that’s billion with a b) results in 1.05 seconds. A similar search on "restaurant" turns up almost 1.9 billion in 1.56 seconds. And the top results will be for such places as Hotels.com, Expedia, Trivago, Kayak and Restaurants.com.

For most users those top results will be all they need. But for others the search will be slightly more involved or the decision to click will take a few seconds longer. The difference? Loyalty to a brand or recollection of another person’s great experience.

What can help businesses in hospitality (hotels and restaurants, for example) earn those few seconds of extra consideration?

Social media – it is the very key for industries whose biggest driver is word-of-mouth marketing.

But how? And, perhaps more importantly, why? According to a 2015 article on Harvard Business Review:

• "Consumers under 35 spend almost four hours per day on social media, and more of that time is being spent engaging with brands."
•  "17% of people older than 55 prefer social media over the telephone for service."

And, of the four stages of the consumer decision-making process – need recognition, information search, evaluation and decision – social media increasingly plays a role in the first three….

So how should those in hospitality – particularly on the customer service side – use social media to attract, assist and retain loyal customers?

10 Social Media Resources for Hospitality Customer Service

The article 5 Social Customer Service Best Practices from Cision suggests restaurants and hotels graduate their social care customers to a more reliable communications platform such as SMS or email, get all employees on board with appropriate social responses and understand that customers expect a near-immediate response on social media.

• Key takeaway: "Today, 39 percent of social media complainers who expect a reply want it to come within 60 minutes, yet the average response time from businesses is 5 hours,” says social media expert Jay Baer in the piece.

In Social Hospitality: How 8 Hotels Engage Guests On & Offline (from Sprout Social) author Jennifer Beese suggests that social media allows hoteliers to be an Invaluable resource beyond just providing accommodations, to be attentive during guests’ stays and a to extend the experience after the stay.

• A key takeaway: "Knowing where your guests communicate online will help you provide a better customer service experience while enabling you to reach the right people at exactly the right time."

The grandly named The Complete Guide to Social Media for Restaurants & Bars (also from Sprout Social) gives advice on creating relevant posts (i.e. understanding the difference between engagement vs. promotional posting), how to find optimal times to post and what it takes to get your social efforts to a higher level.

• A key takeaway: "If you’re not visibly active on social media, then you’re missing out on a large customer base."

The question and answer website Quora might be a great resource for those in hospitality according to Quora: How to Generate Leads for a Hotel says an article on the Social Media Explorer site. It suggests such strategies as being on social to provide solutions, searching social platforms for questions to answer and resisting being promotional in social posts.

• A key takeaway: "A boutique hotel could easily muscle in on the big boys’ territory with well-thought out answers to travelers’ queries. In the process, you’ll build authority and possibly carve out a niche for your brand."

The eHotelier.com piece How the hospitality industry is embracing social media offers a series of "insider tips" for those in hospitality and their use of such platforms as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These include Facebook promotions and working with bloggers.

• A key takeaway: "Ninety one per cent of retail brands use two or more social media channels, and the hospitality industry should be no different."

Conversocial, a website that looks at various aspects of social media and customer service, offers Customer Service for Travel, suggesting that hospitality brands standing out as leaders in social customer service are making major investments in this area, expanding their teams and marketing budgets. The piece offers tips on deepening connections to customers and making the right impression on social channels.

• A key takeaway: "More than other customer service channels, social lends itself to creating memorable experiences for customers."

7. Customer service in its broadest sense means offering something of value on social to current and future customers. So the post 10 Examples of Great Social Media Content for Restaurants on the EnPlug Blog offers tips including the obvious "Share mouth-watering photos” and the not-so-obvious "Get your employees involved."

•      A key takeaway: Show your customers that you’re on social for more than just pushing out promotions. Whether you’re answering questions, addressing concerns, saying thanks, or just responding with wit, your responses will go a long way."

Top social media management tools for hotels and the hospitality industry from TravelTripper.com offers a list of 10 social media management tools for the hospitality industry with explanations of features and pricing.

• A key takeaway: "From streamlining content creation and posting to social listening and analytics integrations, social media tools come with a range of innovative features …."

Are there downsides to social media for hospitality businesses? Some would say negative reviews on sites such as Yelp, but RestaurantEngine.com – in How to Respond to Negative Restaurant Reviews – says "…not all negative reviews have lasting consequences…. It’s what you do with the review that sets you apart and defines your restaurant."

• A key takeaway: "Not only are you fighting for the reviewer’s business, but you’re fighting for everyone else who reads the review."

And of course I’d be remiss to not mention all of the various infographics that boil down social customer service to its key elements. I’ve created a public Pinterest board called Social Customer Service that may prove useful to those in hospitality. The graphics range from how to use social to deal with negative comments to using social to build loyalty and trust with future and current customers.

Bonus: If you’re looking for some thought leaders in the area of social media and hospitality you might check out The Top 16 Leaders in Hospitality to Follow on Twitter from Capterra.

                Is social media here to stay as a fact of life for customer service in social media? For sure. Will it evolve and grow as a series of customer service channels? Absolutely. What do you think?

Related posts:

• Social media listening – it’s time to commit to it
• Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

Tracking the presidential election with social media

With just weeks until the 2016 Elections in the U.S. it is clear that this cycle has become the social media-driven elections.

No matter who you support, who you despise or who you wish would just "be quiet" there is an endless supply of Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram images and YouTube videos to variously inform, annoy or enrage. How to make sense of it all? 

First, decide if social media can help you stay informed. If the answer is "no" you can just stop here. But if the answer is "yes" then here are a few suggestions: 

Twitter
• Follow a popular hashtag or hashtags: Some popular hashtags this election season include #election2016, #debates, #debates2016, #trump, #clinton, #donaldtrump, #hillary, #vote, #nevertrump, #hillaryemails
• Explore some new hashtags: There’s an exhaustive list of hashtags (Warning: some are NSFW) on the Top-Hashtags.com website.
• Create a Twitter list: This is simply a way organizing the Twitter "firehose" so that it is more manageable. In other words by viewing a list you are only seeing the tweets of the people you place on that list and not all of the people you follow on Twitter. (For more how to create a list see Using Twitter lists from Twitter). Who should be on your list? A good place to start is adding the Twitter accounts of the candidates, their proxies and their official campaigns. After that add people you think are informative and helpful.

Facebook
• Like the pages of all the major candidates: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson
• Like the pages of the political parties: Green, Libertarian, Independents, Democrat and Republican. • Use the filtering functions of Socialfixer to exclude certain kinds of posts. Although this article from ZDNet talks about using Socialfixer eliminating all political debate from your Facebook feed, the same principles can be applied to cut down on certain types of content in your feed. See How to filter politically sanctimonious Facebook posts from your news feed. 
• Use the USA Today/Facebook Barometer to gauge which candidates are doing better or worse based on Facebook activity (likes, shares, mentions).

Others
• Follow the Instagram accounts of … Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein
• Subscribe to the YouTube accounts of … Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump 

I hope this is an useful primer. Please feel free to post other social media tips around the elections in the comments.

Related posts:
Fact-checking the presidential election - from social media claims to debate points
Social Media and Politics Makes for Odd Bedfellows

Social Media and Politics Makes for Odd Bedfellows

If you believe, as the saying goes, that "politics makes strange bedfellows," then politics and social media make for some truly odd "bedfellows."

In the current hyper-charged electoral season in the United States it seems social media streams are overflowing with political points of view ranging from bemused commentary to out-and-out hate speech for one presidential candidate or the other.

This, perhaps inevitably, has led to those posting or those seeing extreme posts to invite anyone who disagrees with them to "unfriend me now."

It’s such a phenomenon it’s become a national story with Politico, for example, reporting this week that Trump and Clinton wreck Facebook friendships.

But is "unfriending" – the Facebook term (or unfollowing or disconnecting on other platforms) – the only or even the best option?

Recently, I was asked to add some tips for a story in the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle: Tips to deal with political haters online.

That story featured my tips and those from Scott Talan, an American University communication teacher who studies social media and politics. His tips are all sound:

• "Take a breath or two" and think it through before commenting on a friend's post or unfriending someone.
• Instead of sharp opinion statements, pose questions such as "how can we trust her?" or "is he stable enough to be president?"
• Remember that this will all be over in November, and your friendships could and should outlast the next presidential term.
• And, in general, "try not to be like the candidates."

My additions were:

• Simply ignore the people posting things that upset you. Facebook’s algorithm will eventually push anything they post further and further down your news feed since it gives priority to close family and friends and people you interact with regularly. You can also start interacting more with the people you enjoy — this will hasten the process of the others being pushed down.
• If you must comment on posts, stick to facts and questions. It’s hard to argue with the former (especially if you drop in a citation and/or link). Or ask questions that might provoke new thinking.

But I got to thinking and there are other things you can do: 

• Another way to quickly bury someone who is posting things you don’t want to see on Facebook is to use FB’s “Hide” feature (see pic). At the top right of any Friend’s post the drop-down menu will include Hide and Unfriend. The first means you’ll see a lot less from the person and (if you have a lot of friends) eventually nothing from that person unless they tag you in a post. Unfriending is the “nuclear option” and although the person you unfriend gets no notification of this they will soon figure it out if they try to message you or tag you on Facebook.
• On Twitter a best practice is to start using the Lists feature to organize the people you follow into those who are friends and/or providing relevant posts. This cuts the “Twitter firehose” news feed down to size and can have the added benefit of ensuring you don’t see posts from people who annoy or upset you. 

And in all of this hyper-charged political season one piece of advice for anything on social media still holds true: “Would you be proud to show you grandmother whatever it is you are about to post?”

Good friends and smart people can agree to disagree on one thing and not lose a friendship over it. Social media doesn’t need to be a place where we only associate with people we agree with 100 percent of the time – that’s the kind of thinking that has turned Washington into a laughingstock…

What do you think?

Live video streaming on social media has ‘arrived’

In case you missed it this past week - live-streaming social media video has changed the world. 

While livestreamed events such as a watermelon being exploded with rubber bands or the "Chewbacca Mom" video have been Internet hits, it has been the graphic news of the past week that hints at the live-streaming’s powerful future potential.

The Facebook Live stream by Diamond Reynolds of the aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer in Minnesota was only the latest (and possibly most graphic) example of a livestream capturing and recording news as it happened.

The sniper attack in Dallas the next day led to numerous live video streams on Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope. News coverage on traditional media during the Dallas shootings and over the following hours consisted almost entirely of live-streamed social media video.

If live-streaming needed it’s "coming of age" moment this was likely it. What does it mean?

The live-streamed events of last week foreshadow "the biggest shift in media consumption we’ve seen since the introduction of television itself," writes Andrew Hutchinson, a writer and community manager at Social Media Today in a post called "The Evolution of Live-Streaming Could Change the Way You Consume Media - Here’s How"

"Just as online content democratized newspaper journalism, putting small time blogs on equal footing with centuries-old publications, live-streaming takes away one of traditional broadcasters’ most significant advantages, in the control of the broadcast of live events," he continues. 

"Really, social media is moving beyond its personal networking roots – there’ll come a time soon when ‘social’ media is simply considered part of the media more widely.”

But, the possibility of injury and death being live-streamed raises ethical issues.

In Live Broadcast of Deaths Raised Ethical Questions on the Voice of American Blog ‘As It Is’ Robert Thompson, Director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says the rise in live streaming will have good consequences (holding people accountable) and bad (groups such as ISIS staging killings just for the purpose of recording them). 

"A lot of these bad things are done for the sake of the recording they are going to get," Thompson says. "You could make the argument, pretty soundly, that September 11 was planned as a television production." 

This will raise a wide range of ethical issues with live-streaming technology, but it will be nearly impossible to stop it: "Technology is relatively neutral," he says. "How do you only take the good from this and not the bad?"

And with all of this potentially graphic live content comes responsibility. 

To deal with the likelihood that more and more graphic live material will be streamed Facebook will increasingly play a policies-and-standards role in the news social media users will see live-streamed. 

The Minnesota video was off Facebook for about an hour last week - apparently while the network decided if it was too graphic and might violate Facebook's Community Standards. 

Writing for Tech Talk Quinten Plummer notes that "to determine which graphic and violent images are permitted, Facebook relies on context." 

In an article called "Facebook Live-Stream Video Gives Marginalized A Voice, But Here's Where It Draws The Line" Plummer reports: "Facebook has clarified its stance on gory and violent content. Just as is the case with video on demand, a member of Facebook's review team can interrupt a live video at any time. And a team member is on call around the clock, each day of the week." 

And, in what seems to be Mark Zuckerberg’s wish for the future of live-streaming, the Facebook CEO says: "While I hope we never have to see another video like Diamond's, it reminds us why coming together to build a more open and connected world is so important - and how far we still have to go."

Zuckerberg's wish is one many share, but the reality is this: The media landscape changed last week and the ramifications of that will be felt far and wide….

Related:
3 Things to Consider (Well) Before You Live Stream on Social Media

Social media listening – it’s time to commit to it

What is social listening (and why commit to it)?
In a nutshell it is paying attention to what is being said on social media, but obviously it’s more than that. 

It starts with social monitoring – or collecting every social mention and action relevant to your organization, brand, purpose etc.

After monitoring comes social listening – this requires analysis and reflection on what has been gathered. It also means watching for patterns, tracking sentiment and drawing conclusions based on where and when conversations happen.

So why should you commit to social listening? Among the things it can do:
• Improve customer care
• Learn about opportunities – business and otherwise
• Get feedback on products and services
• Identify your influencers and advocates
• Discover where your community hangs out

How to do it:
• Monitoring – what people are actually doing, not just what they say they are doing, on social platforms and the web in general
• Listening – separating signal from noise; determining importance and relevance
• Interpreting – what does it mean to us now? In the future? Do we see a problem we can solve for a customer?
• Taking action – turning data into insights; acting on those insights

Manual steps (free):
If paying for monitoring tools that simplify social listening is not in your budget there are free things you can do:
• Plan to listen: Set aside time (daily is best) to search on keywords and/or hashtags that relate to your business, its name, its products and services and the industry you’re in.
• Plan to respond: Have a document that spells out how you will respond on social to both the good and the bad comments etc. about your organization. This should include how you can redirect people to helpful online resources or be helpful in other ways. Also, have conversation starters ready to use with influencers and others who are interested in your industry.
• Plan to follow up: When you have jumped into a conversation be sure to follow it to a natural conclusion … and be timely (in other words don’t allow more than a day to elapse between responses – much less time if you’re dealing with any kind of crisis communication).
• Plan to document: Keep track of who you have interacted with and when. Complete a monthly summary of this activity and its benefits to your organization so you can send it to your boss so a higher-up will understand the value of spending time on this.

Paid tools:
There are a lot (see "Resources" below). Here’s what’s important in whatever tools you use:
• Learning curve: How hard is it to get up and running on the app/software?
• Data collection: What kinds of data can be collected and how customizable is this?
• Reporting: How is the data reported and can it be manipulated by the end-user for inclusion in reports?
• Historical reporting: In addition to the regular reports how does it aggregate data and report it over extended timeframes?
• Planning: Does it allow any kind of “what if” scenarios that show how changing one action might affect results?

So, there you have it, social listening is clearly important for anyone on social media. The question is to what extent your organization should commit to it…. I’ll address that in a future post.

Do you have thoughts on things I may have missed? I’d welcome your feedback.

Resources:
• 6 Social Media Monitoring Tools to Track Your Brand
• Top 8 Social Listening Tools That Do Way More Than Listen
• A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions

The Power of 'Thank You' in Social Media

Recently I was reminded of the power of the words "thank you" on social media.

One of my favorite apps – Buffer – publicly thanked me for tweeting about them with a GIF.

@mikejny aww, Mike! You're a legend :) Thanks so much for your support. We love having you with us!! -Paul pic.twitter.com/uY9q0XPymo

— Buffer (@buffer) March 4, 2016

It was a fun and surprising day brightener. And it got me to thinking: What has happened to the thank yous that used to be all over social media?

I think there was a big push a couple of years ago to cut down on the endless stream of "thank you for sharing" and "thank you for retweeting" etc. messages on social media. But that was never supposed to mean you never say thank you.

Part of the "social" in social media is being courteous and thankful. The real question is how to say "thank you" in a different and meaningful way – just as Buffer did.

3 Sources for Ways to Say "Thank You" on Social Media

The post Creative Ways to Say 'Thank You' on Social Media by Brittany Berger (@bberg1010 on Twitter) suggests a thank you on social media is seen by many so it must be "unique and genuine." Berger, before offering great tips also offers that writing distinct 'thank yous' can save your sanity. "Typing the same thing over and over gets boring." 

I love the Six Ways to Say Thank You on Social Media post in The Alley Blog from design company Vital. It offers basic, but sound advice that some of us may forget from time to time.

And in what only seems like a contrarian point of view Stop Saying “Thank You!” on Social Media ... And Start the Conversation! by Jennifer Gardella (@DrJennyLynn on Twitter) the author argues that she is "sick and tired of watching so many small business owners, authors and personalities just say thank you when I share something on social media." 

She says a thank you is an opportunity to "let their network know a bit more about you!" And adds that "As you and your social partners get in the groove of sharing and commenting it will become second-hand and your social footprint will grow exponentially."

Will you start saying thank you a little more now? Was this a useful guide to social media and social niceties?

How to spot a social media scam - and 5 tips to avoid them

Social media scams have always been around, but it seems that each year they get a little more sophisticated and a bit more targeted. 

This week on Facebook a lot of folks in Rochester, N.Y. (where I’m based) opened Facebook and there in their news feed was a post seemingly offering a "free $200 grocery coupon" (see image) to Wegmans supermarkets – the biggest and by-far-the-most-popular chain in the area. The posts were accompanied by poster’s comments such as “Wow” and “Can you believe this?”

The widely shared scam post

Well … no. There were a couple of clues right in the post that it was a scam.

• The URL (web address) at the bottom of the public post does not look like it belongs to Wegmans’s official page
• The English is fractured – typical in scams since they are often posted overseas by non-native English speakers 

Then, if an offer seems too good to be true, well it likely is. So don’t ever click on the headline or any link before going to Wegmans (or any supposed posting company’s) official social media page.

In this case a quick visit to Wegmans’ official Facebook page shows that this "offer" is not posted there and instead there’s a warning about the scam.

The warning on the Wegmans Facebook page

If you do click through to the offer (not recommended as this can be the way the scammers download malicious software onto your computer) there will be abundant evidence that this is a scam. For example: In the case of the Wegmans "offer" it was a digital counter counting down how many coupons supposedly remained. Every time the page refreshed it went back to 360 and started counting down again… 

And, if you are a business that has been spoofed and your organization’s name associated with a scam you should quickly do two things:

• Post something on your own social accounts warning about the scam so people will find the information there.
• Contact the affected social networks and ask for the malicious scam material to be taken down and the poster banned.

Both of which Wegmans did very quickly after the coupon scam surfaced …. 

So, in general what are the best ways anyone can avoid falling for a scam?

Top 5 Tips to Avoid a Social Media Scam

1. Does this news/post sound too good to be true? If it does it likely is. Headlines screaming unbelievably exciting or tragic news. Or offers of cash or goods that seem like they would make your life a lot better. Or words such as “Unbelievable,” “Shocking” and “Disturbing.” All are often related to an attempt to get your attention and get you to click.

As mentioned above, the first thing to do is seek verification by going to an official social network site to see if the post exists there. Or go to Snopes.com and enter a few key words from the item – Snopes is the best online debunker of fake news/information (and, in fact, had an item posted about the Wegmans coupon scam within a few hours). Even a general Google search might turn up warnings that something is a scam.

2. Think before acting: Typically scammers want to make you feel you have to act quickly. Nothing on social media is a matter of life or death. For example, those urgent appeals from a friend who lost their wallet overseas? Think about it: Why are they using Facebook or Twitter to reach out to all their friends?

3. Ask yourself: Is this a chain letter? The old chain letter used to ask people to forward a letter to a number of friends to bring good luck or cash. Today, by way of examples, the chain letter takes the form of "Tweet this image and Bill Gates will donate $100 to help premature babies" or "Share this post with your Facebook friends and Mark Zuckerberg will randomly pick 1,000 people to each receive $1 million in Facebook stock." These appeals almost always tap into a grain of truth, but would these very rich men really do what is proposed?

4. Watch for phishing attacks: You innocently click on a link you find on a Facebook or Twitter post and you are asked to log in using your Facebook or Twitter credentials – don’t. Yes there may be a legitimate reason some sites want you to do this, but before you do check out the URL of the page you are now on. Is it still a Facebook page or some other legitimate site? If not this site is wanting you to sign in so it can grab your credentials and hijack your account.

5. Be cautious of shortened URLs: Don’t blindly click on shortened URLs. You'll see them everywhere on Twitter, for example. But because they are shortened and consist of a garbled collection of characters you can’t tell where the link will take you. The best practice is only click on shortened links from social media posters you highly trust. This is not foolproof, but offers a degree of protection.

Hopefully these tips will spare some of you the grief of having been fooled by a scam or, worse, having your social media accounts compromised.

Personal branding – don’t leave it to chance

Like it or not a personal brand is something that follows you wherever you go from your personal life to the work world and beyond.

It’s the combined information (Internet postings, social media updates etc.) about you that shows up when someone searches online. So it probably makes sense to figure out how to make your brand the best it can be.

5 steps to take this weekend to boost your personal brand:

1. Define your tactics:
Ask yourself: What do you want people to find when they search for you online? Someone they’d like to …

• Hire: Then focus on optimizing your Linkedin profile (and not just to get it to Linkedin’s 100 percent complete status, but adding images, videos, examples of your work etc.) Consider using other channels too: A blog to demonstrate your knowledge, Pinterest boards to demonstrate any visual work and interests, and Twitter to share your work and to network without the barriers of Linkedin.
• Get to know: Start by picking three platforms to focus on that will allow you to tell your story. For example, if your interests are sports, travel and reading consider creating boards on Pinterest for each of you specific interests.

2. Define yourself:
Develop a short description of who you are, what you believe in and what you do best. In other words: How would you tell your online audience why you’re the right person to work with or connect with? 

This two- or three-sentence statement is for you, but should guide how you describe yourself - everywhere. Be sure to describe what makes you different from other people with the same or similar expertise. 

If you’re not sure what that is, do some research on well-known people in your field. Observe what they do and adapt it to your own way of doing things.

3. Define your expertise:
What particular skills and knowledge do you want to be known for? Who do you hope to connect with?

Determining what makes you unique helps you understand what sets you apart from crowd on the Internet. 

Your areas of expertise define who you are and what you do. They should be included in your social media profile descriptions and should include your main keywords.

4. Define your approach:
How will you use various social media platforms to advance your brand? For example, will ...

• You only use Linkedin to post things relevant to your career or will you also post a few things that show some of your personality?
• Facebook be strictly for people you’ve met in real life or consider personal friends?
• Twitter be a place to share industry news and find new connections?
• You use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts to maintain a regular social presence or will you post organically as you find interesting material?
• You use tools such as Empire Avenue, Kred and Klout to monitor your efforts and guide your progress?

5. Define your success:
What will success look like to you?

• Making lots of online connections that become in real life (IRL) connections?
• Enhancing your current job/career?
• Getting a better job?

Whatever you settle on set some future calendar reminders to look back at what you’ve done. Then decide which efforts are worth continuing and which should be dropped.

Remember your personal brand is an evolving, living thing. The only thing you can do "wrong" is to ignore it and let it change, or worse: stagnate, while you remain blissfully unaware…

Does this help? Will you use social media and a plan to boost your personal brand? I’d love to hear back from you.

Related posts:
Quality SM connections for personal branding
Blogging for personal branding

Quality SM connections for personal branding

Making connections is what social media is all about. When it comes to personal branding however, the quality of those connections is important.

For example, imagine a recruiter looking through your Twitter Followers and finding a spammy “Buy 5,000 Twitter followers” account or, worse, a porn account. What does that say about you that didn't block such accounts?

And, if you’re still using the number of followers to measure your social media success, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Do an audit of your audience and determine which users are the right ones, and cull your lists accordingly.

Once you’ve completed the audit what can you do in the future to ensure you have quality connections that will enhance your online personal brand?

Start by having a thoughtful approach to who you’ll follow.

How to decide who to follow on social media for personal branding success

Linkedin
When someone asks to connect with you, ask yourself:

• Are they in your industry or a related industry? (Related question: Are they in any Linkedin groups you belong to?)
• Are they active on Linkedin and other social media?
• What do they talk about and what do they share on SM?

If you are seeking new connections, first ask yourself:

• Who do you want to connect to? Why?
• How will you find these people? Using advanced search in Twitter and Linkedin, and Facebook’s graph search are good places to start – search for people mentioning the terms relevant to your interests.
• Are they active on Linkedin and other social media?
• What do they talk about and what do they share on SM?

Twitter 
In some respects Twitter is a better starting place to find industry-relevant people. It is a place where you can connect with anyone (unlike Linkedin where you need to be connected or pay a premium to contact people you aren’t connected to).

Basic tips to assess whether to follow someone on Twitter include:

• Does their bio indicate relevance to your purposes on social media?
• What kind of content have they shared in the past few days?
• Is their Following-Follower ratio in balance – in other words are there either more Followers or are they about the same. If there is a much higher Following number they are either new to Twitter or desperate for followers.

Still in doubt? Use one of the free tools that assesses Twitter accounts:

• Twitteraudit: It seeks to answer the question: "How many of your followers are real?" But it also evaluates the Twitter accounts of others. Anything higher than 10 percent fake followers indicates someone who indiscriminately connects or does not block spammy followers… i.e. they’re not very careful on Twitter.
• Status People: It sorts any Twitter accounts followers into Fake, Inactive and Good. A high number in Fake (more than 10 percent) or Inactive (more than 20 percent) should also be a warning sign.

Facebook
First, decide if Facebook is a place you want to open up to people beyond friends and family. Some people draw that line at Facebook.

But if you are OK with connecting professionally on Facebook you can use FB’s own search engine to find people who may be worth connecting to.

Start by using search terms such as keywords related to your industry and move on to search on relevant hashtags. And, although its focus is marketing the tips here can be applied to personal connections too: How to Use Facebook Graph Search to Improve Your Marketing

Google+
Any discussion on personal branding has to include Google+. Whether you’re a fan or not is somewhat irrelevant – it’s a Google product so you better believe being there helps in Google search results.

Using the Google+ search or a regular Google search use keywords and the usual Google search operators.

For more on doing better Google searches see How to Use Google Search More Effectively.

Was this helpful? Wil you invest some time in social media and ensuring your connections are worthwhile? It is the only way social media can help with personal branding.

Related link:
Blogging for personal branding
Personal branding – don’t leave it to chance

2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program

As 2015 is shaping up to be the "Year of Employee Empowerment" in social media more and more companies are wondering how they might benefit. 

Social media employee empowerment programs are proving highly successful at brands such as Lenovo, Oracle and Cisco where employees using their own social networks effectively become brand ambassadors.

Increased reach and engagement are just two of the often-cited benefits for brands. But how do you set up an effective employee empowerment program? 

During a recent Brandwatch webinar called Social Monitoring & Gamification: Creating Employee Advocates at Cisco (the slides from the webinar are here) Brandwatch’s product manager Caroline Goodwin outlined one possible approach: 

Raise awareness of the value of social. She said organizations can do this by:

• Putting social up on screens in the workplace where everyone can see social activity around the brand and its products and services.
• Using reports to regularly show employees at various levels what is happening with social efforts and how they help the brand.
• Integrating social facts and figures for the brand with other numbers employees are more comfortable and used to seeing such as sales figures or call numbers. 

Enable your employees by:

• Training them and providing tips and guidelines about what kinds of information can and can’t be shared about and around the brand. Also share how social media efforts are measured.
• Promoting the type of content you’re hoping employees will share, the hashtags your brand prefers and any tips on the ways to share content from the company website.
• Collating all of your employee’s social handles so you can accurately track their efforts. Goodwin says the surprisingly easy way to do this is to "just ask" for each participating employee's social handles.

Encourage healthy competition by:

• Creating a table showing who has the greatest impact (either by using an existing commercially available tool or creating your own measurement) that looks at frequency of sharing, numbers reached, and numbers of responses and re-shares. 

Harness the power of your advocates by:

• Planning ahead, for example, by giving your employees a heads up on an upcoming marketing campaign and share the relevant hashtags and links to the content that will be going out in the near future.
• Monitoring results by tracking specific links and hashtags and who is sharing them and how far they are going. Brands can also keep the momentum going by providing very regular updates to employees during the campaign so everyone feels involved.
• Recognizing all participants once the campaign is over and sharing its success with all. But then also recognize the most successful social media advocates.

So that’s one approach to employee empowerment in social media, what about others? My next post will look at that and provide links to some great thinking around the whole topic.

Related posts
Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand 
Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

Employee empowerment drives massive social media results for brand

Increasing social media reach by 1,000 percent might seem like an unattainable goal for any business.

Well, that’s exactly what Cisco’s Marketing Manager Alex Montuschi reports as a chief advantage of his company’s empowering employees to use social media to talk about Cisco.

He was speaking during a recent Brandwatch webinar called Social Monitoring & Gamification: Creating Employee Advocates at Cisco. (Also, the slides from the webinar are here.) 

The webinar was looking at what is turning out to be one of the hottest trends in social media in 2015: Employee empowerment.

In a nutshell employee empowerment (as it relates to social media) is a conscious move by a brand to empower/encourage employees to support the goals of a brand using content and social channels owned by the employees. 

Why do companies use employee empowerment?Among the reasons cited by Montuschi:

• Cisco employees have 10X the followers than the brand
• 90 percent of employees’ audience is new to Cisco
• An employee advocate is likely to score 2X on any measure of trust than the CEO
• Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement that content shared by brand channels 

 According to Montuschi, whose particular piece of the Cisco pie is the area known as Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR), one of the most-effective tactics his company employed was creating a social leaderboard table that recognized the most-influential employees on social. 

These were not always those with the most followers or the most posts on channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

In addition to the massive increase in reach for Cisco message son social in the EMEAER region, Montuschi listed other benefits:

• Cisco employees’ social activities increased by over 140 percent in 6 months.
• Average number of tweets posted by employees increase by 5 percent.
• Some 232 employees are using the social leaderboard tables to measure their social impact.

Cisco also used the introduction of the leaderboards as an opportunity to offer 120 hours of social media training to 200 employees. The result of this, said Montuschi, was that those employees became better users of social media and more aware of their social impact.

So how do Cisco and others set up its employee empowerment program for social media? More on that in my next post.

Related posts
2015: The Year of SM #EmployeeEmpowerment and How to Create a Successful Program
Social Media Employee Empowerment - What Works

Facebook sees dead people… begins to help ... is it enough?

Three cheers for Facebook for beginning to address the issue of death and our online presences. 

This week Facebook announced it will begin allowing you to designate someone — whom it calls a "legacy contact" — to manage parts of your Facebook accounts posthumously.

Facebook is the second major online business to allow for designating digital executors (Google allowed this starting in 2013).

According to a Wall Street Journal story (Facebook Heir? Time to Choose Who Manages Your Account When You Die) Facebook legacy contacts will be able to manage accounts in a way that can turn the deceased person’s Facebook page into a kind of digital gravestone.

The story says: "Legacy contacts can write a post to display at the top of their friend’s memorialized profile page, change the friend’s profile picture, and even respond to new friend requests on behalf of the deceased."

But has Facebook gone far enough to help those of us left behind?

Attorney Scott L. Malouf, of Rochester, N.Y. helps other attorneys use social media and businesses minimize the legal risks of social media use, and he thinks not.

A "Legacy Contact won’t be able to remove posts or photos that a deceased user might want taken down posthumously," he says by way of example.

"Similarly, the legacy download does not include security or settings information which might be useful in tracking down other online accounts that an executor needs to access."

And what of user incapacity and accounts requiring immediate and ongoing access?

Malouf asks what would happen, for example, if a business owner were in a serious car accident and wanted a trusted staffer to have immediate access to relevant email, business records, collaboration and project management services, and social accounts.

"The introduction of the legacy contact feature is a great first step," Malouf says, "But it can’t be seen as a complete solution to deceased or incapacitated users."

How to set up a ‘Legacy Contact’

Of course having a legacy contact is only possible if you, the Facebook page owner, designate someone. So how do you do that?

• Open Facebook. Click Settings (pull-down menu top right) and then Security (on the left side)
• “Legacy Contact” will be an option at the bottom of the Security page
• You will be asked to select someone you trust 
• You will then be asked if you’d like to now send them a message telling them why you chose them or selecting the option to do this later
• You can also check the option to delete the account upon your death (see image)

So, what do you think? Do Facebook’s new settings allowing the appointment of a legacy contact go far enough? What more would you like to see the social network offer?

Other relevant reads:
From Gigaom: New Facebook tool masks tech industry’s digital death fight
From Scott Malouf, attorney: Social Media Law: Coffins don’t have Wi-Fi: your digital assets in death

Does Facebook’s anti-fake news approach create a new problem?

Social media still has a bit of a reputation as the Wild West of the communications world.

So Facebook’s recent announcement that it would empower users to flag hoax news seemed like a step in the right direction.

In a post on its blog Facebook said the new feature would help it police the proliferation of fake news making its way onto the platform.

But like most things on Facebook, how you mark a post as fake is complicated:

• First you go to the top-right corner of a post and select "I don’t like this post."
• That brings up a window titled "Help Us Understand What's Happening."
• Then you select "I think it shouldn't be on Facebook."
• That brings up several choices including "It's a false news story."

If enough people flag a piece of content as a hoax Facebook’s algorithm will tag it as such and save the rest of us from wondering if it's real or not.

So this would all seem to be a good thing, right? As the Washington Post wondered: Did Facebook just kill the Web’s burgeoning fake-news industry? 

But what about abuse of this system? You need only look back to November to see how it could be abused.

It happened when The New York Times was reporting on Florida State University football players seemingly getting preferential treatment when local police ticketed them. When the Times’ official Twitter account tweeted out a link to the story, according to a report in USA Today, the tweet was quickly marked as spam.

The story says it is believed many FSU fans tagged the tweet as spam so that it would disappear from Twitter.

Upon being contacted by Times staffers Twitter restored the tweet, but not before hundreds, if not thousands of users, had seen it marked as spam.

So, could this happen on Facebook? Could hundreds or thousands of advocates for some cause mark a legitimate post as a hoax and have it flagged as such? Of course.

How do Facebook, Twitter and other social networks fight this virtual whack-a-mole approach to dealing with hoaxes? They have to have humans at the controls. No algorithm on its own can solve this problem.

So, what do you think? Will Facebook’s new ability to flag news items as fake be abused? Will it create other problems?

Social Media 2015: 10 Perspectives

Social media saw some big shifts in 2014, but what will 2015 bring? 

The only thing that is certain is that change will continue and at least one new network will come along and surprise everyone with how quickly it gets broadly adopted. In the meantime here are … 

10 Views of What 2015 Will Bring in Social Media

Heidi Cohen (@heidicohen on Twitter) of Heidi Cohen’s Actionable Marketing Guide says in 2015 Facebook will retain its social media marketing dominance, but continue to lose its key demographic, namely teens and twentysomethings. Among her other predictions: Amazon will rock social commerce, Twitter will continue to lose market share and importance, and Instagram and Pinterest will keep growing in importance. Read more at: 2015 Social Media Predictions: 10 Forecasts You Need.

Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer on Twitter) of Maximize Social Business gathered the opinions of 11 social media CEOS into a SlideShare presentation. Among the more interesting predictions are that "…schools will recognize social media as an asset, rather than a liability" (from Ryan Holmes, CEO at Hootsuite) and "Social Media Marketers are being phased out in favor of Community Managers that understand social media in context of a broader ecosystem. " Read more at: 11 Social Media Predictions for 2015

Stephanie Frasco (@StephanieFrasco on Twitter) writes that in 2015 Facebook will see a lot more "pay to play" … i.e. more advertising. As brands try to stand out on the crowded platform they will need to spend more money to do so. She also says: Hashtags will have a heyday, consumers will seek more online privacy, online influencers will be more important than ever for brands and everyone’s decreasing attention spans means anyone on social media must use more and better visuals. Read more at: 15 Digital Marketing & Social Media Trends That Will Shape 2015.

Angela Hausman (@MarketingLetter on Twitter), an Associate Professor of Marketing at Howard University, writing for Business 2 Community says big trends in 2015 will include brands merging the notion of a customer journey with content marketing, brands understanding the value of building social media community and increase in paid advertising in social. Other things she notes include mobile finally living up to its potential and visuals dominating social networks even more. Read more at: 5 Megatrends: Social Media Predictions For 2015.

Rob Nightingale (@robnights on Twitter) writing for makeuseof.com says the next year in social media will see more video, more paid posts, more use of big data and even more use of mobile. It will also see hashtagging become more mainstream and LinkedIn having a renaissance… at last. Read more at: Social Media In 2015, Predictions and Potential.

Adele Halsall is the lead writer and researcher at Customer Service Guru (@gurucustomers on Twitter), a customer service blog based in Britain, predicts a rise in interest-based, not people-based, social networks. "Newer platforms like Foodie, Fitocracy and PlantWorking are geared towards individual audiences rather than taking a ‘everything, everyone, everywhere’ approach," she says in a guest post on the Jeff Bullas’ blog. She also predicts mobile will continue to grow as a priority for brands, social shopping will become far more common and vlogging (video blogging) will become an increasingly common advertising channel for brands. Read more at: The 7 Top Social Media Trends That Will Impact Your Marketing In 2015. 

Bill Sussman (@BillGSussman on Twitter) CEO of Collective Bias, a publisher of user-generated content, writing for Entrepreneur magazine says 2015 will see a rise in location-based mobile marketing along with personalized media. It will also see the aligning of SEO and social media strategies and marketers creating their own newsrooms to cut through content clutter. Read more at: 3 Social-Marketing Predictions for 2015.

Elena Nicosia (@Numerounoweb on Twitter) is Project Manager at Numero Uno Web Solutions and in writing for Business 2 Community predicts that consuming information on smartphones and tablets will really take off in 2015. She says trends by definition are fleeting, but "the one bet you can bank on in 2015 is that social media will officially become the most important tool for marketers and advertisers." Read more at: Social Media Trends Set To Dominate 2015.

Kimberlee Morrison (@KymleeIsAwesome on Twitter) a writer and editor with the Freedom Writers Foundation writing for Social Times gathered some expert opinions and says 2015 will bring – Apple’s power as a social identity manager will increase while Yahoo’s will continue to decline, so-called native advertising will crease on social media, niche networks will continue to grow and the full power of YouTube will finally be realized and utilized by marketers. Read more at: 10 Social Media Predictions for 2015. 

My 5 Predictions:

• Niche social networks will continue to gain strength – the days of the one network for everything are numbered. Therefore … 
• Facebook’s dominance will begin to show more (and bigger) cracks 
• Twitter, sadly, will continue to struggle to grow
• Linkedin will build on its 2014 success and become a dominant network
• Social media will continued to be "normalized" as a set of communication channels 

What do you think 2015 holds for social media?