Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

Organisations shouldn’t only have social media experts: they should help everyone in the organisation understand social media by helping members use it themselves.

I see more and more organisations hiring managers for “social media” or “digital media” or “community management”.  This is a good thing if one of the key responsibilities of these people is to help all members of the organisation learn social media through doing it.

This is a smart strategy for a few key reasons:

* There is no such thing as a social media “expert” because it’s all too new and it changes too fast. The more people you have learning and sharing the better.

* Doing social media doesn’t take lots of money but it often takes lots of time in both the short and long term. One person can’t do it all.

* When (not if) your social media  person leaves, you’ll have other people trained and motivated to take over.

* People will be able to see the value of social media a lot easier if they see the value of it in their own lives.

So how do you get newbies in your organisation using social media? Start with their egos.

Here are two simple steps to take that are guaranteed (or your money back) to get people interested:

1) Get everyone to set up a Google Alert on their name. Many people have never done a Google search on their name (which is what Google Alerts are) and the results often surprise.

2) Have them set up personal Twitter accounts two week later. – After they’ve had the Google Alert for a couple of weeks have them all set up personal Twitter accounts and start sending a tweet a day. Google search results now include Twitter so they’ll start getting their tweets, and any tweets that mention them, back as Google Alerts.

Let the fun begin.

Does your organisation have a social media learning culture or social media experts, or both? Please share by leaving a comment.

Tags: Learning, Social media
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Whenever I pick up a copy of one of the Dummies books I am reminded of why these books are so insanely popular.

Such is the case with the copy of Marketing for Dummies I got for about 13 bucks off Amazon. It’s the perfect book for the marketing newbie with chapters like Clarifying Your Marketing Strategy, Writing a Marketing Plan, Researching Your Customers, Competitors, and Industry, and Marketing on the Web. It also has reality checks like the fact the majority of marketing programs fail.

It’s written by Fortune 500 corporate marketing consultant Alexander Hiam whose Insights for Marketing website, has his books for sale and a couple of good, short, free articles: The Five Principles of Brilliant Sales & Marketing and A Dozen Ways to Boost Sales. The rest of the site is devoted to, well, marketing the marketer and many of the references are US-based but it’s still a good read.

Now, I’m just at the beginning of the book but one thing that’s immediately clear is the potential of social media to do cheaply what has traditionally been prohibitively expensive for many small or medium organizations: market research.

How do you use social media to find out the most important things you need to know: who you customers are and what they think about your product and your competitors?

I am going to email some of the best minds in social media right now and ask and will report back what I find out…

Posted in Learning, Training | 2 Comments »