Jessica L. Owens

You’ve chosen to begin using social media as a solution to solve your marketing gaps, or to build your personal brand online. Now, how do you decide which channels to begin sharing content on?

Whatever you do, do not just sync up the same content in 5 different areas. Just because you have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account and a HootSuite account that can publish to them all in one swift click doesn’t mean you actually should use that power for every single message. People follow or friend you in different channels for a reason. Understanding how your audience (or potential) audience uses their social channels is critical to being successful in the digital world.

With that said, each channel may be an appropriate home for the exact same story, yet, just told differently based on capabilities of the technology and the allowance of the type of media considered acceptable on that channel.

I recently participated in a #SMCGLB panel on personal branding and online profiles. It was rather useful, however, I realized that as a recent job seeker, I could have easily stood up there and participated on that panel as an “expert.” There are some simple steps to start an online presence whether you’re unemployed and looking for a job, an entrepreneur, or simply looking to increase online reputation:

Be available

To be found, you must be available. Have profiles across many platforms:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn <<A must!!
• YouTube
• Emurse.com

It is important to have a presence on several platforms, but have one main “hub.” This could be a Google profile with links to all of your various profiles or a blog.

Be an Expert

Subscribe to newsletters or RSS feeds that write about the subject matter in which you intend to find a job in. Join discussions on Twitter with professionals in your field and list them for easy access. By subscribing to discussions, you’ll have the ability to share useful and recent information in an interview or while networking with potentials.

Make Your Resume Digital

You will have variations of your resume, but it should always include your url – probably to your “hub.”

Also, have one variation of your resume be a digital resume. Whether it’s actually an html page, PDF, or a word document, it should contain links to your work in it’s actual environment.

Post an Ad

Use Google Ad Sense or Facebook Ads to target specific companies or recruiters. Link it to your “hub” or digital resume allowing potential employers to accidentally find you by targeted advertising. Talk about differentiating from the competition!

Propel your career or business with social media

Register Today!

Learn to use social media to build a personal brand at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 27 at Central Michigan University (location no longer in Grawn and will be announced soon).

This free seminar hosted by Social Media Club – Great Lakes Bay and CMU’s American Marketing Association will feature a panel of three well-known speakers who have successfully built brands for themselves and other companies/

Learn how to build your personal brand online

The panel will consist of Hajj Flemings, Nikki Stephan and Becks Davis. They will discuss how to build a brand using social media tools – such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and more – and will answer your questions about personal brands. Use hashtag #smcglb to tweet about this event. 

Afterward, join us for drinks and networking at our afterglow event (location to be determined).

About the panel

Hajj Flemings (@HajjFlemings) has been featured on ESPN.com and BusinessWeek.com. He is the founder of Brand Camp University and the author of “The Brand YU Life,” which was selected as one of Fast Company Magazine 2008 Readers Choice Business Books of the year. His branded clients include Walt Disney, Ford Motor Company, Skechers Footwear and U.S. Department of Defense (Telecom Division).

Central Michigan University alumna Nikki Stephan (@EstrellaBella10)  is a public relations professional and social media strategist at Identity Marketing & Public Relations. Nikki is a member of PRSA Detroit and Social Media Club Detroit. She also leads a weekly Tweetea discussion group in metro Detroit. She’s a frequent contributor to Identity’s blog, id tags, and maintains a personal blog, Essential Elements, where she shares stories related to creativity, happiness and success. 

As the founder and editor of detroitmoxie.com, a website focused on Detroit, Becks Davis (@BecksDavis) has built and fostered a community organically using social media tools. She also is active in the Detroit digital community, working on projects such as TEDxDetroit and 140 Characters Conference Detroit.

Social Media Club – Great Lakes Bay is sponsored by:

Platinum: AGP & Associates, Inc. and Dow Chemical
Silver: Think Marketing and Design
Venue: Apple Mountain and Midland Center for the Arts
In Kind: CMU Career Services 

Interested in becoming a sponsor? E-mail SMCGreatLakes@gmail.com for information. 

The future

Creating Organizational Change to Support Social Media Integration

The Speaker: Shannon Paul

Shannon is the Social Media Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and she writes about social media for business at the Very Official Blog, a blog listed in the Advertising Age Power 150.

Prior to her current role, she managed social media for PEAK6 Online, parent company of several web-based businesses in the financial services sector, and the NHL Detroit Red Wings.

Shannon has experience creating and implementing social media programs, policies and workflow systems to help businesses participate in the social web, including those in regulated industries.

The Afterglow: Apple Mountain

Stay after the seminar to network with others. There will be a cash bar at Apple Mountain

What to post?

When designing your social media strategy, a lot of companies find themselves stumped in what to post. Granted, you can promote sales, perhaps your bestselling products, or continue to talk about how awesome your company and employees are, but lets be real… nobody really cares.

Instead- post information that people want to read and that they can relate to by telling success stories of your companies or employees. Make it interesting and something that the reader could relate to or wish to share with a friend. It’s important to ask “what’s in it for the reader?” each time you post something.

How to post it

Also, it’s important to post in an easy to read format. Include charts and pictures and summarize by using lists.

However you write and present it on your site, make sure that the text that gets placed in social media is intriguing enough that the reader at least just wants to finish the sentence he or she is reading- but what the hell, they’ve already clicked through so lets keep them there for the whole article– better yet, complete a sale before they leave. Because that’s what the whole point is right? Well, that’s up to you and that’s what your strategy will determine.

Where to post it

Sync your accounts using tools like perhaps HootSuite or using the options that the social media service provides.

Make it available on all types of services such as Facebook and Twitter. Also be sure it’s available on multiple devices and utilize RSS so that no matter what the reader is utilizing (mobile, tablet, Google Reader, etc) they have the chance to find it, read it, and share it.

A lot of people tend to struggle with the value of social media for businesses, especially if they’re not really social marketers, they’re business people. I saw a great example today of exactly what business want to see as they begin to interact with consumers through social media. I’ve removed the names to protect privacy.

Two years ago, nobody would have ever posted on the internet their mid-afternoon snack choice. Today we do and we’re sharing with hundreds and maybe thousands of friends and followers. Tomorrow we will tag that image and post not only to our followers and people who we know, but we’ll share with our brand’s followers and those that we don’t know.

The influence users have over purchasing choices while using social media has been documented many times over. If this doesn’t convince you, I’m not sure what will work… and in that case, you probably will struggle to compete in a complicated market place.

I was reading Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin yesturday and I started to think about the future of marketing and how we interact in a time when there is more content available than ever before. Seth talks a lot about how there are more and more competitors and the need to infest the “hives” with “ideavirus” in order to be successful.
As the world comes together on the internet, content grows drastically. We’ve only been in this era for a short period of time but we are already bombarded with more information than any of our previous generations could fathom.
Many see a future where the internet connects the world and the people all become a unified “hive” as Seth would put it. But after reading about Seth’s “ideavirus” and the need to infect specific “hives,” I beg to differ. He clearly states that there is no way to infect everybody even if your product could impact everybody.
So as we enter an era with unlimited content, we have learned to aggregate content in a way that is focused to only our needs. As marketers, it is unbelievably essential to understand this. As our world starts to evolve electronically, everyone will be segmented into hives. Marketers will have more success by focusing on hives and understanding the targeted hive instead of the traditional mass media.

I always look forward to my Six Pixels of Separation newsletters! And for many reasons- but they’re all irrelevant to this blog… and no, unfortunately, I’m not getting paid by them to say these things. It’s just true! This week their newsletter/blog featured companies that are “missing the mark with Twitter.” It’s great, I suggest you read the article…

The article focused a great deal on the fact that many companies are not using Twitter to maximize the potential for the company. They are simply trying to push their product. That irks me. It is unfortunate… but nobody asked why?

Except for me.

“Why?” you ask.

Because, in many cases (not all) there isn’t just 1 single person in a corporation that knows exactly what is going on, nor has the time to do so. This could be someone in PR that is very knowledgable on the company’s policies and knows how carefully deliver the proper information to the public…

But the article I’m so fond of mentions HR, customer service, and many other functions that could be leveraged by Twitter… and the author is right. Very right. (Look at Comcast!). So the question is why? Because many times, it is very difficult for a massive company collaborate  to communicate the proper information to use social media technology to start integrating internal functions with direct customer satisfaction. Companies need an individual in select functions such as HR, customer service, public relations… and more… who are able to give input- and regularly. It doesn’t do any good to have a company account if nobody is including useful updates! Take the time to learn and leverage the tools that are available used. Heck- Hire someone solely for that purpose!! If you need any suggestions on who to hire, I’ve got some ideas for you… just saying…

Sometimes people ask me what type of job I’m looking for or what I want to do with my major. I try to be brief by explaining that I’d like to go into digital marketing and new media. Many people don’t really understand this and I realized that new media is vague. Quite frankly it could mean something different to anybody.

Wikipedia and Google tend to group the search “new media” and “social media” in the same results and description. Wikipedia describes new media to be digital and computerized. This new term tends to coin the image of a computer, Facebook, Twitter, SEO and SEM. If you’re like me and you’re interested in the much bigger picture of new media, you don’t necessarily think of it that way.

On a grand scale, new media could also refer to television, DVR, TiVo, and On Demand. In fact, it already is used in TV. For example, when I was helping my mother buy a new TV, we shopped for many different features. A TV with new media features that was presented to us was by LG. There were capabilities to connect the TV by wireless or via Ethernet to surf Netflix, YouTube, and more. If you don’t want to invest in a brand new TV, don’t worry, there are also reports of DVD players containing this technology.

The company’s message to the potential consumer should not continue to be interruptive of the viewer’s leisure time. The consumer should seek the product and the company and marketer should be able to deliver at the appropriate time. This is what new media will be. My goal is to become one of the hard working professionals in new media. That is, I would like to make my career efforts towards all types of ways to make marketing be what the consumers are looking for  by using behavioral targeting and marketing and by using new media in many ways.