It’s Not Too Late to become Social Media Manager…
Are you a small or medium-sized business owner who is so flat out running your own business that you haven’t had time at all to get savvy around Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked In, Youtube, or blogging?
Social Media Manager
Or are you the social media manager for a business, perhaps a business who has a complacently comfortable owner who is deply stubborn around innovative ideas, so you’re looking to brush up your own skills because you sense that even if your boss is rolling in revenue now, if he or she stays off social media, it might be a very different story in a year or two’s time?
Or maybe you’re someone who wants to start a business very soon, and you’re aware that you need to get a heightened sense of the opportunities that SEO (search engine optimisation) and social media can create so you can get past that dangerous first year by working smarter as well as harder!
If so, then you’ve come to the right page.
In comparison to the returns that SEO and social media bring to your business, social media workshops are a highly affordable way to get your feet wet without drowning in all the wrong ideas.
Sydney-based presenters Stewart Dawes and Nicole Greentree in fact met via twitter when both had established their own businesses, Stewart after 18 years of magazine publishing alongside 12 years as an online publisher and five years as an SEO specialist, Nicole after running her own successful acupuncture clinic for seven years, followed by two years as a mum and then three years as a freelance social media manager.
Within a short period of time after meeting and working out who would present what, they found themselves in demand from many small business owners who were hearing about their work via word of mouth from their existing clients.
“We’ve been blessed because all of our workshops have ended up being booked out,” Nicole says over coffee in Broadway Shopping Centre, near the corporate suite where they run many of their workshops for businesses. We’ve had private companies ask us to present workshops to their staff, and what was just as exciting was when universities contacted us about doing workshops for their students.”
“While it’s great getting very down-to-earth with business people and answering their many questions about their ROIs (returns on investment), it’s also extremely rewarding seeing students get excited about twitter, for example, which many of them had avoided, and suddenly seeing the appreciation about how it can shape their careers and life paths as social leaders way into the future.”
For Stewart, being a 46-year-old bloke may not fit the stereotype of what a hiptronic social media guru should look like, but as a “late adopter” who got going on it just three years ago, he’s not only met and interacted with scores of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s who are brilliant at social media, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, but he understands how business owners hesitate to get involved and are sometimes afraid of what Facebook and Twitter might hold for them as far as privacy issues and even the risk of being sued should your in-house social media manager have one drink too many and defame someone in front of thousands of people.
“It’s risky employing someone who is immature to be your social media manager,” he says. “While I have a few carefully-chosen staff who look after the youth-focussed social media activity, it’s a fact that my typical social media manager is in his or her late 30s or 40s, and I even have a social media manager in her 50s onboard. Typically these staff members not only need to have perfect spelling, but they need to be world-wise so that the calibre of tweets or status updates is journalistically rigorous, thought-provoking and constantly reflects the ethos of the company they’re representing,” Stewart reveals.
“A lot of fascinating issues get raised by attendees of the workshops, including the other day where a 40-something businessman asked if he should tell his insurance company that he tweets because they may have to factor that into their premiums in case he gets sued,” he laughs.
“I’d never thought of that before,” Stewart adds. So I tweeted his question and got a stack of fascinating replies.
Which were?
“Well they were such things as ‘yes you should tell them’ to ‘don’t tell your insurance company anything they can use to manipulate more money out of you’.”
To find out more about Nicole & Stewart’s social media workshops in Sydney, email Stewart: media@sydneycafes.com.au or call 0413 276 780 during business hours. Or there are some dates of their most forthcoming workshops in the right-hand column above.
What Else will be Covered?
Springboarding now off their grass-roots day-to-day experience of being social media managers, their social-media-for-business workshops will see a wide range of topics covered including Facebook for Business, Linked In for Business, how best to use Facebook’s Branch Out and of course the ubiquitous Twitter for Business, including important business-related social media strategies (many common sense but easily overlooked) like the below:
1. Be yourself. If you’re writing about the company, its products, or its competitors, use your real name, and identify that you work for, or own, a company. If you have a vested interest in what you’re writing about — as a shareholder, a paid consultant or employee, a board member, or the spouse or family member of one of the above, say so clearly and directly.
2. Be truthful. Never represent yourself or the company in a false or misleading way. Make certain that every statement is true and not misleading. Substantiate all claims.
3. Be relevant. Post meaningful, respectful comments — no spam, no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
4. Be smart. Use common sense and courtesy in all postings. Stick to what you know — don’t comment if you aren’t sure your information is correct.
5. Be discreet. Don’t violate the company’s privacy, confidentiality, and legal guidelines for external commercial speech. Don’t publish or report on conversations that should remain private and internal to the company.
6. Be polite. When disagreeing with someone’s opinion, keep it polite. If an online situation becomes antagonistic, don’t get defensive, and don’t disengage from the conversation abruptly. Ask the company PR director for help, and/or disengage from the dialogue in a polite manner that reflects well on the company.
7. Be diplomatic. If you write or comment about your competitors, behave diplomatically. Get your facts straight, and secure the appropriate permissions from management before beginning such a conversation.
8. Be silent. When it comes to legal matters of any kind — including the reputation or personality of any person or organisation — don’t say anything at all. Never, ever comment on anything related to legal matters or litigation, past, present, or future. The only exceptions are the corporate counsel, the CEO (when authorized to do so by corporate counsel or required to do so), or the PR manager (when authorized or required to do so). (This is one of two hard and fast rules for EVERY social media policy.)
9. Be guarded. Protect yourself, your privacy, and the company’s confidential information. Google never forgets, so consider your postings carefully.
10. Be compliant. Obey all laws and regulations that apply to the company’s business, as well as all laws that apply to online behavior in general. Comply with all regulations and rules from any regulatory body or standards organisation. (This is the other hard and fast rule for every social media policy).
As for the cost, this was bugbear for Stewart, who as part of his research ran the gauntlet of over-priced social media events which deliver kindergarten-level information.
“I went to one two-hour event which cost $250 and had advertised it as “Twitter for Business”. However when I got there I was handed their workshop notes which were titled “Twitter for Beginners”. It was a slick presentation but I only learnt one thing in the session, and that proved to be useless by the third week,” he says.
“But there were 70 business people in the room, and clearly most of them felt like they’d turned up on another planet for the day.”
“I’ve also been to Facebook workshops at $400 a day which again spend most of the session delivering education on the absolute basics. Still very necessary for a lot of business people, but you can’t help but feel that people are getting ripped off.”
“A lot of the beginner-level ideas presented generically to a group turn out to be useless when business people apply them because they need to have far more advanced strategies custom-tailored to their business .”
“So we run through the basics but specialise in providing daring ideas which move business people to an advanced way of thinking about social media.”
Social media is … Image Conscious …
After many years of fulltime social media activity working for a wide range of clients setting up many successful SEO and social media campaigns, and with 18 years of full-time media life under his belt, Stewart aka @sydneycafes decided to clandestinely apply for a few social media jobs to test his marketability.
After a few months of emailing out his resume, he’d not been invited to a single interview. Eventually one recruiter levelled off the record with him – the businesses who were advertising for social media staff ranging from $40,000 to $150,000 had a very clear idea of what they were looking for – a female aged 26 to 36.
Just as the fashion world has its preference for stick-thin models, so the social media world, at least as far as the corporatised interpretation, has its preference for the type of social media employee it desires – definitely not a forty-something bloke, even though twitter is littered with over-achieving virtual supermen with followers above the 100,000 mark.
Which raises the question, how accepting is social media of difference? Within social media circles, the answer is extremely accepting, but outside of that, cliches determine who can do what from the conservative viewpoint of the regular business world.
Even old-school media, suspicious if not often terrified of online democratisation of news, has a shallow view of what a social media professional is – in the same way that they’re quick to determine that a geek is nine times out of ten someone wearing glasses, apparent by the Sydney Morning Herald’s recent Definition of Famous Geeks, who include:
Archetypal Geek: Job Heder as Napoleon Dynamite
Multifaceted Geek: Chris Lilley as Mr G in Summer Heights High
Professional Geek: Ben Lee
Hero of the Geeks: Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura in Heroes
Super Girl Geek: Thora Birch in Ghost World
Gawky Rock Geek: Jarvis Cocker
Putting Iced Vovos back on the Ministerial Menu: Chief Geek Kevin Rudd
Three’s a comedy company: Geek trio, Tripod
Geek Diva: Sarah Blasko
Hence Stewart’s urge to deliver social media workshops to people who are feeling disenfranchised by the cool factor permeating perceptions of social media.
“Most business people are not blessed with Hollywood looks, if they were they’d be in Hollywood or maybe a B-grade Sydney TV identity,” Stewart theorises, “but it doesn’t mean you put a photo up of one of your staff who has a significant double chin on a twitter profile which is designed for selling weight-reducing infrared saunas, as one of my clients did.”
“However nor does it mean you put a fake image up of some glamorous anonymous starlet as that turns people off even faster – in that case you’d be better off going with the double-chinned staff member as at least it’s someone real.”
There’s plenty of hands-on education in these workshops as well as information supplied in links to global articles which are at the very cutting edge of Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and internet technology and trends such as the inspiring adoption rates of mobile/smart phone users.
“There’s no question that iPhone, Blackberry and Android users are going ballistic on Twitter and Facebook in unprecedented numbers,” Stewart adds, yet many business people still have their websites in Flash which iPhones simply can’t read,” he warns.
Plus there will be breaking down of jargon, eg getting real about such questions as:
How do you take your social media content to the next level?
Where do you find your audience?
Is content the driver for interaction and engagement?
How do you measure what types of content are the most successful?
Do you have to be funny/out there/wild to be engaging?
Is branded content a no-no?
Currently Stewart’s business divides its attentions between the serious business of SEO, and the supposedly not so serious business of being social media managers to clients from Sydney to Perth – with a particular hit being his outrageously priced $35-per-week social media package which is causing heart palpitations among other social media companies and providers – and there will be a direct presentation of just how a “10 minutes per day on Twitter” package works, so that business attendees can either do it themselves, or take up the option of having it downe for them by social media professionals.
Other subjects covered will include much of the inspiring information included in this page: 50 of the best articles on social media.
To find out more about Nicole & Stewart’s social media workshops in Sydney, email Stewart: media@sydneycafes.com.au or call 0413 276 780 during business hours. Or there are some dates of their most forthcoming workshops in the right-hand column above.
