Advocacy and You: Twitter
Now that you are using your Facebook as an advocacy tool, it is time to expand your reach to twitter. Twitter can be a great
way to advocate. There are over 175 million active users who are willing to connect, and ready to support a cause; you can make a difference. If you don’t believe that Twitter has power let’s look at all of the revolutions that took place in 2011. The majority of them were started because of people connecting on twitter.
Here are some tools and tips to help you be a better advocate:
- Connect with the Media: There are a lot of journalists that use twitter. What better way to spread the power of music therapy than through the media? Begin to follow journalists on twitter and see what stories they are writing about. Begin to comment on their tweets and show your knowledge and appreciation for the topics in their articles. They more you interact, the more likely you will be able to assist them with a story in the future.
- Look beyond your network: Start to connect with people outside of the music therapy community. Look at politicians, celebrities, and people who will be beneficial to connect with. See what they are talking about and show them that you can relate. If they are people with celebrity status, treat them like your friends. (Most celebrities won’t open up if you flaunt all over them)
- Every connection is a new door: Just like advocating in an elevator or to the government, you never know whose life you can touch by spreading your message. If you think someone can benefit from some information, let them know. Twitter can connect you to so many people and you don’t have gateways blocking you. On Facebook they need to add you as a friend, LinkedIn requires approving your connection; twitter can allow you to gain access you didn’t think was possible.
- Be Human: Here is one thing we often forget when we put on our advocacy hat. You may want to sound formal and stick to a script when advocating. Formality can often be lost especially in only 140 characters. The more human you are the more likely it is that people will listen.
- Importance & Repeat: Remember to let people know why it is important to support your cause. If you don’t tell them then they won’t know. On twitter, you need to tell them often. There are so many updates that come through on a given twitter feed. I follow 666 people right now, that means your tweet can easily be missed when I log on. Tweak your message a little each time so you stay human but if it is important make sure you keep updating!
Check back on Monday for tips on increasing your advocacy efforts on LinkedIn and Google+.
Will You Revolt?
Imagine you are sitting at work and you get a memo stating that your boss will no longer allow you to go on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media site. What would your first thought be? Would you take kindly to this new form of oppression? Would you feel that your boss or upper management doesn’t trust you or your co-workers anymore?
Basically, this is a very small scale of what happened in Egypt over the past month. The Government didn’t feel that they could trust their people and blocked the internet from them so they couldn’t do anything socially. So does this mean that companies that are limiting the social media use in their offices, can potentially face a revolution of some sort?
Well David Meerman Scott posed this very question on his blog yesterday. and I think it is a very interesting topic to think about especially if you do run a company that has these policies. Of course, we know that there won’t be rioting in the streets due to social media sites being blocked at work, but employees might revolt in other ways. When employees feel that they are being restricted or if Big Brother is breathing down their neck, they are most likely to waste time. You may be thinking you are cutting out time wasting activities by banning these sites, but people can waste time doing absolutely nothing.
If you begin to put to much restriction on them, and they feel that they are being watched too much, they will quit. I once worked in store where the management actually timed how long their staff went to the bathroom for. If they were in the bathroom for more than 60 seconds they would come in and check on you to see what you are doing. People didn’t last long working for a place like that, there were plenty more places to work that didn’t put those type of restrictions on their staff.
So you might not end up with picket lines or wild mobs, but you will definitely loose productivity and will potentially loose your employees if not all of them. And if your worried that your employees will waste too much time on Facebook or other such sites, then your best bet is to develop a very open Social Media plan and educate your staff on what is and isn’t acceptable. Your biggest fear is a disgruntled employee bad mouthing your brand, but in the retrospect, your loyal excited employees could be better marketers than your marketing department. It is better to be open and have enthusiastic employees than put people in cages and let them destroy your hard work because of oppression.
Let me know your thoughts, and please share your stories if you have worked in an environment liked this.
The Last Five Years
The other day I got home from the office and opened my mail to find a letter from my high school. My life has been in fast forward mode lately, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about the past, so when I received a letter telling me that my 5-year reunion is coming up in June I couldn’t believe it. I started to think that in five years I started college, helped start an IMC Firm, graduated college, and have been working for two years, among the other events in my life.
That wasn’t what inspired me to write this article though. What really got me thinking was that back in 2006, when I was deciding on what college I would go to, I couldn’t imagine what I would be doing now. I mean I literally couldn’t imagine what I would be doing because it didn’t exist. Social Media was just beginning to take off and it wasn’t even a possibility for a business to advertise on them. Facebook was still college e-mail only and youtube was just taking off. I can even remember sitting in my Comm 100 class freshman year and watching the news coverage of Youtube being bought by Google. My professor said that you will remember this day for the rest of your lives because it is the start of something new. And it was.
I then had the benefit of taking all of my Public Relations classes with a professor who was tuned into this “new possibility” of PR and was immersed in the possibilities of these technologies before they became mainstream. I can even remember signing up for a twitter account when no one really knew what it could be used for and now even grandma’s are tweeting. I’ve been aware of the term early adopter for a long time, but you never really know that you were one until you reflect back.
I also find it fascinating that even know I didn’t know I could make a career out of Social Media, I was able to store major events of this field into my brain before I knew they were super important. It makes me wonder if these events (youtube sale, facebook going completely open, launch of twitter, Ashton beating CNN) really hold a strong place for people in other fields or not.
It also amazes me on my moment of nostalgia, how fast we have advanced in 20 years. I remember when my family got our own first personal computer, then a year later we signed up for extremely slow dial-up through AOL, but today I can get the internet on a device that fits in my pocket even in the middle of nowhere. This niche field of Social Media Expert that I love and call home in the broader field of PR was created basically overnight. Who knows what the new thing will be tomorrow, or next year but always be looking for that next great thing, because you never know what you can make into a job.
One final thought:
I wonder if those people who said “Facebook? That won’t be around in a few years! Why would I even bother getting into that?” are shamefully jumping on the band wagon or still sitting in the “stone age” of technology, waving their first at this new way of doing things, hoping one day they will be able to say they were right.
Technology and Music: Part 3: Do’s and Dont’s of Social Media
Now you have your brand developed and on the web, so whats next? This is a common question that most people ask themselves when they are starting to create their on-line professional presence. If you want to be successful and expand your presence, you have to walk a fine line of not enough and too much.
You may be asking yourself, What does he mean by this?
Well, take a look at your normal social media participation. You are probably either updating it constantly or you check it every few weeks, you want to be in the middle of that line with your professional persona. When you are just using these technologies to keep up with your friends, you only need to worry about your participation level as much as you care to.
When your building and maintaining your professional persona on these sites you need to be constantly active, but not pushy. This mean you should always be checking to see what other people are saying to you on the sites. People want to be communicated with, and in a world filled with a need for instant gratification, you will loose peoples interests if you don’t respond quickly. If you publish a demo of a song on Purevolume, and people comment on it, try to comment back. Show them that you are active on your own sites, and that you aren’t the reclusive musician. Also, try to make sure that you share relevant information with those that follow you. If you are a music therapist, send out information around that topic. If you see a movie or book coming out that features your field, then share the link. If your profession was featured on the news, then share the link. Don’t post a link to a cat doing something funny, no matter how cute it is. This is probably the biggest factor that causes people to loose followers. Yes, they might find that cat funny and cute, but they came to your site to get information on you or your expertise. Unless you were giving therapy to that cat because of their traumatic but cute incident, then it is not relevant.
The other biggest don’t is that you should not tweet or post about every second of your day. Just because your Grandma wants to hear about what you have for breakfast every single morning, that your sitting on your favorite park bench, or your keeping up with your personal hygiene, doesn’t mean your professional acquaintances want to hear about that. A general rule of thumb would be if it doesn’t directly relate to your field, then would it be something you tell to someone in a business meeting?
Also, NEVER and I mean NEVER, complain or vent on these sites. Even if you think that you can’t loose your job by saying something bad about your boss or your job because you are the boss, you can damage your brand even worse. Imagine a potential client (music therapists) or a Event Coordinator (Professional Musician) hears about how amazing you are in what you do. The first place they are going to go is to your facebook page and see what they can find out about you. If you complain about a past gig or client, you might have lost that paycheck before it ever came. As before, if you wouldn’t say it in a client meeting, don’t say it anywhere on the web.
Technology and Music: Part 2: Social Media and You
Now that you have your brand figured out, it is time to start putting your brand to work for you. You have to live into your brand. Every time you meet with a new client or a potential employer, make sure you take some time to reflect on that meeting after it happens. Did your Brand Essence come into play during that meeting? Do you think that Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So walked out of there thinking you were “fill in the blanks?”. When you are giving your therapy session, did you keep your brand promise to that client? It is going to be tough but to have a solid brand you really have to eat, breath, and sleep it. But remember, you don’t announce what the details of your brand are to the world, so don’t think that if you can announce your brand promise to make it easier for your clients or audience to see where you are coming from.
Now that you have your Brand and are living into it, it is now time to begin building your brand into your Social Media sites. In the section below, I am going to walk you through a variety of Social Media tools that you can use to strengthen your Brand Presence and get noticed in the world. You can use bits and pieces of each, or you can decide that one tool is best for you. That is the great and frustrating thing about Social Media, there is no right way of doing it but there can be wrong ways.
Facebook is probably the one place you want to be involved with on-line, no matter what your goals are. There are over 500 Million active users on Facebook, and it is reported that 50% of those people log on each day. That is 250 Million people that you can potentially influence on a given day. Now for a Music Therapist, you will want to concentrate on the city you are in, but for a musician you might want to gain exposure over a state or a country or even the world. For more stats on the usage of facebook, click here.
The key to expanding your brand and advertising is hitting people where they currently are. That is why billboards are placed on popular highways. People drive past them, they see them without actively going to see them. Every time you post a message to your wall, your friends get that message on theirs. They are already sitting there, using the site, so why not take advantage of their active attention.
Now for your options. You have two general options when deciding what direction to go with Facebook. The first option is to create a page for your professional self. This way people aren’t linked directly to your personal profile when looking for you on this site. The benefits of this are that you can still have your private space where you can maintain personal relationships without getting friend requested from every person looking at you professionally. You can flood the airwaves with professional links and information without pushing it on your college buddies, unless they want to go like your page. The cons of using this technique are that you have to go to the page to update, and you have to update. I would say if you don’t provide 1 new (USEFUL) post a day, then you will loose your audience.
Your other option is to convert your personal page to your professional persona. This allows you to be connected to your professional digital self without having to click over to a different page. Every update and wall post can be conveniently pushed to your smart phone and you can be connected everywhere. I love this option for the solo professional who is making a career out of themselves. If you are your brand, then everything you do should be that brand. It leaves a big loophole if you say I live into my brand during the 9 to 5 hours and then I am Nega-Scott during nights and weekends. The cons to this are that you no longer are away from your business (might also be a pro), and you have to live like your brand. If you don’t want potential clients seeing your drunken side, then you might want to keep those photos on your iPhoto and not on the web.
Twitter is a great site to get a part of, but if you want it to work for you be prepared to be logged in. If you want to use twitter effectively then you have to be prepared to update it a few times a day, with meaningful posts or links. Let people know what your doing as far as professional purposes go. We want to hear if you are working on a new song or if you are giving a presentation to the board at a hospital to advocate for music therapy. We don’t want to hear that your bagel with jam was super delicious this morning and now you are on your way to yoga. Also, feel free to send out relevant links about your profession. Let people know that you are connected to what other are doing in your field and not just yourself. The real challenge is trying to make you brand personality apparent through each tweet. If you say your creative, then make your tweets creative. If you say you are a strict professional, don’t be cracking jokes everyday. So as far as pros and cons go of using twitter, a pro is that you can reach another massive group of active viewers, and you can link it to your facebook so both update with one message. A con is that you have to actively update, twitter is so quickly updated that you can easily be forgotten if you aren’t an active presence.
Here is a great social media site that performance musicians can really use to benefit themselves. For those of you that record your own music, do you ever dream of having it sold? Well now you can, but it might not be in the way you think. First of all, I would stop dreaming about having your cd carried in an FYE or a BEST BUY because FYE is going out of business and Best Buy will have to keep changing to adapt to the ever digital market. Also, it can be difficult to get your music on iTunes, and then unless they have heard of you people might not find you. This site allows you to sell your music digitally to your fans and lets them do most of the work. Some of the features are that you set your price, people are able to share your music via other social networking sites (which gives you a wider brand presence), and a custom design to really make your brand shine. For a full list of features, click here. Pros is that it gives you a chance to network and share your music while you get a profit, and I can’t really find any relevant cons.
There are hundreds of other sites that I can talk about that can benefit your brand. I feel that this is a good start to get an online presence that represents your brand and they can all link together. I do want to warn you though, that it doesn’t happen overnight and if you really want to use this technology to your benefit you have to put the work in to get the results out. So just stay active, make sure your brand is being properly identified on-line and stay positive.
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*This is Part 2 of 3 in a series about branding and networking your career on-line for musicians.
Update on Egypt
I just wanted to give a quick update before I head off to bed, because I am deeply interested in this story due to the fact that it started getting popular not only due to the social issues but the social media issues as well.
If you haven’t seen, the president of Egypt announced a statement saying that he has asked his cabinet to resign and that he would have new leadership in place tomorrow, doesn’t he realize the problem is with him and not his people. He is putting a bandage on a major flesh wound and expecting people to think it’s healed! I can’t wait to see what happens next.
I do applaud our president for stating that he believes I. Free speech for all countries and that we are on the side of the egyptian people.
Let’s see where this goes!
Remember if it’s worth doing, Do it in Public
Jim
Egypt, Technology, and Wisdom: What can we learn from this?
As the days have progressed, we have seen the situation in Egypt go from bad to worse, to almost hitting rock bottom. It started earlier this week when the Egyptian government “allegedly” banned the Twitter service in their country. Some Egyptian companies stated that this was probably a service failure on the largest ISP in Egypt and had nothing to do with the fact that Egyptian citizens are in the midst of a protest to overthrow their leader.
I just think that the all too convenient failure of one social communication site was just a really bad attempt at a Public Relations cover up. As we have progressed through the week, we have seen that there is no chance that it was just a system failure. We have seen the Egyptian Government shut down internet communications beyond twitter, and even start a ban on cell phone service. They know that the strength in the masses is through communication. Which, in their minds, without these major social community sites, and basic technologies like phones, people won’t be able to communicate as efficiently and support for protest might be slowed down to where the Government can handle it.
I don’t blame the Egyptian government for being afraid of this uprising, especially when earlier this month Social Media was attributed with helping the Tunisian government be overthrown. Check out NPR’s story, Social Media Gets Credit for Tunisian Overthrow. But as I said in a previous post, Revolutions were happening way before electricity. The sentiment is out there, as we saw, nearly 20,000 protestors filled the streets to combat this. They sure weren’t sitting there voicing their opinion’s on facebook or twitter. I think by trying to silence them at this point, is just adding to the fire.
We can talk about these situations all we want, because they are across the ocean, and we luckily can just sit back and watch the chaos ensue. But as we are distracted, we should be concerned with our own country as well. Back in September of 2010, there was a bill proposed, S. 3804 (111th). This act is titled “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Acts, and basically makes a law where the government has two lists of domain names that have to be blocked by ISP’s by law, which is controlled completely by the government. Yes, their intentions are noble, to cut back on counterfeits online, to protect property, blah blah blah. But do you realize that with the ambiguity of this act, the entire internet could be blocked, and we can be no better off than CHINA? We could loose YouTube, because they allow people to post videos with songs that they don’t own. Facebook could probably find it’s way onto that list, because how many of us post a video or a song that we don’t “own”. This is absurd to think that anyone in their right mind would even consider proposing an act like this. I am not to worried that something like this will pass currently, but lets just be conscious that people in power have the thoughts and capabilities to really diminish our freedom.
So after hearing that, I just want to put this thought out there into people’s minds, especially when we can compare the situation in Egypt to the fear of social media in some circles here in America. I don’t mean that we are going to revolt, or anything like that, but when Corporations still hold a tight fist around information that is shared on public sites, and to even get to the point where people loose their jobs due to a photo or a status update, we are having a little bit of a Big Brother Complex. It isn’t working well for Egypt or Tunisia, so lets try to reform are approach here.
We understand you (big companies) don’t like to have your brand tarnished, especially by someone on the inside. And obviously, you shouldn’t allow a disgruntled employee to destroy your hard earned rep, but to cause fear in employees that if anything slightly negative goes on-line they can loose their job, is outrageous. We even have to worry about a friend tagging us in a photo from a drunken party last weekend, even know we can untag it, we can’t untag it fast enough when we are all tuned in. Even if we set our profiles to private, we live in the fear that you think we are hiding something so bad we can’t let you see it. We are in a loose/loose situation. Lets stop living in a world of do’s and dont’s and let everyone be proactive/reactive, and talk.
What I mean is don’t discourage or block people from being involved with these sites. I mean if you really treat your employees great, they can be your best source of advertising, and you don’t have to pay them extra. Instead, let people know that you appreciate their interest to talk about work on these sites, but encourage them to come to an actual person with a problem. Let them know that they can complain about their job all they want on-line, but are their friends really going to help them in that area? Nope! and you should let them know that. If they keep complaining to their friends, they will get frustrated because the problem won’t be solved and then the company will also have a negative connotation because they might not know the problem exists. If they come to the management, the problem can be solved quickly, with no harm on either end. Also, instead of blocking these sites from work computers, maybe offer a one-day training seminar on how to effectively use these tools to get work done, and be a model for the company.
There are many ways we can work together to avoid volatile situations, and I think the bottom line is to realize that Social Media isn’t the cause, it is just a tool. Let me know your thoughts on this, and let’s keep Egypt in our thoughts as they suffer through this situation.
Techno Tuesday: Tweeting in Real Time
TweetDeck for iPhone
So for the first Techno Tuesday post I thought I would start out with a great tool that helps you keep connected no matter what you are doing. We all have busy schedules and staying connected is tough. Unless our job is to monitor Social Media sites all day long, we have to spend most of our day working on something else.
So you may be asking yourself, “How do I stay connected in real time if I have to be away from where the conversation is?”.
One of the best ways to see what the conversation is, is to be involved with Twitter. Twitter, when used correctly, can help you see what your mass audience is thinking throughout the day. Just look at Gatorade, a company that is dedicated to having at least two employees monitoring their twitter feed at all times.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InrOvEE2v38&feature=player_embedded]
But how does this influence you? Especially when I already mentioned that you most likely don’t have the time to sit in front of your computer and monitor twitter, facebook, and linkedin all day long. Well this is where TweetDeck comes in.
TweetDeck Interface
TweetDeck will help you keep in touch with twitter all day and allow you can still be involved with your other work. I personally keep TweetDeck up and running all day long and find it useful to let me know when new tweets pop up without having to leave the screen I am on. TweetDeck conveniently sends a translucent pop up every time a new tweet comes through.
Example of a TweetDeck Notification
You also have the option to turn on and off the pop up when your in a meeting and might need to take a break from monitoring. The notifications also come with a nice little ping that can let you know a new tweet came through without being in front of your computer. This option can also be turned on or off independently of the pop up.
The other feature that I like about TweetDeck is that you can have the ability to have your followers tweets come across right next to your messages and your mentions. It also allows you to save searches to the interface that will constantly update as they are
Custom Search Columns
posted to. This way you can search the hash tags(#) for your business or your competitors and always be notified when they are being talked about on twitter. I do applaud Twitter for allowing comparison screens, like TweetDeck, on their new version launched a few weeks ago; but they still don’t really allow for a customizable main screen that will always leave up your feed with competitors mentions and you have to leave your feed to check anything else out. I still believe the ease of use is better on TweetDeck and honestly nothing is better than being able to be connected without having to have another window on your browser open all day.
Bonus: You can also bring TweetDeck with you on your iPhone or Android smart phones.
So my final words of advice are to download the program on your computer, and play around with it if you haven’t already. See if it is a viable option for you to remain connected while doing the other aspects of your job. Then play around with the mobile version as well and let me know what you think. If you want to learn about another comparable program check out HootSuite, which I will talk about in another post on another Tuesday.
Happy Communicating,
Jim
The Bird or The Whale … Is Twitter really worth it
To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question.
Twitter was great in the beginning. A group of people gathered together on one site tweeting about what they were doing during their day to day business. Most of it was used by communication professionals and we discussed news stories we were covering, what important people we were meeting, and used it as a way to connect across the world.
Then it started to gain popularity, and the site gained more users. Soon people were tweeting about waking up, eating breakfast, and even when they were going to the gym. It was annoying but we didn’t have to follow them and could easily stick within our professional groups.
Then came the Celebrities. They used it as a medium to talk directly with their friends It was great to see them involved and we (the average citizens) could actually talk to them. So the site was gaining popularity and then it really hit the fan. Here comes @aplusk, oh Ashton you caused it to become one of the most popular sites and that lead to the whale. With Ashton Kutcher’s attempt and success at beating CNN to get 1 Million followers, we noticed the largest rush of people getting involved on the site.
Now we go to log on to the site and we get to see the infamous whale.
So the question is whether or not twitter is worth still using.
If you haven’t already been sold by the popularity you might want to check out this post at the Guardian.
If you do know what it’s about but still aren’t sold if you should join, especially with the rumors of twitter possibly shutting down or switching to a pay service because of the “whale” issues. Then you might want to take my advice. Yes, get involved and make sure it is important. Don’t be one of those annoying twitter users that just let us know what you are doing every second of the day. Also, I want to warn you to not just use it for promoting yourself. If you want to send out new blogs posts, make sure you also send out links to other sites you think your followers would like.
In another post I will give you tips on what to tweet and how to make your twitter account successful. But logon, try it out if you haven’t, and just see who you can connect with.
Facebook Yourself
Whether you are a seasoned professional or a student you still have to build your own personal brand. We will touch on how to build your business Facebook page in another post. What is really going to matter, is how you sell yourself on Facebook. As I said in a previous post, this website (Facebook) is what serves as your first impression.
Whatever you do, I guarantee Facebook is the first place most people go and try to do research on you. If you meet a new person at school or at a job, they probably try to find out all they can on Facebook. I wouldn’t doubt it if you did the same thing to everyone you meet. But it is also where potential employers are going to go and look before they hire you. So what are good tips to think about when you are designing your personal Facebook page?
First of all you want to make sure you really represent yourself. Don’t create a reality that isn’t yourself, because all that will accomplish is to set everyone who looks at it up for disappointment when they really meet you.
The other big mistake I see that people make all the time is that they block off their personal Facebook account or change their name so they can’t be found. This is a mistake, especially in todays society. If your Facebook doesn’t exist outside of the realm of your friends because you only use your first and middle name or set it to private, that shows people one of two things. Either you do some pretty stupid stuff that you don’t want people to know about or you are so anti-social that you don’t even belong to one of the most popular networks out there.
The best approach is to have your Facebook open and available. Blocking it off is like going to a job interview with a paper bag over your head. Also, here is a little secret that you might be shocked by. It is okay, even surprisingly comforting to see you have a few pictures with you drinking with your friends. That shows a potential employer that you are sociable and real. What 20-something doesn’t have a drink here and there. Hiding it on your Facebook just lets employers wonder what else you are hiding.
But still make sure you keep it in check. Even know it’s great to see you have a drink with your college buddies, we don’t need to see the picture of you with your head in a toilet or streaking down the road after one too many Jagerbombs. Most importantly be yourself, don’t try to sell something that doesn’t exist.
