Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Are All Young People Social Media Experts?

by Leave a Comment

graduate on cell phoneCongratulations, class of 2021. You survived. You graduated. You even landed a job.

Now, watch out.

Your employer thinks you’re a social media expert.

Just because you’re a “digital native” who played with an iPhone before you could ride a bike, your new employer thinks you can be the company’s social media manager.

Without training.

In addition to all your regular duties.

 

What are you supposed to do with that?

It all depends.  Do you want to be a social media expert?  Then, here are three things you need to do right away.

One: Explain to your boss what you have to learn.

  1. How to create a strategy for your organization, so that you reach the people you want to reach, where they hang out, with a purpose in mind.
  2. Who in your organization has great stories to tell.
  3. Who in your organization can take great photos.
  4. Who in your organization can produce great graphics.
  5. How to motivate the people in 2, 3, and 4 to send that content to you to use.
  6. What a publication calendar is, and how to stay on schedule.
  7. How to write killer subject lines for email, headlines for blogs, and text for tweets.
  8. How to write content that will make people look past the headline.
  9. The best ways to make sure your Facebook posts get seen.
  10. The best times of day and days of the week to post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn….
  11. How to integrate your print communications, website, blog, email, and social media.
  12. What will make your followers like, share, and comment on your posts.
  13. How you can find and curate content your followers will be glad to read.
  14. How to tell whether any of it is making a difference.

Two: Tell your boss you’ll need a budget for training.

(Call it “professional development”: it sounds classier.)

  • There are great online courses.  The Social Media Managers School founded by Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare is one of them.
  • You can also take webinars on the subject of your choice.
  • In-person classes and conferences will bring your skills up to date and keep you there.

Three,  politely explain that being a social media manager could be a full-time job.

Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good, estimates that doing a good job with just Facebook could take you seven hours a week.  Get a very clear set of instructions about your boss’s priorities: in writing, if possible!

eating snakes

Is this how you think of social media?

But perhaps you’d rather eat live snakes than manage your organization’s social media.  Then, show your boss this blog entry to make the case that it’s just too big a responsibility to do on the fly.

Suggest that he or she hire a communications consultant to do it right. (I might just be available.)

You just helped make your organization better.  Congratulations, graduate!

What to Do When the Client Asks for the Moon

by 1 Comment

What do you do when your client–or boss–asks you to do something you don’t know how to do?

A friend who’s a social media consultant submitted a proposal to a new client.  She would make sure they had a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and write their blog.  The client asked, “What about data mining?”

“Data mining?” she thought.  “That’s not social media.  It’s not what I know how to do.  What should I say?”

The consultant turned to her friends in Phyllis Khare‘s and Andrea Vahl‘s Social Media Managers School for advice.  What they came up with was a strategy I call Many Moons.

What Do You Mean?

In James Thurber’s classic children’s tale, the princess is sick and won’t be well until someone gives her the moon.  The king turns to one expert after another.  They have no solutions.  All they can tell him is how big the moon is, and how far away, and how it’s impossible to give the princess what she wants.

At last, the king tells the court jester that the princess will never be well until she has the moon.  So the jester goes and asks her:

“How big do you think it is?”

“It is just a little smaller than my thumbnail,” she said, “for when I hold my thumbnail up at the moon, it just covers it.”

“And how far away is it?” asked the Court Jester.

“It is not as high as the big tree outside my window,” said the Princess, “for sometimes it gets caught in the top branches….”

“What is the moon made of, Princess?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s made of gold, of course, silly.”

So the jester gets the goldsmith to make “a tiny round golden moon just a little smaller than the thumbnail of the Princess Lenore.”  And the princess gets well!

Asking-the-Right-Questions_620

Asking the Right Question

It turned out that “data mining,” like the moon, can be many things to many people.  What this client really wanted was not anything statistical.  They simply wanted to keep their ears to the ground and listen to what people on social media were talking about – and then to join in.

I would call that “social listening,” not “data mining.”  But that doesn’t matter.  My friend could give them what they wanted–and more–once she asked the right question.  And so can you.

When it sounds like the client is asking for the moon, remember you might have what they need right under your thumb.

 

What I Learned at Social Media Manager School

by 3 Comments

Have you heard the saying, “There’s no such thing as a social media expert”?  It’s true.  Social media are changing too fast for anyone to know it all.  But Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare come close.

Along with a few hundred students from around the world, I enrolled in Andrea and Phyllis’ Social Media Managers School this fall.  They have a wealth of practical experience and they shared as much of it with us as they possibly could.

I learned a lot more than I already knew about:

  • Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest
  • Top tools for managing multiple clients’ posts on multiple social media
  • Analytics you can use to measure what matters
  • Producing webinars and Ebooks
  • Finding clients, online and in person
  • Setting expectations and actually doing the work

I came to the course with a well-developed sense of strategy, the writing skills I needed for content marketing, and long familiarity with social media.  What I knew less about was a) advanced social media tactics and b) running a business.

Phyllis and Andrea took the mystery out of it.  With patience and good humor, they led a varied group of wanna-bes and already-ares through the course.  The Facebook group for participants was a great bonus: there were some days when I learned as much from the other students as I did from the teachers.  That’s a sign of a great course.

If you are interested in managing clients’ social media for a living–or if (like me) you want to add social media management to what you can offer your clients–then you cannot do better than to sign up for the 2014 Social Media Managers School.

Just don’t call yourself an expert.  Let your expertise speak for itself.

Yes, I’d like weekly email from Communicate!

Get more advice

Yes! Please send me tips from Communicate! Consulting.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.