May 5, 2011
Laying the Groundwork
By: Trish Forant
“Our social networks, both the old-fashioned type in real life, as well as the new constructs created by social software, give us the ability to do amazing things for ourselves and for others. But it does require some thought and consideration.” Chris Brogan
One of the best ways to set your team up for success is to arm them with great resources. Continuing this month’s series on “Training Your Company for Social Media” we thought we’d give you some ideas on how to build a resource library both physically and virtually that your team can begin to familiarize themselves with.
Laying the Groundwork
Resources will help your team grow more knowledgeable about what’s going on across the social web, as well as give them a good foundation to build upon as they go forward. How do you go about finding resources? Where should you look? Consider event sites like Plancast and Eventbrite that help you track events on the topics and locations that interest you. You can even use these sites to make note of conference speakers and thought leaders on particular topics and connect with them across your social networks.
Other great places to gather resources and learn who’s who on the social web are local clubs. One in particular that comes to mind is the Social Media Club. The Social Media Club connects media makers from around the world to promote media literacy, industry standards, and ethical behavior and to share the lessons they have learned. With over 200+ chapters, covering 6 continents, there’s sure to be a chapter close to you. While you’re at it, check out Podcamp and WordCamp as potential places to learn, grow and connect with others in the industry.
Twitter and Facebook can be great resources as well in a number of ways. Since you can ask questions and get immediate feedback, these platforms can be great sources of information. For example, if you’re looking for great books on understanding ROI (Return on Investment), ask your community what they’d recommend. You can do this to find great blogs to read on a particular topic, too.
Don’t forget the search option either. Both Twitter and Facebook give you the ability to search, Twitter has an advanced search that is quite useful as it allows you to search people, places, hashtags and even sentiment.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
There are already plenty of great resources available to you that others have created. Take Mashable’s twitter lists for example or the Huffington Post’s. These lists are broken down very specifically to include listings by city, state, and cover a wide variety of topics across several niches.
Naturally, not all of these resources will strike a chord – that will vary depending on your business, but they should whet your appetite. Make note of the ones that resonate with you and discard the rest – or better yet, create your own lists and share them with your team internally.
It’s also important to encourage your team to seek out social media resources on their own. To reinforce this, consider a reimbursement policy so employees can take courses, classes and buy materials that will help them build a stronger social media foothold without the constraints of finances getting in the way.
Don’t forget, there are plenty of free resources as well, your local library should have a social media section and you can also search the web for white papers, eBooks and case studies. Most are relatively easy to find with a simple search.
We know embarking on this social media journey can be a bit intimidating at times. Therefore, we’ve taken that into consideration with our upcoming posts. We’ll talk about cutting through the chaos of information overload, as well as help you focus on tips, tricks and resources to help internally share knowledge so you’ll be able to determine what works best for your company. Knowledge is power and we want to you to be prepared as you begin your social media strategy toward success.
Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start when it comes to building your own resource library, what are some of your favorite resources and what would you add to this article? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Sometimes it seems to me that the Social Media networks are too big to get a handle on. As a real-life analogy, it's like trying to communicate with everyone in your hi-rise office building. They're too many, too diverse, too independent and too unpredictable to reach with a single tool. What I would probably do, instead, would be to create an affinity group within the larger community. It's an easy way to begin.
That's the kind of help I think most organizations need for beginning a foray into Social Media. They need baby steps and hand-holding, outlines, timetables, stepping stones and so forth.
Unfortunately, almost everyone out there who offers to help, does so by promoting outcomes that are to big, too complex and too daunting. One eats an elephant one bite at a time.
[...] by the way, here is a good read for starting social media up in your business from Trish Forant: Laying the Groundwork Trish works at Radian6 and she knows a few things about social media 0 Comments – Leave a [...]