Thoughts on public relations, social media, marketing
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Business Link is offering two hour workshops across Yorkshire on the subject of Online Social Networks – Reaching out to New Customers.
The workshops are free to attend and equip delegates with the knowledge to begin attracting new customers through social networking.
Topics include:
For more information, visit Business Link and search for “Reaching out to new customers”.
Fresh Business Thinking is holding a Hit Me! Social Media and Search event on 30th March 2010 at Microsoft’s London Office.
The event’s seminars will cover:
Guest speakers will include ‘Twitter expert’ Mark Shaw and Realwire CEO Adam Parker.
Tickets for the event start from £145 + VAT, and the event runs from 9.30am – 5.30pm.
For more information, visit the Hit Me! Social Media and Search booking page.
This is guest post from Rob Hanson, a web developer based in Grimsby. Rob is also involved in GeekUp, “a community of web designers, web developers, and other tech-minded folk from the UK”.
With the abundance of social networking web sites and ways to access them, using social media is becoming ever easier. These are not just social and promotional tools, they can also be very useful tools for improving your knowledge base in whatever area you choose.
Take Twitter for instance. I use Twitter a lot, and not purely from a social angle either.
“Aaah, Twitter. Isn’t that just for seeing what celebrities had for breakfast?”
Yes, it can be, if that is all you want from it.
One of my biggest uses for networking these days is to increase my knowledge on a specific subject. I’m involved in producing websites for small to medium enterprises, and I follow a number of web designers, web developers and graphic designers on Twitter.
I follow them not just for their more mundane tweets – although they can be fun too – but for the information they freely impart to their followers. This might relate to how they solved a coding problem, an idea they had for something new, something that inspired them…You get the idea.
“Ok, so I’m signed up with Twitter & dozens of other social networking sites. Can I stop all this ‘real life’ networking now?”
Actually, no. Not if you want to make the best of your connections. Online social media is great to a point, but there’s really no substitute for face-to-face interaction. Don’t get me wrong, the online networks are a great way to broaden your ‘friend base’, but I still reckon I get way more from an hour having a coffee with someone than two hours online.
“Now I’m confused. So I don’t actually need to bother with Twitter & the other sites at all?”
It’s simple really: online and offline work brilliantly when used together.
Here’s an example: I recently decided to improve my knowledge of CSS & HTML (they’re programming languages for those not in the know), and a trawl through Twitter produced a number of people tweeting information & links on those very subjects.
Chatting with them online has led me to meet some people local to me who can benefit from my knowledge and who can in turn help me improve my knowledge in just the areas I wanted – all without hours spent poring over Google Results and clicking through to countless websites that wouldn’t be quite what I wanted.
A quick way to meet like minded folks is to use one of the online methods such as Twitter to set up a meeting at a local pub or coffee house (if organised through Twitter, they are often called ‘tweetups’).
If you’re not keen on the idea of instigating such an event yourself, a couple of great resources to help you find relevant events in your area are Twitter Search (use this facility to search for relevant keywords along with mentions of towns local to you) and Upcoming (a user generated directory of local events).
Pretty much all other social networking sites come with some kind of search facility or events section, but if you’re struggling just send out a post asking about future events.
I guess my main message is: go do it! All of the ways I’ve mentioned can help you improve your level of knowledge on a subject of interest to you, not to mention broaden your horizons too…and it’s fun. So, give it a try – you may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
This post is part of a week-long series of guest posts on the topic of real world networking. Read all about it here: Online networking is booming, so why network in the real world?
Lots of men and women in business don’t network in person anymore. Some even consider it a waste of time.
If you’re of that mind, you may have instead opted to stay in the office and get yourself a swish website and sign up to LinkedIn. You may well have cottoned on to the rising importance of social media and created a presence on Twitter, Facebook and relevant internet forums. And to get your name out there, you may be using telemarketing, mailshots or email campaigns. You’re getting ‘out there’ from the comfort of your desk, so why bother taking time out to circulate in person with perfect strangers?
Well, here’s my take on things…
I love online social networking. It has expanded my knowledge base, brought new friends and new business my way, and been instrumental in raising my profile and that of my business. Similarly, I’m all for basing communications with potential and established clients online. It saves time, saves fuel, and it’s good for the environment.
But, I also strongly believe that face-to-face meetings are vital. Perhaps you’re happy to source all of your suppliers via the internet, but lots of buyers want to meet a real person in order to get a sense of who they’ll be dealing with before they part with their hard earned cash or sign on the dotted line.
It’s as simple as this: we buy from people we trust, and sometimes it’s a lot easier to win trust in person over a coffee than when relying on written/telephone communications alone. Not only that, there’s the potential to make a whole different set of creative and social connections in the real world – not everyone is online.
Networking in person works, and I’ve been thinking lately about the best way to communicate that fact and illustrate how best to make it work for you, whatever your personality or business.
Rather than writing a long post extolling the virtues of networking, I’ve asked four people whose opinions I value and respect to supply guest posts for the remainder of this week. Each will look at networking from a slightly different perspective and hopefully make you want to give face-to-face networking a go.
The first post will appear here tomorrow morning, 9am. See you then.
The week of guest posts on real world networking was a great success, thanks to all who contributed and all who shared. Here’s the list in full:
If you haven’t caught on to the social media buzz yet, the Mashable Open Web Awards 2009 are now open for entries.
Launched in 2007, the awards give recognition to major triumphs in internet technology and the best players in the world of social media. Nominations are made via Twitter or Facebook Connect, and a winner is selected by vote from the top five nominees.
The Mashable Open Web Awards 2009 have dozens of individual awards available, organised across six categories:
Brand/Startup/Company/Agency
Facebook Specific
Media
Mobile
People
Twitter Specific
Nominations close at midnight on 15th November 2009. The top five nominees in each category will move forward to a voting round (18th November until 13th December 2009), with the winners announced on 15th December.
For more information, visit the Mashable Open Web Awards 2009
Following in the footsteps of Twitter users such as @dannybrown, @nikkipilkington and the like, I’m moving my #followfriday recommendations over to my blog.
This week, I’m recommending @prsarahevans and @MarketingDonut.
Sarah’s blog is a very useful resource for those interested in communications and social media, with lots of advice and commentary to get you thinking and acting. Sarah is also involved in a number of projects that are a must see for anyone trying to establish their brand through social media (see namechk.com and MediaOnTwitter).
@MarketingDonut is the Twitter persona of marketing resource website, The Marketing Donut. It’s packed full of marketing advice, aimed specifically at small businesses and broken down into bite-sized chunks of under 300 words. Undeniably useful stuff.
That’s it. More next week.
Update: Twitter now offers its own marketing and customer service ‘how-to’ guide for businesses. It takes you through the basics, including key Twitter lingo, and offers tips on best practice. There are also case studies so you can learn how some big brands have leveraged the power of Twitter. Check out the Twitter101 guide for more information.
I came to Twitter comparatively late because I’ve never been a huge fan of social media. Actually, that’s not quite true. For some years I’ve been a big fan of topic oriented online forums, or blogs that welcome comments that turn into conversations, but I’ve never entirely clicked with the likes of MySpace. Why? Because I’m not big on socialising without a common theme or purpose.
So what’s different about Twitter? Well first and foremost it performs a function for me that isn’t quite what I would have called social media a few months ago. For me, it works like an aggregated new service, keeping me abreast of news and commentary from all the people – and only the people – I choose to hear from. You know how you find a great blog, hit the FeedBurner email button, receive the emails about new posts, file them, and then never have time to read them? Well Twitter works better for me. It puts all the headlines in one place, with the option to read more when I have time. And the content stream is much more approachable than with a feed reader like Google Reader because it’s all kept below the magic 140 characters.
The people I follow are mostly people relevant to my work. So, first up there are the publications relevant to my industry. That’s PR and media publications such as @prweekuknews, @FTmedianews and @mediaguardian, and SME publications like @growingbusiness, @BusinessZone and @LaunchLab. Then there are the industry commentators whose comments and blogs prove an invaluable resource for keeping on the forefront on what’s happening in PR and social media. These include @briansolis, @dbreakenridge and @Octane. Then there are the people whose tweets are simply a pleasure to read, such as @stephenfry, @glinner, @mikebreed, and so on, and so on (and so on…).
And finally there are people I know: friends, family, colleagues. But, unlike my experience of other social media such as Facebook or MySpace, they form the minority. Why? Because to me, Twitter really does seem to offer a valid platform for linking with people I don’t already know. It’s not a case of, “be my friend because I want to hit the 2,000 friends mark by April”, it’s more a case of (for me at least), “I’m interested in keeping track of the information you put out and if you want, and only if you want, you can follow what I’m doing too.” And of course, if there’s a real reason to converse, then networking happens naturally. Genius.
Yes, Twitter has a way to go before it proves it can survive long term, but with apps like FriendFilter looking to improve how connections are made by displaying additional information about followers, I think Twitter’s future continues to look promising. Let’s just hope the search for the holy grail that is monetisation doesn’t dilute the product and bring it to its knees like we’ve all seen happen in the past.
Emily Leary is a comms consultant and blogger. With over a decade of experience in PR and digital marketing, … [Read More...]
