Which social media tools are appropriate (and easy) for newcomers?
I had a very interesting session working remotely (backstory on remote consulting) with Prosper Consulting and Simon Ibson, the MD.
He is quite new to social media as a business development tool and we discussed the places that I use to promote my blog as a means to help him navigate and research the possible places he could do the same with the new website which isn't quite ready… (Story of my life!)And so I started with the places that my professional profile is listed:
Facebook
Plaxo Pulse
Linked In
FriendFeed/RebeccaCaroe
Twitter
Facebook occupies a curious cross-border place in my toolkit because I principally use it for friends and family but there are some great groups I belong to hosted there which are clearly work not play. I favour the groups "London Girl Geek Dinners ", "BIMA British Interactive Media Association " and "What I saw at the Direct Marketing Revolution " as really active with new items posted regularly which really interest me.
Plaxo is a surrogate Friendfeed but has more professional contacts in there. I use Friendfeed to funnel stuff into my Alert Thingy stream which is a great way of posting to Twitter and it has a tinyurl plugin that really works!
And then there are aggregator sites where I can set up the RSS feed from this blog to send stuff over automatically. This is a fabulous service, if (and only if) the site has got itself a good audience and is well-managed.
UTalkMarketing
Marcom Professional
Marketing Services Talk
Ragan
Of these, MArcom Professional set up by Philip Sheldrake is my favourite. It has a better range of comment and is less 'managed'. I used to check in to Ragan a lot but it's very US oriented and mainly aimed at PR folk, which I'm not. Plus, I loathe the weekly email from Utalk but haven't managed to unsubscribe from it. Maybe I dream that one day they'll pick up one of my posts to print…
And so how should you work out the places that your profile (corporate or personal) should be online?
My suggestion is to start with Linked In because you really can't go wrong there. Take a look around the people you know on there and start an active campaign to connect to the ones you know. If you have the energy, also ask for recommendations for those you've worked for.
In order to find sites that may be helpful for you try this checklist
- Go to Technorati.com and use a key word search that describes what your company does
- Read the blogs it lists and sign up to read a few that seem a) prolific b) have good, informed commentary c) post regularly d) score highly on the Technorati Authority score
- Search Google or Yahoo for the same key word + 'blog' or 'news' (that'll filter out your competitors' websites)
- Repeat step 2 and find those who write well. Sign up to read…
As far as the others go, take a month to regularly read what's on them from people you know (ask someone to let you log in to their feed / pulse stream). You can also ask your trusted colleagues and clients which they use and / or know about. And make your own mind up.
Simon was curious about what copyright I chose to exercise on this blog. I told him that I publish it all under the Creative Commons license - detail on creative commons.
Simon recommended two books to me. Alan Weiss' "Million Dollar Consulting" and "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug
Prosper Consulting is a talent acquisition specialist that works hard on building long term relationships with client companies, delivers recruitment solutions and doesn't work on success fees. And so if you want to hire top talent and don't want to be spending percentages of their salary on the agency, check out Prosper Consulting .
