A neat way of promoting the whole skill base of your agency to interested parties.

20/20 Public Relations Team twitter group

And then having noticed one, we also saw this at the Optimizer HQ

Optimizer HQ twitter group for the team

How to create groups in Twitter

These articles cover off several businesses who offer this service:

• Mashable - How to Create Groups for Twitter
• Twitter Help – How to Use Twitter Lists
• Mashable – 30+ more ways to create groups on Twitter
• Josh Bartlett – How to cut the noise and create groups for friends [more about filtering than group lists]

Read more posts about Step 2 in our Business Development process “2- Marketing communication”

Here are our top 5 tips

1. Write a blog

in advance to say that you’re going and what you’re looking for e.g. researching new suppliers or getting price quotes to buy new equipment

2. When you write this blog make the title H1 header something people will search for in google in future.  This makes it really good SEO for your brand.  ”Seeking new sports equipment for our retail enterprise” or “Looking for document management software applications” or “Researching new web design agencies”
3. When you physically visit or arrive at the event.  Find the hashtag#, tweet that you arrived and are free to meet anyone. Check in on other social apps if you use them.
4. While browsing the trade show and you are there in front of each stand, take 2 minutes to tweet that you’re with XYZ co looking at their product ABC at the #showhashtag.
5. Ask folks on the trade stands what their twitter id is so you can personally follow and mention them as well.

In this way you’ll get traction from anyone else at the show who sees you using the show hashtag, the brands themselves wil pick up on your mention, and probably the show organizers too.  Many will RT your work and show off your twitter ID in association with their own.  And hopefully your advance mention will bring in some messages from businesses who want to trade with you or supply to you or use your company to supply them as well.

Go forth and conquer trade show twitter promotion.

Check out our other blog posts about Profile Raising for new business development.

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
• Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
• Alternatives to custom fields.
• Custom field usage.
  • Planning.
  • Collection.
  • Reporting.
  • Personalization.
  • Segmentation.
• Thinking outside the demographic box.
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

• If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
• If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
• If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
• If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
• If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It’s possible to do all of this without having this extra data – typically known as custom fields – but when you can’t target content to the right people at the right time then you’re losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we’re typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it’s easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it’s going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time’s worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient’s gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as “MA”, “Mass” or “Massachusetts”! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it’s perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

• Custom fields – Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
• Personalization – Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
• Segmentation – Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you’re ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

• What do you want to do with the extra data?
• Where is the data coming from?
• What about existing list members where you didn’t collect the data?
• Is all the data going to be required or optional?
• What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you’re running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don’t ask for it. Make a “Just For Dads” list instead.
You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you’re a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership – you can add their “Member since” or “Month Joined” data yourself. You don’t want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they’ll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner – data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you’re getting a lot of “tire-kickers” adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn’t there. There’s nothing worse than a mailing that starts “Dear Valued Customer” since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there’s no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you’re going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you’re going to have to sync the email database with your CRM’s data. That requires manual or automated import / export – more work.

For the old list, you’re going to have to ask them to add the data. You’ll need a link to your form from your provider and you’re going to have to send them to your readers. Since there’s no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they’re already on the list; they’ve done the hard part), don’t expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you’ve done your planning up front, this won’t be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don’t neglect reporting once you’ve set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just “Dear Jane” instead of “Dear jane@example.com” (although that’s good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber’s status.

Also understand that “content” isn’t just what’s in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.
There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes “safely”, clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you’ll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than “all readers” mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you’re using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don’t want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who’ve already paid full freight. And it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it’s both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics – broadly speaking: name, gender, location – are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I’ve talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you’ve gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you’re not getting the basics right – subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action – then you’re missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I’d recommend that you make sure you’re well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you’re spending it wisely.

A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the “Custom Fields” button in the left side bar. Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base – click here to start.

Next week we will have  Blog 15 – HTML Email Design Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

1. Become a force to be reckoned with.  AKA, get found.  Hopefully, you have a website and you can add a blog section to it.  If not, start a blog to develop a reader-base.  Start writing about your area of expertise, and get the word out that you know what you’re talking about.  The power of the internet lies in getting found.  If you create a reader-base first, your e-book is going to sell much better.  It’s all based on generating high quality content on your website, and helping people find you.  You can also start a newsletter to keep track of any followers.   Give them an incentive to join, by offering them special tips over time, or discounts on your products.
2. Get in on the conversation.  During your morning coffee, make it a habit to do a daily search on relevant content being published on other’s blogs.  Read what other people have to say and contribute to the conversation.  If you have something good to offer people will start searching for your name, and your own blog will come up.  This is not blatant marketing, mind you.  Don’t scrawl your blog site all over everyone else’s blogs in flashing letters—nobody likes that.  Simply contribute to other people’s conversations in the areas of your expertise, and traffic will come to you.
3. Tweet about it.  Number 2 flows right into number 3 here.  You already know who has good blogs out there and you’ve joined in on the conversations, now, share the gold!  Tweet about those great blogs you’ve found and show that you know what great content is, even if it isn’t your own.  The authors of these blogs will see that you’re linking to them, and then take a look at your blog.  If they see you know your stuff, they’ll link back to you too.  Do the same with Facebook, LinkedIn and any other relevant social media sites.
4. Listing the book. Selling your book through a variety of websites is key.  It’s this simple: the more hooks in the water, the easier it is to catch a fish.  Using sites such as Amazon, Fishpond and Barnes and Noble will open you up to a bigger audience.  It will also create links to a highly ranked website.  In addition you can sell directly from your own website (now that you have one!).
5. A discount for the loyal followers. By this time you have established a following that you are hopefully able to track, perhaps you have Facebook fans, Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, etc.   Just before your book is released offer your loyal followers a limited time ‘buy early’ discount, to get the ball rolling on sales.  This also encourages more people to become your fan, or subscribe to your newsletter, etc.  They get special offers from it, and honestly, who doesn’t love a discount.

Remember, like most things, persistence pays off… it may take weeks or months to get the audience and the traction that your book deserves, but keep going and little-and-often will definitely get you noticed.

We have 5 free E-books by Norman Evans to give away. Please contact us if you would like to be one of the lucky recipients!  This is actually true, so hurry and send us your details and see if you get to read ‘Becoming an Entrepreneur’ for free!

Now, get out there and market your e-book and let us know how it goes!

Image by imjustcreative via Flickr

Sometimes it’s nice to be on the receiving end of some in-bound agency marketing.  There’s a nice branding agency we have been following based in Birmingham, UK.  They sent us a little slide deck.

It had some background slides about the company and some case studies of client work.  All very nicely presented.

BUT

There was no apparent purpose to the communication.  The deck arrived with a nice covering letter but no call to action, no reason for the email except to say they had some ‘exciting news’.

So we launched in to a critique and sent them this email

That’s a very interesting slide show you’ve presented. Thanks for sharing it.

However, you really do sell yourself short in an email shot like this – what would a prospective client like myself think after reading it…… “Nice slideshow. What was the ‘exciting news’ anyway? What now? Back to my work.”

Using some direct response copywriting in the covering letter/email can you provoke me to deliver a response? For example – get an answer to questions like ‘what did Rebecca think?’ and ‘could they do this for my brand?’ Both questions that will help to narrow down your list of ‘suspects’ and take them one step closer to becoming prospects and then clients.

What about building on the campaign like this?

• Having a special website landing page just for people who got the email?
• Use the landing page to measure click throughs and get a poll / survey / comments / discussion going?
• Sharing the slides on slideshare / docstock so others can embed them and let them go viral
• Putting them up on your website for others to ‘like’ on Facebook / Twitter
• Asking for a meeting in the email text so you can show your credentials in more detail
• Asking questions about my brand so I can see if I ‘suffer’ from the same problems you solved for your clients

Anything but just sharing your slide deck…

So that’s just my two pennyworth suggestions for you – free of charge.
You can take them and put them into practice yourself.

This is an unsolicited approach offering you some free advice on how to improve your marketing. I just happen to be on your mailing list and so hope I’m trusted.

And they replied

Thanks so much for your thoughts.

This soft launch does indeed have a plan underpinning it, with more activities to come.

That said your passionate response is appreciated. We will keep you in mind for future activities!

What would you do in response to an unsolicited email?

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

Get reading – this is gold dust!

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

List Building for Bloggers

So you’ve started your blog. You’re on Facebook and perhaps even have a Twitter account. You’re rocking this whole social media thing; why on earth should you bother with email? It’s so, well, twentieth-century isn’t it? Isn’t email extinct, dead and gone?

Why bother offering email subscriptions at all?

Because you can’t afford not to.

Here’s why:

• Email subscriptions are WAY more popular than RSS.
• Email subscribers are your biggest fans.
• Email is everywhere.
• Email is accessible.
• Email is the most effective subscription mechanism available.
• Adding email subscriptions to your blog is fast and easy.
• Managing email subscriptions won’t take up your time.

You’ll grow your readership, build your community and monetize more effectively by combining your blog with email. It’s that simple.

Email Subscriptions are Very, VERY Popular

The facts are that email works: people want it. Email subscriptions – i.e. your newsletter or mailing list – are familiar to the vast majority of people online. They’re comfortable with the concept. When FeedBlitz partnered with FeedBurner back in 2005 to deliver their email services for them, email subscriptions were the #1 requested feature.

Moreover, the evidence shows that email subscriptions are significantly more popular than their most frequently cited social media equivalent, RSS feeds. (I’ll ignore for now the fact that most bloggers’ email subscriptions are ultimately powered by RSS; it isn’t important from the email subscriber’s perspective).

Need some data?

HubSpot ran a survey in 2009 and found that email subscription rates varied by audience, but could be as much as 12 times (not 12 percent, 12 times) more popular than RSS.

Darren Rowse, aka @ProBlogger, revealed at a session Blog World 2010 that ~75% of his subscribers were email-based; that’s 3 times the number of RSS subscribers.

Based on these data points, if you don’t offer email subscriptions you’re potentially missing three to ten times your potential subscriber base.

Your mileage will vary, but clearly the opportunities lost to connect are significant. Can you really afford not to grow your subscriber base that much with a simple step?

Put another way, if someone told you that you could boost your subscriber count four-fold or ten-fold with five minutes’ work, wouldn’t you leap at that opportunity? That’s what having email subscriptions in your blog can deliver over time.

Email Subscribers are your Biggest Fans

These days it’s work – it takes commitment – to subscribe to a properly run mailing list, what with CAPTCHAs and dual opt-in. The email subscribers on your list have made this commitment to you, and they are inviting you to barge right in and occupy their inbox (you need to do this respectfully, of course, but that’s for a later post in the List Building for Bloggers series).

Many people follow hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, Twitter accounts, and all those teeny-weeny, unbranded, untracked, undifferentiated, easy-to-miss messages fly by.

See too Jay Baer questions the current vogue of trumpeting the number of Facebook fans and compares the trend to email subscriber valuation:

“The psychology of Facebook “likers” is similar to email newsletter subscribers (I have enough kinship with this company to allow them to stay in touch with me). However, in comparison to your Facebook fans, your email subscribers usually provide far more important information to your business when they subscribe. It takes a lot more than one click to subscribe to an email list.”

Compare and contrast.

Your email to a subscriber is in their inbox, by invitation. Fully branded. Content rich. Tracked. Customized. Personalized. A Tweet? Not so much.

Your subscribers are your core audience.

They’re the foundation of your community. They advocate for you. Engage with you. Recommend and refer you. And email is the best mechanism for staying in touch – and for them to forward your messages too.

Email is Everywhere

You’re a blogger. You’re probably more tech savvy than many of your friends. Although you have already several email accounts (one from your ISP, cable or phone company, one from a free service like gmail or hotmail, one for your work, and one for your cell phone), you may prefer not to use email much of the time. That may be true of your blogging friends too as you all hang out online on Twitter.

So when you think subscribers, you may well think of RSS first. That’s fine; it’s natural to do so for you. But remember this:

You are not your audience.

Think about it. Your audience is probably less technically sophisticated than you are. They don’t know nor care what RSS is. They don’t want to download and install and learn yet another system just to get updates from your blog. And no, they don’t understand that little orange RSS icon in their browser and they don’t understand how to get to the browser’s integrated RSS reader to subscribe and track updates. It isn’t happening for them.

So, unless you are writing for a very tech savvy readership, your readers are not as likely to be comfortable with Twitter, RSS feeds or even Facebook. They don’t “get” it. That’s fine too – they’re not worse than you or me, just not as focused on new messaging technology. So stop trying to persuade them that they’re wrong (or, worse, stupid), and accommodate them.

Give them an email subscription option instead.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

1. SX Social website – the insiders registration site where you can create a profile, connect with friends and see what’s inside their freebie “Swag” bag.  Also SXSW Go which is a mobile app including a handy scheduling service.
2. Mobile Tweetdeck – you’ve gotta be able to track the conversation so set up a search on #sxsw now [better than in past years where you had to un-follow people who weren't at the congress in order to filter tweets].
3. Instagram – the photo sharing app that allows you to filter a ‘vintage’ look onto them.  Combine with Impression to watermark them with your URL and it’s a winner.

I am going to cheat and add another

1. Feedblitz allows your RSS feed to be sent by email – but also integrates Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and enables multiple feeds to be curated using the tags.  I’m going to create a #SXSW tag which will allow my followers who only want the updates from the interactive event to go to their emails.  Neat.

Image via Wikipedia

Devising appropriate ways to measure your social media campaign for new business development is key to proving that your work is delivering results.

Today we suggest some ways to measure the success of your work

1. The number of Followers on Twitter
2. The number of Fans on Facebook Fan Pages, Events
3. The number of tweets & RTs on Twitter
4. The number of Shares & Likes on Facebook
5. The ratio between Followers-Friends
6. The authority of the people that follow you
7. The authority of the people that share your content
8. The average quality of your previously shared messages
9. The number of unique mentions/shares (similar to Link Diversity)
10. The rate and the source of links that you share

Moreover search engines are expected to use Social Media buzz to determine:

How fresh a particular post is

If an page is still useful/valid/up-to-date

What are the current trends

Which terms are related to the particular post. They are likely to use the keywords and the hash tags that can be found in the content of the shared messages.

The theme or the topic of expertise of each author.  Users that tend to post high quality messages about a particular topic are likely to be considered as experts.  Bing already uses this feature by recommending users on Twitter.

I was reminded of this by a recent follow request from StrewIt.  I have no idea what the service is but if you “visit them and start Strewing!!!” apparently all will become clear.  Not.

Twitter biography

So much for them.

Well to take our own medicine, we created the Creative Agency Secrets Linked In company page.

Other places where  your personal and company information could be kept up to date:

• Facebook page
• Skype
• Delicious [topical right now]
• Website about page
• Industry specialist directories
• Techcrunch directory
• Industry magazine website listings

Why not add in a new calendar item for yourself every few months – to update your online profiles?  Set a reminder as a task or a diary date so you don’t forget.  Include in the task the list of sites to check and add in any new ones that have become important in the intervening period.

I was really pleased to read this post from Jeffrey L. Cohen in which he interviews Laurie Ruettimann, an HR Consultant and blogger, about how she would advise an organisation to use social media for recruitment.

If you don’t have time to hear the full 8 minute interview, here are the notes I took from it.

• The biggest single thing to do is to align HR with marketing and sales – your products and services brand should have the same messaging as the HR brand
• Internal social media is also important – have a look at the Sodexo careers – a hub to develop relationships.  It includes a neat job search desktop widget
• Outsourcing has crossed over with technology – Many companies outsource reference checking and use social media and telephone to speak to reference-givers.
• HR is ahead of accounting and finance, and ahead of some marketing and sales depts especially in managing relationships and candidate databases
• “‘Social recruiting’ – the new term for using social media in HR.
• Should I get social media skills?  Everyone benefits with higher skills.  US workers are bifurcating – knowledge class and working class.  Chasm between the two.

• More social media skills are needed in softer ways.  richer and deeper relationships and thoughtful understanding of the world with broader communication skills.  An organisation can then use you in different ways.
• Do companies need a social media director or community manager?  Some firms are hiring them.  It’s a position of luxury now – often they fall under marketing and sales and existing job titles.   The companies of the future are creating these roles and investing in them.

• TIPS:
  • Go on Google and understand what people see when they google you.
  • Grab your name on Twitter and you’ll be ahead of the game.
  • Companies are looking for competency and people who won’t cause law suits (!).

Social Media Changes in B2B HR and Recruiting from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.