Strategic Public Relations

Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips

Logging into Twitter over the last few days, users are being prompted to update their profiles. According to the AP,

Twitter is encouraging people to allow their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to be included in the service's search index.

Let’s be honest, this is more of a Twitter acquisition strategy than a Twitter service improvement. The more information Twitter has about its users, the more it can charge advertisers. Twitter may push out 50 million tweets every day, but after four years in business the blue birdie needs to make some bank.

Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips
We should still take advantage of the profile prompting. In fact, as spring promises to arrive sooner than later, we should do a sweep of all our social media profiles. Several of these tips were created with Twitter in mind, but I think that most can apply roughly to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and even social media platforms like Foursquare to a degree.

A | B | C
 As much as I love that Glengarry Glen Ross scene, this does not represent always be closing. A, B, C stands for Avatar, Bio and Content/Conversation/Commercial.

• Avatar: Use one! And preferably the avatar is a picture of you. I break this rule. Often. But the point is it reminds everyone that there is a real live person at the end of every tweet you send.
• Bio: Twitter is reminding everyone to fill out their profile because in part not enough people have filled out their information. And if you look at the picture below, my first instinct is to NOT follow this person. No picture + no bio info + no tweets = no context and no real reason to follow them.

• Content/Conversation/Commercial: This is also called the law of thirds. If you focus too much on just pushing out links to stuff or just on having conversations or only shamelessly self-promoting yourself, you won’t appeal to many potential friends/followers/contacts. A mix of all three is a well-received variety.

Don’t fret about getting it literally into thirds. But this is a helpful guide to keep your content streams as useful as possible.

Register Your Name
OK, this is a very niche tip and may only apply to Twitter. But if you go by handles like crazylegs25 or, uh, prblog, it pays to include your full name in your profile and/or register your full name account so people can find you. I use @kevindugan to do nothing other than push people to my @prblog account.

Better yet? Don’t even start down this schizo-branding road. Be yourself from day one. Trust me on this. As the line between personal and professional continues to blur online, it doesn’t make much sense anymore. In my defense, I started down this road eight years ago.

Profile Consistency
You may want to use every pose you paid for at Glamour Shots, but using one or two pics across profiles consistently helps people to recognize you. If you have a few specific interests or skills, be sure to use the same keywords across every profile. This makes it easier for like-minded people to find you in relevant searches. And by pushing each profile’s email alerts to one account you can be more organized and potentially more responsive when new friends find you.

Register at Directories, Create Lists
It really can be tough to find people on Twitter, hopefully their profile update prompt helps this in the long run. But for open-API social media sites, there are usually a few directories where you can register to be more easily found by like-minded folk. Sites like TweepML and Listorious also make it easy to create your own lists. I owe a ton of my followers from being included on lists.

Your social media profiles are the first moment of truth many will have with you/your personal brand. Profiles have to do a lot of work and you’re not around to provide context. Are your profiles doing you justice?

“Can I Pick your Brain?”

Disclaimer: This is a very specific RANT.

Hopefully it goes without saying that I love sharing my experiences, opinion and POV in the hopes it will help people. It's why I have two blogs, speak frequently and tweet.

But when I receive a voicemail or an email from someone asking to “pick my brain” it’s a fire-engine red flag.

Sending someone a note asking to pick their brain is the equivalent of saying you want them to work for free. Think about it. There's a difference from using other’s experiences and POVs to answer your questions and guide your efforts. Asking someone to essentially do your job is a bit different.

While having lunch with friend and colleague Mike Boehmer, we were trading experiences. Mike is using social media to help his stakeholders at the Hamilton County Job and Family Services. He also helps out the Cincinnati Chapter of PRSA as their social media committee chair.

Mike confessed that he started blogging to help decrease the amount of phone calls he receives from well-intended colleagues about social media. Everyone wins in that situation. In fact, Chris Brogan started blogging answers to questions he was asked so more people could benefit from the answer -- everyone wins.

When Mike told me he also gets requests to pick his brain, I realized it wasn’t just me.

So keep in mind that sharing is required for a network to, uh, work. Sharing is a two-way street and there’s a fine line between getting help and essentially outsourcing. /rant

Tribute To Guitarist Pat Martino - Scan 03 07 uploaded by Mikey G

Chat Roulette: The Element of Surprise & Discovery

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Twitter has me surfing a lot. And I like to share what I find. Here's a great video about a site called Chat Roulette. I'll let Casey explain Chat Roulette. It's a great video that somehow seems to channel Common Craft and Woody Allen. Strong work.

Surprise & Discovery
IMHO, sites like Chat Roulette tap into our curiosity. But consider geolocation sites like Foursquare and "Website Roulette" via Stumbleupon. There is an element of spinning the wheel and you might be surprised by what you find...checking in for the first time at a cafe on Foursquare and finding out a long lost friend is the mayor for example.

That element of discovery grabs you and can hardwire that site into your regular surfing habits. Sites like Chat Roulette, Stumbleupon and Foursquare are very specific examples...their functionality drives the surprise and discovery. But as you construct your social media efforts; do they include the concept of surprise and discovery?

Overthink, Overthank, Overthunk 
You're already overthinking this, I can tell. All this requires is: monitoring, response and personality.

• Monitoring: Watching the conversation about your brand. It's taking place whether or not you're watching, much less participating.
• Responding: You need to have a process internally on who handles various comments...if at all. And as Mashable notes, you need to respond quickly, even before you may know the right answer to the question.
• Personality: A good friend is in the process of moving. She took a spill while loading a U-Haul and tweeted about it. She received a tweet from U-Haul asking if she was ok. You could argue U-Haul was covering their butt after my friend fell on hers. But she was not on Twitter complaining. She did not want reparations from U-Haul. And she was genuinely impressed when they checked in on her. So impressed she told me and here I am telling you. 

Brands can surprise their customers in small ways like this that make a world of impact. And it fuels ongoing online discovery in the process.

What Elvis Taught Us about Social Media | The King's Top Three Tips

One of the highlights of my college years is my road trip to Graceland. In hindsight, climbing into a car with two friends and driving round trip from Cincinnati to Memphis in about 48 hours is less than appealing. But the Elvis experience is still fresh in my mind for other reasons. In fact, Elvis’ life can teach us at least four things about social media.

“A little less conversation, a little more action”
One of social media’s unique abilities is how quickly it can be used to organize people into taking action. Elvis song reminds us that while counting things like re-tweets, Facebook fans and blog traffic can help show progress towards a goal – successful social media efforts start with a business goal in mind. This goal will drive what metrics are tracked. This ensures that ROI can be analyzed.

Live and In Person: The Ultimate Goal
Graceland docents relaying stories during the tour help detail how down to earth Elvis could be. Without visiting Graceland and seeing this in person, I’d never know this. The ultimate goal of social media is to facilitate in-person communication. Brands get so used to having a minimum of one-way glass between them and customers, they can forget that social media is a circuit. That circuit is completed by meeting customers at in-store tweet ups or other special events. It also fuels more conversation and content creation online. Consider that a Flickr search for Graceland finds nearly 87,000 pictures as just one example.

Burnin’ Love
While this classic Elvis tune refers to his love for a woman consuming him, it reminds us that you need passion to fuel your social media efforts. If your social media team simply views it as another job to do or your agency considers it an add-on service to keep clients and realize new revenue, it will show in the results. Social media requires participation. Anyone at their social media site of choice can tell who’s genuine and who’s rehearsed.

Elvis and social media do mix. But unfortunately, despite considerable mental effort, I was unable to attach a tip here that would allow me to discuss my favorite Elvis cuisine – the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Well, maybe I could point to mash-ups, but I’ll save that for another post.

ELVIS PRESLEY'S GRACELAND uploaded by craigis007.
Cross-posted to my work blog, Social Study.