It all has to do with rocking, the rocking you create, share and learn. So, here are some of my ideas to rock your company or brand in the Social Web:
Rocking Social Media
- Objectives: if you don’t know where you want to go before you get started, you’re better off staying where you are.
- Don’t run: you will fail. Your family, your boss, your colleagues, even I, know it. Fail fast, and learn what works and what doesn’t faster still.
- Take a run-up: jot things down, work hard, don’t settle with what you’re doing. In social media you can always do more than what you’re doing. Vertigo? No, it’s a springboard!
- Excellence in excellence: take care of every detail in your online presence: design, profile pictures, banners, bio, descriptions, titles, spelling mistakes, punctuation marks, permanent beta, elaborate communications, fast and efficient answers, taking a real interest for your people and, always, going a little bit further.
- Listen without talking: listen to the conversations that go on in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn updates, blogs, and forums. Show up, contribute and add to the conversation but don’t just show up and start a preaching discourse, you’ll be ignored!
- Share even yourself: don’t speak of yourself only, we can all do that. Share whatever you think is valuable and adds to the change. Do it often and see how you start connecting with opportunities and people. The more you share, the “luckier” you’ll be. Here’s an example: Eva Collado.
- Create change: I’m sure you have something to say to the world. When that happens, you create change. Start a blog, create a hashtag, a LinkedIn group, a Pinterest board or a blog/email in Posterous and shed some light. We’re expecting it.
- Human is sexy: when we speak of love affairs, “opposites attract” is tantamount to saying “even if I’m not interested in what you do, we could get into bed together and see what happens.” We’re looking for people like us. Therefore, we’re looking for brands and companies like us: human, a kindred spirit, in line with us and with whom we share an interest. This is no different. Brands are increasingly human because they give off emotions, feelings, warmth. They resonate. They are increasingly human because they connect with us in different ways; they listen to us, hold conversations with us and care about us. That’s quite sexy!
- Speak the same language: speak in a close, familiar and friendly way with those with whom you interact.
- Always answer: maybe you’ve got enough on your plate or you’re “busy” like we all like to say, but unless you’re Lady Gaga, David Guetta or Justin Bieber, answer, we arrived at your doorstep, don’t let us down now!
- Do something: you thought you were going to get off scot-free? Get out there and do something: contests, promotions, offers, cross campaigns with your partners/sponsors, set a calendar for publications, landing pages to measure traffic, creative campaigns to measure your reach and participation, communicating with your community one to one, open days for your fans/followers/readers or product trial to get some feedback. Anything, but do something: that is the driving force behind creating value.
- Social CRM rocks: you can create one without having software costing 10,000€. You can start with the information you gather from your clients when you follow and monitor them, or the information you collect when you interact with them. You can bring together all this information in a spreadsheet used as a database and classify and handle it in cells with fields regarding your clients.
- Analytics are hot: of course they are! Everyone is doing the same: publishing, sharing photos, answering and, in the best of cases, observing how the number of followers/connections/contacts/readers/fans grows, as well as embedding links and videos. So, when the analytics with results arrive, with variables and ways to get where we want to go, then yes, we get crazy hot!
The key to being brilliant is, in fact, being brilliant, not pretending to be.
Rock on.