Social Media best practices! Common sense but not commonly practiced
“Motivation Day 2K10″ (organized by California Staffing Professionals) started today with a keynote by Craig Silverman, Partner and Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Albin Engineering, which was indeed insightful and motivating. Among the many things that Craig shared with the audience were these questions which he encouraged everyone to reflect upon and answer:
- How do I rank my ability to ask good questions
- How do I rank my ability to listen
- How strong is my understanding of my clients businesses and how they buy
- How good is my ability to track metrics, progress, and results
- How strong is my ability to develop great relationships
There were additional reflections, but I just want to highlight these areas because I would like to suggest that these apply not only to our success with our motivation in pursuing business goals, and our effectiveness in dealing with customers, but just as well in our Social Media effort.
The Social Media experts continue to stress the important of listening to the conversation instead of simply broadcasting messages (Brian Solis) and staying on brand instead of entertaining everyone with our lunch or weekend plans (Jason Alba in his lunch & learn webinar with us last year) and Elaine Starling (in her lunch & learn webinar last Fall). So could we extract some simple but valuable Social Media best practices from these insights?
A few simple best practices for our Social Media conversations
Best Practice #1: Observing and listening before jumping in and/or hijacking the conversation.
Best Practice #2: Contributing with relevant and compelling content; not the chatter! or use the 80/20 rule. In this case 80% compelling, 20% chatter.
Best Practice #3: Tracking progress and results using metrics that are carefully defined
This is a start, and now your turn to add to this! Please share your comments below!
More resources
- Craig Silverman’s blog
- Brian Solis’ blog
- Old terminology, new terminology: “People connecting with other people”
- How to avoid being overwhelmed and consumed by social media?
