Brands: Finding Your Online Voice

Choosing the right voice for your brand is a very important step in your brand identity and building your social media efforts.

I recently spoke at a conference to an audience of University employees who are responsible for recruitment, enrollment, and student engagement in student services. I was speaking about how universities can use social media sites to boost their recruitment and engagement efforts. I started the presentation asking how many universities, by show of hands, had a social media policy. I was honestly shocked to see that only approximately 10% of 58 major colleges and universities had a policy as 100% of them were on social media sites!  Without a policy that creates a plan on your use of social media websites and helps define your values, purpose & voice, these universities are showcasing multiple personalities online as many different functions/teams within the campus are using these sites with no overall alignment.

Universities (or companies) wanting to use social media sites, must first go through an exercise of defining your brand voice.  Think of a playwright, building a character, you must think through things like Persona, Tone, Language & Purpose.

Here is a great article on Social Media Explorer by Stephanie Schwab that walks you through building your voice through the above 4 characteristics:  http://bit.ly/gTsbTS 

I hope my thoughts & the above resource help. I always love sharing a great article/resource. Don’t forget that your online voice must be a work in progress & you should visit it often to make sure you are adhering to your plan and having a consistent voice across multiple online mediums (i.e.: Facebook, twitter, blogs etc)

Canadian University Uses of Social Media for Enrollment & Student Engagement

Universities and colleges are feeling the same pressure as companies in recruiting students & even further pressure to keep them engaged throughout a 4 year degree. It’s about targeting the RIGHT students & engaging them in student services to create a loyalty to the campus. I spoke at the SEMM conference last week put on by Brainstorm Consulting (Strategic Enrolment Marketing & Management) with an audience full of University & College enrolment directors, student service managers etc. It was a fantastic audience here in Toronto & I’m looking forward to presenting in Calgary on May 6^th in just a few weeks.  I spoke on the topic of using social media to recruit & create connections with students.  This blog post will be a 1 of 2 series as the below outlines what universities are currently doing in the social media space and post 2 will outline what they SHOULD be doing.

As this was a new topic for me (I typically speak on how to use social media for company student/new grad recruiting vs college recruitment/engagement), I spent a full day doing an audit of the 52 schools in attendance. I looked at the following things:

-     Did they have social media links on their home page (Were they “above the fold” – meaning, did I have to scroll down the page to find them?)

-     Where there social media links on the admissions page where prospective students can learn about university life on that campus?

-     Did the school use widgets to feature Twitter feeds, Facebook updates or YouTube videos?

-     Was the school present on social media sites (even if not listed on their website) in terms of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, did they have a Blog?

-     If present, what where they doing right & what were they doing not so right?

-     Did I get a sense of the uniqueness of this campus via their social media efforts?

This was truly a quick & dirty audit as I spent about 10 minutes per school to understand what they are doing in the social media space.  Here is a quick summary of my findings:

-     77% of the schools had social media links on their home page or admissions page

o   Note: Most of these links opened in the same window (losing the audience) versus opening in a new browser

-     Though most schools were on the main social media sites (Facebook, Twitter), not all were listed on their sites

-     Only 1 school was on Foursquare (a location based platform)

-     Most of the schools did not use widgets to showcase social media efforts & most links were “below the fold” meaning I had to scroll & look for them

o   Ie: Did not have a twitter feed or have videos with campus or dorm tours right in their website but instead I had to go into YouTube to see them (risk of losing your audience to YouTube recommended videos is very high!)

-     Over 90% of the messaging on social media sites was PR orientated, which is against the nature of these platforms

-     At the conference, I polled the room and though 100% of the attendee schools were on social media only 10% of the attendees actually had a social media policy (SCARY!)

So, what do universities need to do? Stay posted for my blog post on Wednesday with Tips & Tricks for how universities/colleges should be using social media for recruiting & engagement purposes.

Are you involved with your University or Campus Enrolment or Student Engagement? Join me at the SEMM Calgary May 6^th conference: http://www.semmforum.ca/home.htm

Handling Social Media Mishaps - the Good, Bad & the Ugly

A scary part of social media sites dominating communication channels today is that brands no longer have control over their products or the messages surrounding them. There are 2 fantastic examples of brand faux pas’s within social media recently - one the good and one the bad & very very ugly. @BPglobalPR is a twitter account mocking BP through very ‘official like’ messages. This handle has 177, 360 followers and is listed over 8,000 times meaning that the reach and WOM of this handle is out of control and yet BP has no control over the messages released by this handle. On the other hand, there’s the recent Red Cross Twitter faux pas, which is an excellent example of how a brand successful handled an ‘oops’ moment online.

Let’s talk about these examples and hopefully you will learn some things NOT to do with your brand online & then a few tips on what to DO when something goes wrong (which is bound to happen when this many people are talking about you online).

@BPglobalPR is a twitter handle created on May 19, 2010 mocking BP’s handling of the gulf oil crisis. In my opinion, it is the most professional case of newsjacking to date. BP tried to have the account shut down but twitter essentially quoted freedom of speech and took no action. As a result, the account turned up the mock factor by 10 as seen in this response. “BP wants Twitter to shut down a fake account mocking the oil company. Twitter wants BP to shut down the oil leak that’s ruining the ocean.”  BP had no control over its message and the ‘fake’ account soon had greater reach than BP’s official news releases. People were drawn to the satirical comments and the ‘real’ truths being shared mocking BP’s efforts versus the canned message BP was offering. It’s a pretty scary place for a company when a handle is set up on a social media site and you have absolutely no authority to shut it down or influence the message.

Let’s talk about a good example of a brand owning up to a mistake. Recently the @RedCross account mistakenly tweeted something that should have come from the tweeter’s personal account via a mishap on hootsuite. The tweet read:

Oops – not exactly the message you expect from a 130 year old humanitarian organization. What the American Red Cross did well was own the issue, apologize and move forward. The discussions across twitter no longer mocked the mistake but complimented the Red Cross for owning it.  The Red Cross responded on their website with: “We realized our honest mistake (the Tweeter was not drunk) and deleted the above Tweet. We all know that it’s impossible to really delete a tweet like this, so we acknowledged our mistake:”

They turned this blooper into a powerful social media moment showcasing that the organization is run by “real” people. The twitterverse’s respect only increased for the organization. If only more companies were like the Red Cross and confident to show their human side and have a little laugh at their expense.

Ensure you don’t wait for messages about your brand to go through a thousand and one PR official channels; remember you have to be timely in using social media as if you aren’t someone else will!

Red Cross Twitter Faux Pas: http://bit.ly/dIW65p

@BPglobalPR on Twitter: http://bit.ly/i7tmna

Read more about BP asking twitter to shut down the “fake” BPglobalPR account: http://aol.it/cCDqf3

Interesting article about the man claiming to be behind the @BPglobalPR handle and his motives: http://bit.ly/9HmQot

Personal Social Media Policy

You have heard me talk about how using social media to build a brand – be it a product, employment brand or personal brand - is important. I often speak at conferences that companies are absolutely behind the times if they don’t have a social media policy as they current have no control over what’s happening online and believe me, it is happening!  As an active social media user, I wanted to take the time to review my vision & what my goals are online. I Googled social media policies and used a whole bunch of template to create one that is just all me. I’m not going to give all of my secrets away but will give you a sneak peek!

VISION: My Vision is to use social media to learn online & build my professional expertise through the following values:

-          Knowledge – educational and well thought out information sharing and learning

-          Passion – sharing my personal passion for marketing, talent acquisition, onboarding and employment branding with others

-          Consistency – have a consistent message throughout social mediums

-          Transparency – be transparent and open about my message and my goals

-          Relevant – posting relevant information that others in my space will find interesting

-          Timely – time is relevant to building my following and I need to provide posts that are timely and relevant

-          Integrity – be true to myself through the use of social media & my posts

In my Social Media Policy, I then go on to outline what are my goals, target audience, boundaries & use of each forum (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc).

Do you have a personal policy? Do you make it up on the fly or do you actually have it written down? If you don’t have one, I recommend taking 30 minutes to at least review the social mediums you are using and decide what are your personal boundaries and uses on each.  Good luck! Let me know how it goes!

Are you a Split Personality Online? Branding Consistency

I just finished reading a fantastic article about personal branding on Social Media Today. It, along with Mashable, are such great avenues for quick 5 minute read articles to get you thinking and seeing the trends out there in the social media space. It got me thinking, what's important in using multiple mediums for branding?

As I work on expressing my personal brand, I sat down to figure out what is my purpose and what success looks like (sometimes I am so hardwired 'marketing' it is scary!). Is it professional speaking engagements? Followers on twitter? Blog followers? Networking opportunities & reach outs? LinkedIn connections?

YES to all of the above BUT I challenged myself to also have some qualitative measurements – the “feel goods” that are such a part of working on yourself as a professional. For me this means being consistent in building my name as an expert in my chosen fields by being transparent, relevant and timely.

Sounds like a bit of a vision statement doesn’t it? I actually sat down a few months ago, as geeky as this is, and wrote out my personal social media strategy. I preach at conferences that if companies don't have a go-to-market strategy with social media they aren't using the most of the medium and have no control over a very important space. I thought I better walk my talk; so, I created my policy. This policy needs to be a living breathing document so it evolves as I evolve. This policy can't just be a piece of paper, filed away on my computer, but should actually be top of mind when I use these spaces so I am being true to the voice I seek to have.

Great quote today from SocialMediaToday in, "In a marketing sense, your personality is your brand and the different social media you employ, regardless of the combination you use them in, should always reflect your brand." - Tia Peterson

Thus, be it a personal brand, an employment brand, or a marketing social media strategy, take the time to sit down & develop a vision listing each of the mediums out there & how you choose to use them. Remember that the biggest connection between all of them is being authentic, transparent & relevant to your audience. Don’t be a split personality online! Are you?

Reference: http://bit.ly/8ZAuLc