The Social Media Advantage. Holly Berkley

on sensitive projects. It allows you to see negative comments coming before the conversations gain leverage in front of major media channels on the bigger social networks.

      In addition to helping you discover new places your company should engage, setting up a Google Alert with your own company name as the keyword allows you to be notified anytime anyone online is talking about your company. Being able to listen in to what audiences are saying about you and having a chance to respond is what gives social media such powerful reach. If you are simply using social media to post press releases and company announcements you are missing the point of social networking. Monitoring the online responses to these press releases and announcements is the real power of social media.

      As you dive deeper into social media, you will want to use more advanced social monitoring tools. Companies like Lithium Technologies (ScoutLabs.com) and Radian 6 (http://www.radian6.com) allow you to track and engage with anyone who is mentioning your company on the social web. Using either of these website tools, simply type in your company name or a product name and see what people on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, websites or news articles are saying about your company and products. Almost anything that is mentioned on the social web will pop up using these listening tools. These social monitoring tools go deeper than Google Alerts as you can actually click on the post from the application and respond to the online discussion in one step.

      Social media monitoring tools can also be valuable at helping you monitor your competition. For example, while consulting for Verizon, we used the Scout Labs dashboard (now a part of Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring) to compare online sentiment for AT&T to Verizon. Within seconds, a graph showed that Verizon has more mentions and more positive overall sentiment on the social web than AT&T.

      The social web is essentially the world’s biggest focus group allowing you true insight into what your customers are saying. Additionally and better than the focus group, the social web gives you the real-time ability to respond and add to this discussion. You don’t have to be a major company like Verizon to generate an overwhelming amount of social comments from customers that need responses from your company. Perhaps you are just in the midst of a heated online debate about a new project, which is developing hundreds of posts you’ll need to monitor. Fortunately, applications like Lithium’s Social Media Monitoring not only show you every place your company name is mentioned, but conveniently sorts posts in order of priority, so you can know which posts are most important to respond to. The program determines priorities based on several critical factors, such as how much traffic the web site gets, Google rank, how many people are actively reacting/responding to the post and perhaps most importantly, the online influence of the person who made the comment.

      Understanding Key Influencers Within Your Target Audience Group

      Determining the identity of key influencers within your online social networking circles can be critical to your goals – especially if you tend to carry controversy around specific projects or individuals within your company. How the key influencer in a social circle regards your company can make or break your mission. When this influencer loves your company or project, you can sit back and watch the positive energy flow, but get on their bad side, and you may be confronted with a PR nightmare.

      No matter the size, every online community has its loudest voices. And these voices make up only 1% of the total community. But they are a powerful 1%. This select group is essentially the “creator.” They are the ones who start conversations and keep the discussions alive over the course of several days or weeks. The creators have a huge influence on the attitudes and energy of the social group.

      Figure 2.3

      It may appear that a social network is not active or that no one is listening due to the small percentage of participants actually creating content. As shown in figure 2.3, 10% of a community is what is known as “editors.” These members will post and contribute to conversations started by the “creators.” They are the ones who will simply “like*” something on Facebook, or contribute a “me too” type blog comment.

      So what are the remaining 89% of the members doing? Listening.

      Even though you may think no one is paying attention to your posts and comments, they are. Social media provides a voyeuristic view of what’s happening in your community. For the same reason reality television took off, social media offers a chance for people to listen in, see your ideas and hear what’s going on in a fairly anonymous way.

      Finding New Employees On Linkedin

      LinkedIn provides an ideal way for you to find new employees, vendors and even open yourself up to new customers and projects. In today’s online world, more and more people in charge of hiring look to recommendations on LinkedIn before anything else. Of our survey of business professionals, 73% are actively using LinkedIn, and more than half are using it to recruit and to connect with vendors, partners or subconsultants.

      “I put a lot of weight on referrals received via Twitter and LinkedIn,” admits Amy Good, vice president of finance/business manager of Lancaster County Timber Frames of Lititz, Pennsylvania. She uses LinkedIn frequently in her company’s search for employees, partners or vendors.

      Making sure your personal LinkedIn profile is complete, up-to-date and you have quality reviews is a great way to help your profile show up in LinkedIn’s professional searches, which helps your target audiences find you.

      The primary benefit of LinkedIn is the ability to connect with other people in your industry and for the opportunity to get introduced to their connections, thereby expanding your network of quality business contacts very quickly. Once your profile is up-to-date, LinkedIn will help you easily find your connections by content pulled from your profile, such as past employers and the schools you attended.

      But adding a profile and connecting with others in your industry is only a minor part of LinkedIn. There is an extremely targeted, active question and answer community happening behind the scenes in the LinkedIn social network. Not engaging in these discussions is like showing up at a networking event and not talking to anyone, but just signing in at the registration table and maybe dropping a business card in the fish bowl in hopes someone might notice you and give you a call, but not attending any break-out sessions or social hours. You are a LinkedIn wallflower if you are passing up the opportunity to chime in on these discussions.

      Only 20% of our survey respondents are using LinkedIn to demonstrate thought leadership or advance the intellectual brand of their company. Depending on your profession, there are likely plenty of active LinkedIn groups dedicated to your specific industry, that could use more expert voices. There is a search function at the top of your LinkedIn page where you can input keywords relevant to your work or research which professional organizations, groups or magazines the other key players in your industry belong to. Join as many as you can realistically keep up with. You’ll quickly find that these resources can provide an excellent way to show off your expertise to the right potential client or partner who is looking for your skills.

      Most LinkedIn groups are created with a particular audience in mind. Often, the administrators will only approve new members that fit this demographic.

      Can’t find an existing LinkedIn group that meets your goals? Start a new one. In Chapter 8, we’ll provide tips on how to build and nurture a social media community.

      Reaching Your Goals With Twitter

      By 2013, nearly 28 million Americans will be tweeting. (emarketer.com, February 2011). Many business professionals say Twitter is a great way to monitor what competitors and thought leaders are doing, stay informed of recent articles and blog posts relating to a subject of interest and get the inside scoop on what stories the media is researching.

      Twitter users follow* people, organizations and companies of interest to receive real-time communications from these companies. Another way of using Twitter is to search for a keyword or phrase to