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Follow Friday Facebook Pages

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OK, don’t shoot me for mixing up a Twitter tradition with Facebook. We on Twitter typically use the #FollowFriday to send a shout out to specials in our stream. To be honest, my head is loaded with too much to hone in on a blog topic for today, so I took a cruise through Facebook (where I’ve had messages since December) to troll some small-business Facebook pages.

These are the ones I recommend for a “Follow Friday:”

  • New England Multimedia — Michelle Quillin begins each day with a question d’jour, and it varies topically and is always interesting. I believe she’s killing several birds by engaging her members, earning likes, and finding blog fodder for her equally interesting blog. I commend Michelle for how she strives to keep members interested with issues oriented to health insurance, employment issues, social media, video production, and so much more for small businesses and clients.
  • Terracom PR is a Facebook page by my colleague Christine Esposito.  She engages on all things green. As a public relations practitioner I’ve known since my Publicity Club of Chicago days, Christine impresses me with her expertise in sustainable marketing. Her posts are nothing but high-end expertise on a range of environmental, ecosystem, and other green topics, and she highlights them with informed statistics to back up her musings.
  • The Eye Site is a Singapore (what else?) spectacle retailer. This page does a great job of mixing it up so the posts are not too salesy yet  engaging with customers. It’s worth joining to see how Desiree Koh seems to mesh food with eye glass retailing, and it works! The pages are deep with videos and 29 (!) photo albums available, too.
  • The Meatloaf Bakery in Chicago  produces authentic, creative meatloaf meals as a cupcake. This FB page shows this small business has the right frontline team doing its national media relations, social media, and location-based marketing. The posts are a healthy mix of what’s on the weekly menu; hits in national, regional and local media; as well as Groupon promotions. I’m impressed with how this page has come alive; now I need to get there and sample the goodies for real! Congrats, Cynthia!
  • GJEL Accident Attorneys is a page for which I influence content every now and again (it is my client in the name of full disclosure). Why I deemed it an important addition to this list is due to its resourceful and educational content. This small law firm in northern California orients its Facebook content to safety issues pertaining to all ages of motorist (see the section devoted to parents), teen drivers, vehicle safety and a breadth of other information including links to the firm’s blog posts. As law firm sites go, this one is worth considering because its content is fully educational with downloads everyone can benefit from i.e. its On-The-Scene Accident Checklist.

Those are my picks; can you add any of your favorites we should check out?

Change Twitter Habits to Spiff a Boring Stream

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Credit: scienceblogs.com

You can’t get complacent with Twitter. You may not know you’ve done so, and here’s a few suggested pulse points:

  • Do you only follow the same tweeps each day and respond to them and no one else?
  • When was the last time you opened a new link to a new tweep’s blog and engaged?
  • Are typically the same people replying to your tweets and RTs?

It’s easy to get comfortable on Twitter, reading the same blogs and getting more acquainted with the same gaggle of folk. We’re human after all; not many people like to step out of their comfort zone, but I’m encouraging you to reflect on your Twitter habits and spiff up a boring stream.

The dawn of a new year is a perfect time to ask the following questions:

  • Am I merely engaging with peers in my own profession?
  • Am I learning another vertical?
  • Has someone ticked you off with their behavior on Twitter?
  • What are you gaining from your Twitter experience?

When you explore your original objectives about Twitter engagement (and you fast learn it’s much more than “hi, I’m going on a hot date tonight,”) then ask and answer the aforementioned questions.

Peers in Your Space

Professionals in your space are most likely to support your commentary. I love Davina Brewer @3hatscomm for her always banter around my public relations opinions. We’re in the same field. She’s not likely to send business to me nor I to her; perhaps we’d team up on a project, yet we’ve never discussed it. So, in essence, we’re competitors yet friendly and supportive. Love that. Our Twitter engagement is top notch, and I’m not likely to unfollow her any time soon.

Learning Another Vertical

Everyone knows enough about an industry to be dangerous. So, dive in to an entire stream of tweeps expert in health care or engineering. What you can glean from them is a treasure; trust me, because I did it in social media a few years ago. Twitter was my training ground in social media, and the pace was fast and furious. All those online courses – for the birds.

Ticked Off?

There was a woman I had been following for a good year. I noticed how she flitted from blog to blog and arrogantly posted a criticism and lofty opinion and then moved on without responding twice. Then, I watched her comments on a chat forum and began slowly to become annoyed with this behavior. I cleaned my stream and that was that. Better balance all in all. You can do the same and keep the peace.

Gaining from Twitter?

Twitter’s hidden gifts are numerous, myriad; like a new galaxy. If you can’t list 10 perqs off the bat, you’ve got a problem and you’re likely using Twitter the wrong way. I bet if you ask yourself “what am I gaining from Twitter?” you’ll be surprised what’s in the treasure chest.

There’s no way any of this can happen if  you complacently watch the tweets roll in. Change your Twitter habits and keep your stream fresh. Lead Twiter instead of letting it lead you; what a great business goal for 2011.

What If There Was No Twitter

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Mark Schaefer is a long-time social media peer, colleague, and mentor with whom I banter and exchange heated yet friendly discussion about my views that PR Drives Marketing and his view that I’m on crack.

So, I linked to his tweet with intrigue to this magazine I’d not heard about, Social Media Marketing Magazine (which I now have joined), and, lo, here’s Mark’s excellent article “Why Facebook is More Important Than Your House.” He’s writing as adjunct professor at Rutgers University (pretty cool).

I encourage your read of what Mark’s saying, and then I encourage your contemplation of what I’m saying.

In a nutshell, Mark suggests that people are so aligned with Facebook it has become a lifestyle – the Farmville crap, photos of the grandkids readily accessible, and all the other inanities being exchanged among friends. (My words, not Mark’s.) We can’t forget that our kids are officially the Facebook Generation. Gen Y begets Gen FB.

Where others have glommed onto Facebook; I have become absolutely addicted to Twitter. Mark’s article got me thinking…what if there was no Twitter?

  • The spark in my life would slowly extinguish, and I’d again be commiserating, ranting, laughing, bantering, and learning from my Google RSS reader (which sadly is a one-way street).
  • Blog comments would be more robust because peeps would have to log their commentary directly on a blog as there wouldn’t be Twitter comments about blogs (which happens frequently).
  • Alas, I’d go into deep depression because the peeps I’ve met have extraordinarily enriched my life, professionally and personally. It’s these human relationships I can absolutely say are the single-most hidden gifts of Twitter.
  • My global network with direct connections and open communications to Hong Kong, Sweden, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Brazil, and hundreds of other cities and countries would be non-existent.
  • My learning curve would again be extended (as in take longer) without the immediate knowledge sharing Twitter offers.
  • There’d be no place I could let loose a rant, exclamation or share in the fund-raising support for a global natural disaster.
  • Most of all I’d have no community in which I could align, be a peer, become a mentor, share in a leadership capacity or move to a thought leadership and influencer role. I’d be relegated to the traditional method of networking by, argh, actually going to a physical meeting.

Perhaps your experience with Twitter has not been as rich as mine; if that’s the case, I encourage your exploration of this channel because Twitter’s hidden gifts bear more than the Three Wise Men.

What would you miss if there was no Twitter?

Auto Makers Tap Twitter Influencers

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Intriguing article in The Wall Street Journal on November 15, 2010 “Tweeting to Sell Cars; Auto Makers Turn to Social Media Influencers for Buzz.”

Basically, the piece is about Ford, Lexus and Toyota tapping social media heavyweights to help influence followers on Twitter and push brand and new cars. Where traditionally celebrities were engaged to tout new vehicles, now the likes of Brian Solis, a disc jockey, and Baratunde Thurston, web editor of the Onion, are being tapped to push autos down followers’ throats.

How do you feel about that?

Brian Solis is in my stream; he doesn’t follow me, but I regard him as an A-lister, for sure. Would I pause if he began tweeting about a brand more than five times a day? Absolutely, and then he’d lose credibility in my book. We all agree social media is supposed to be monetized. Kudos to those who do it well ala Brian Solis.

Being a Twitterati is more about creating community in my book, but it’s also about replying and connecting. The only time my tweet was acknowledged by Brian was when the product I bought from him was late by five weeks (and it messed up my presentation).

In the case of the large auto makers, their scale is global. To them numbers talk, and we are, after all, a numerical society – those with the highest numbers of followers get the nod from outsiders but not necessarily from we on the inside.

What’s your impression of Twitterati, corporate America tapping social media influencers, and whether that strategy works with the grassroots tweeps? I’d love to hear your impression on this one!

Social Media is Not a Job

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My fellow tweep and colleague at The SMB Collective, Michelle Quillin, tagged me in a blog post of hers recently. That blog post and a series of others was oriented to social media as a vocation for an intern. In particular, the topic of the post I commented on addressed “what hard-hitting questions would you ask a social media intern?”

What gave me pause was not the questions but the “social media intern” piece. Social media is not a vocation in and of itself. There’s been a bunch of discussion on this very topic, and I’m in the camp of consensus over “social media skills come from expertise derived from public relations and/or marketing.”

I’d never hire an intern to do social media at the outset, and here’s why:

  • Those who are engaging in social media and doing it “well” should have ~two years under their belt. I know for a fact that interns/recent grads may be awesome at texting and Facebooking to friends, but will have little strategy expertise to complement that.
  • Social media skills go hand in hand with public relations and marketing. We in public relations boast heavy expertise on content development and the strategy that goes into that message creation. No intern has that skill set without years of experience.
  • Prior to launching any social media exercise, I step back with a company to ensure a messaging framework is developed, approved, current, and in use. I do message mapping, and I’ve written on this topic in the past here. Tweets, Facebook content and LinkedIn groups need to push messaging that align with corporate communications strategy.
  • Writing skills are rarely taught in school; you’re either gifted and teachable, or these skills come with years of nothing but writing all day. There’s a need for writers out here, and often young people suffer without that skill. Being clever on tweets and Facebook posts (not to mention blogging) is something that builds with time. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. are also musts; because the texting generation is upon us, the lack of quality control in these areas is palpable (I’ve seen it).
  • I appreciate the knowledge a young person brings in areas I haven’t mined i.e. new social media apps, widgets, plug ins, platforms, sites, etc. etc. While it’s good to know about additional channels to piece into a larger strategy, a seasoned practitioner must synch the elements into place.

Is there a recent graduate who knows PHP and WordPress or other content management systems for websites? Now that’s where I’d hire someone on the spot; follow the money, kids!