MediaSnackers Alumni
(GBR) The MediaSnackers Alumni are a growing number of past clients that could just disappear into the ether if we didn’t catch up with them. We decided to hunt down and grill them to find out what difference their training had made in the way they work professionally and personally.
This months thoughts and insights are from Steve Gilroy from Vistage UK:
What’s your role, who you work for, and what sort of things do you do?
I’m the Chief Executive for Vistage in the UK and Ireland. My role is to set the strategy, hire the right talent, point them in the right direction and then—get out of the way! I’m also looking closely at what our members are saying, and where business in general is going—a big focus for me is business in the new economy.
Its been a month or so since you have been drenched in the MediaSnackers ‘way’, what did you learn from the experience?
A lot. My background is in the IT industry, but social media is a different world. Very exciting and moving very quickly. I guess I learned most about HOW to get involved. Yes I also learned about a lot of new tools and social media sites, but the most valuable thing was learning HOW to use the different tools, HOW to position myself and the organisation and HOW to contribute, follow, get involved, hold conversations, engage, respond. You learn a lot of ‘HOWs’ with mediasnackers.
How have other members of the team/organisation, that didn’t attend the course, received your new techniques?
They’re excited to see all of the new things were now doing, lots of video, lots of seeing the Vistage name and stories across the internet. And they’re also seeing a fast-moving pace—new content, new engagements—every day.
What has been the biggest and easiest change to make in the way that you work?
To be honest I was always clear that we’d be going in this direction, and most of the staff get it. There’s no resistance, it’s been very easy to implement so far. We’ve created 2 blogs, one to reflect Vistage and all the activities we do vistageblog.co.uk and another blog which I own neweconomyblog.co.uk which concentrates on business and economy. We also have content on youtube.com/vistageuk, flickr.com/vistageuk, delicious.com/vistageuk, twitter.com/vistageuk, a fan page on Facebook and Vistage groups on LinkedIn. All the staff contribute to our social media presence.
Has there been any difficulty in implementing these new approaches?
Well, we learn new things every day—and we also learn that there’s a lot more to learn! I guess we’re all just getting involved and getting on with it. At first the temptation was to be sure that we did everything right, to apply standards, but we’re quickly learning that the ‘getting involved’ is far more important that rules and standards.
What future projects do you have planned which utilise social media?
Video and audio are big new areas for us. We have literally thousands of pages of good content in terms of words and images, but we’ll be moving quickly to add a regular stream of good video and audio content.
Thank you for your time, Steve Gilroy.
See all MS Alumni interviews here
