Our fifth in a new series of video podcasts (vodcasts) focussing on those interesting folks who manage social media for their brand / company / organisation.
Mario Sundar is the Senior Social Media Manager (Global) for LinkedIn, the professional online social network.
0.00 intro
0.15 about LinkedIn
1.05 day-to-day activities (LinkedIn answers, LinkedIn blog
03:36 rolling out a strategy across 12 countries
06:16 measuring impact and tracking success of their Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter profiles
13:43 advice for other companies
16:33 the future
17:51 outro
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What we deliver in our social media training has changed over the past five years but the principles have stayed the same (more or less).
As the industry becomes dilluted with every man and his guinea pig pimping their own brand of social media offerings here’s our differentiator.
I know what you’re thinking : we’re crazy to give this stuff away… without arrogance we know not a lot of people can do this and certainly no-one can deliver it like us, so we’re cool :
Be nice—right from the outset. Be warm. Be engaging. Be smiley. Be likeable (and BEware not to appear smarmy).
Have a wicked slidedeck—you have to impress from the start and create an emotional reason for participants to engage (above and beyond the fact that their boss has asked them to attend). This is not a powerpoint slide with bullet points on what they will learn, but a call to arms, a challenge, a haka, a throwdown…
Know your shit stuff and how to communicate it to queens and paupers—setting up a blog is not the same as knowing how to blog nor is it the same of enabling others to blog. Learn the difference and explore all the ways to communicate them.
Be confident and self-aware—not a fan of standing up a room of 20 strangers, then move on. If you don’t have the balls to laugh out loud, share what inspires your soul, cry (seriously, some of our sessions have been known to get that emotional), then you won’t give, in turn, permission to those participating to do the same.
Contextualise often—being a jane-of-all-trades is a must (unless you’re only serving a specific industry, although even then you’re missing out as to go forward look sideways). Polymaths rule in markets which constantly overlap and bleed into each other. Hit the books and learn the differences between how music venues speak compared to local authorities etc.
Challenge—training is about expanding brains and pushing at the limits of existing knowledge. This might mean telling people they currently suck at something or are doing it wrong (in a social media context). Always be ready to back it up though and you better also have the solution at hand as well otherwise things could get ugly.
Inspire—show people the goal. Highlight through stories how much impact this stuff has. Illustrate through personal insights and corporate case studies the outcomes of using these platforms (from a monetary saving perspective right through to a cultural shift into authenticity and customer engagement).
Play—this is your greatest weapon. Creat spaces and cultivate the environment of play. Our golden ticket to get high levels of engagement throughout the day.
Now sprinkle in the content, some funky missions and learning styles then you have yourself a blueprint of how to deliver a kick ass training session. We’re constantly tweaking and changing this but you get the idea.
Now think of the last training course you went on—anything like this?
Think about how many meetings happen in your business / organisation. Here’s a guaranteed social solution to save both time and money :
Lets say that one person spends about 2 hours a week writing minutes / notes relating to meetings they attended (that’s outside of actually attending the meeting in the first instance).
We will be generous and say this person gets 4 weeks off a year and therefore that’s 48 weeks x 2 hours = 96 hours spent per year on the taking of notes and minutes related to meetings.
This equates to £1,632 (the average wage in the UK is about £24,000 a year / £17 an hour approx).
Now, here’s the solution—at every meeting someone just creates a Google Doc, adds the attendees in as contributors and writes the notes / minutes there and then.
The impact this would have is :
no need to go back to the desk and write the minutes up
no need to send emails out with the attached minutes as the participants already have access to them
no need to print the minutes out for distribution (saving more time / money / trees)
no need to send emails out if someone makes an edit as people will be able to see on the document itself
(If you don’t know what Google Docs is then check out the helpful video below) :
Totally realise the above calculation is rougher than a badgers undercarriage (numbers are really not my strong point) but you get the idea.
Do a quick number crunch and see how much time you could save yourself if you switched to using google docs and eliminated the accumulative time currently spent on the original method. Then multiply that by the people in your company who do similar things to you. What figure did you come up with?
I’ve been using the simple example above for ages in all our masterclasses / training sessions and yet, hardly any businesses / organisations I know have adopted it.
Why?
Well maybe I didn’t communicate it well enough could be one factor. But I think the issue is institutional or cultural.
There is a deeper barrier to adoption for these ideas and the others we share in our sessions, however, the habitat for the innovation habit does not exist.
To cultivate a culture of progression and openness to new ideas is about aligning the motivational factors of the individuals to the purpose of the organisation. If the people are all for new ideas and the company is not, then there is no adoption (and vice versa as well).
This is the biggest challenge to seeing social media being explored and then used.
Inspiring individuals is easy. We’ve been doing that for over five years. But organisations and company wide, now there’s a challenge, one which I’m going to be taking on in my secondment as the Social Media Manager for CORE in Christchurch, NZ.
MediaSnackers is currently in 'permanent pause' mode—check out justadandak.com where most of the juicy action is at nowadays!
Subscribe directly to these vodcasts through iTunes by clicking the ‘subscribe’ icon opposite (download iTunes for free here).
