Today, social media week Miami hit it out of the park with some amazing speakers. I was able to catch two great discussions that were broadcasted live on LiveStream.
Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings
The first discussion was “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” which focused a lot on social media policies in relation to employee management. The discussion focused around a key point that I can not stress more; the importance of having a company social media policy in place BEFORE you begin using social media. While it is always nice to think that there will not aggressive, rude, or “sensitive” posts or tweets about your company, you need to be prepared for the “what if” situations.
For example, what if an employee tweets a negative and inappropriate comment about the company to their public Twitter profile? Having a standard or policy in place on what employees are allowed and are not allowed to say online, (in regards to the company) will make incidents such as that much easier to handle.
Not only should your policy include internal standards of maintaining your brand image in social media, but it should also include standards on how to respond to “sensitive” posts about your company by non-employees.
The key to monitoring your brand online is being honest, transparent, and quick to respond. Above all, do not ignore or delete negative comments. You do not have to address all negative comments in a public forum, comments are often addressed offline through Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages.
A great FREE tool that you can use to monitor your brand online is SocialMention. In real time, SocialMention aggregates all the user generated content that mentions your brand into one information stream. It pulls content from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
Other key takeaways from the “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” event were:
- Try to keep all posts/tweets as organic as possible
- Create a conversation calendar
- Every engagement with a follower can be an opportunity
- When creating a social media policy for employees, balance maintaining company values and not scaring employees off from using social media
- Recommend to employees that they avoid talking about the company, but encourage talking about the industry
Personal Branding Through Social Media
The other event that I watched, was “Personal Branding Through Social Media”. During the event a tremendous panel discussed how to harness the power of social media to build your personal brand.
The panel included the following social media experts: Gabrielle Bozza from Made You Famous, Gerard Bush the Chief Creative Director of the BRPR Group, David Sugarman from Sugar Time Sports Management, Susset Cabrera the president of Peacock Public Relations, and Anne Owen the publisher of Miami magazine.
The panel discussion focused around creating a new persona; a digital reflection of who you are as a person and as a brand. When creating your personal brand you have to be prepared to defend yourself, your posts, and your tweets.
Some of my favorite takeaways from the “Personal Branding Through Social Media” discussion were:
- Put your personality out there, otherwise people will get bored
- You must be prepared to defend yourself
- Be consistent but don’t be overly careful
- Social Media – touch the world in 15 minutes
Also, if you want to watch either of these discussions you can find the videos for both the “Oops! Social Media Mistakes and Learnings” and the “Personal Branding Through Social Media” events on LiveStream. You can also watch all of the events live here: Social Media Week On LiveStream. If you do watch any of the events live, I highly recommended following the corresponding hashtag on Twitter as well. There are some great Twitter conversations, thought, insights that happen throughout the events. For example, today while watch these events I followed #smwmiami , it made the broadcast even more exciting and got great insights from the other viewers who were tweeting. To see all the Social Media Week 2012 events check out their website here.
Thank you so much for the post, it was interesting reading.