I’m excited to finally be able to publicly announce a great new partnership.  I’m working with two great teambuilding guru’s, Mike Mulvihill (http://www.possibiliteams.com) and Mary Scannell (http://maryscannell.com), to write a book entitled “Big Book of Virtual Teambuilding Games.” We’ve signed a publishing contract with Mcgraw-Hill and have until June 1, 2011 to finish the manuscript. The book could be on bookshelves as early as Sept 1, 2011.

The book is a practical guide with detailed activities for virtual teams to use to improve their team trust, working relationship, brainstorming, decision-making and more. We’ve aligned the book’s activities in accordance with the various stages of development that traditional teams go through. The audience for this book is any organization with teams that are spread out geographically and rarely or never get to see each other. When you work remotely it can be difficult to cultivate deep working relationships that lead to truly productive outcomes.  This isn’t a book about Virtual Worlds (SecondLife, OpenWonderland, Sims), but rather using work tools that most teams already have at their disposal.

More to come soon. Thanks to all our friends, family, co-workers and clients who have worked with us over the years and supported our work.

If you are in the Phoenix area on Jan 11, 2011 and have some time in the evening, come join us at the Arizona Organizational Development Network meeting (AZODN). I’ll be speaking to the group this coming Tuesday regarding Social Networking and how we can connect it to our Organizational Development (OD) work.  The session should be informative, fun and interactive. The presentation is open to all members and non-members. A small $10 registration fee is collected from non-members. Be sure and check it out or pass it along to your OD, facilitation, training or coaching colleagues.

There are so many diverse types of volunteer organizations with people doing great things. Whether you are an association, a volunteer service group, or networking group you probably have the same challenges.  How do you continue to attract new people while continuing to engage the current folks?  There’s a limit to how effective your email, phone calls and postcard communications are going to be without becoming noise.

If you are in the Phoenix, AZ area come join me for my presentation on “Attract & Retain! Social Media for Volunteer Organizations” at PodCamp AZ. I’ll be speaking at this great new media gathering this weekend. Here’s the details:

What: PodCampAZ (Networking media unconference)
Where:  University of Advancing Technology UAT, 2625 West Baseline Road, Tempe, AZ 85283
How to Register: Register online now or just walk in.

Follow on Twitter: #PCAZ2010
When: NOW! 11/20 and 11/21, all day. Check website for session times.

My Session Name: “Attract & Retain! Social Media for Volunteer Organizations”
My Session Overview: Your team works hard to put together a conference or member meeting and you don’t seem to be fully engaging your audience. How can you attract new attendees, while driving deeper relationships with the people who attended your last meeting? It’s time to go beyond the email blast and start engaging members on a new playing field. In this session, we’ll go over the steps you can use to attact and engage members at your next big event. Using social media you can even continue the conversation beyond the meeting. Join us for this interactive session where we will dive into the ins-and-outs of social media for events.

The unconference is free to join and really a great experience. “Unconference” is not like a regular conference. You are encouraged to truly get what you want out of the day.  Talk to folks, join sessions, leave sessions early to catch other sessions and all free!

I just signed up for PodCamp AZ and I’m jazzed! How many conferences have you been to that are free, filled with great speakers, innovative topics and really encouraged participant interaction? Try nearly none! If you are in the Phoenix, AZ area this coming weekend, Nov 20-21, then you owe it to yourself to come take a peek at the sessions being offered.

This is not a geek-out festival (ok..it kinda is), but rather a great place to come learn about topics that might be eluding you or you find hard to learn on your own.  The topics and speakers are diverse, but all are focused on educating on some form of new media. The speakers are warned…NO SALES PITCH! So from a participant’s perspective you can really look forward to getting a presentation heavy on content and light on “here’s what else I can do for you.”

Did I mention this conference is free?

Another great this about this conference is the simultaneous sessions.  Each hour there are several speakers and topics to choose from, depending on your interest.  If you aren’t digging the session, drop out and go to another.  You are encouraged to make it the best experience for you.

I pulled the speaker lineup from the front page of the PodCamp AZ site to save you a click.

Speaker Lineup

• Charlene Kingston
• Scott Timms/Christine Slomski’s
• Kevin Kittredge
• Ovi Demetrian Jr
• Don Burnside
• Eric Myers
• Steven Groves
• Jeremy Vaught
• Naum Trifanoff
• Tyler Hurst
• Sian Proctor, Ph.D
• Israel Hyman
• Steve Riekeberg
• Evo Terra
• Ruth Carter
• Jennifer Maggiore and Matt Meaker
• Elizabeth Hannan
• Ely Delaney
• Scott Kelly
• Derek Neighbors
• Chris Hewitt
• Mark Miller
• Alan Levine
• Francine Hardaway
• Carey Holzman
• Don Baine
• Leigh Dow

If you are going, drop me a note and let me know. Would love to connect with you there and compare notes on speakers.

See you there!

In partnership with Desert Willow Conference Center, I’ll be presenting “Practical Social Media for Business” September 30 at 11:00 am. The event includes lunch and is free to those who pre-register. You can register by sending an email to: susan.armentrout@sodexo.com . I’ll be providing real examples of organizations using social media to engage their audiences.

Event Logistics
Location: Desert Willow Conference Center, 4340 E.Cotton Center Blvd. Phoenix, AZ
Date/Time: Thursday, September 30, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Registration: Send email to susan.armentrout@sodexo.com .
Cost: Free  AND includes lunch!

Event Description
In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to sift through all the social media hype and focus on tools that will really make a difference in your work.  Whether you are a meeting planner, facilitator, or just seeking a way to create more interactive, engaging meetings you will find something to walk away with. This session will introduce you to a social media framework that gives you the power to choose the right social media tool for the right purpose. We’ll also discuss the various methods to tracking usage and effectiveness of social media.

In this session you will:

1. Discover how a social media framework helps you plan your social media efforts.

2. Explore which social media tools are useful for meeting planning and which are not.

3. Plan how you could leverage social media to create more interactive meetings.

4. Review methods for measuring social media effectiveness.

We’ll be videotaping the session with our great partners AZ Webcasting who you can follow on Twitter via @azwebcasting. I hope you can join us for this fun event. The conference center is a beautiful location for meetings and conferences of all sizes.

We’ll be tweeting via @mikeabrams .

I was helping out a buddy of mine recently who is entering the job market.  After looking at his LinkedIn profile, I realized he was making some of the same mistakes that many smart executives make.  They put up a profile and some basic job description and work history and leave it at that. By not using LinkedIn to its’ fullest potential, you are making it harder to find and hire you.  In a job search, you want every available method of meeting people working IN your favor…not against you. An unmanaged LinkedIn profile is just that…working against you.

Special thanks to Steve Gilbert, Managing Director of Passivecast and long-time executive recruiter for some of this info. He’s been coaching me on the ins and outs of how recruiters find new candidates. Here’s what I shared with him. I hope it brings you some value as well.

Hey {unnamed person}, You need to get your LinkedIn house in order. I imagine you’ve had headhunters calling you over the years…but the right ones must not be able to find you or you would have been recruited away a long time ago.

Here are a couple of thoughts for you to tweak your LinkedIn profile, so when you speak with execs & recruiters, they can get what they need…quickly. LinkedIn is the one of the most well used recruiter tools. You need to help them to find you and know you. That way the CEO/CIO/VP contacts you are making sync up with the recruiters. It’s a win-win for you.

• LinkedIn Profile : Your LinkedIn.com profile is not public. It’s got to be public so people who are recruiting via Google can trip across you as well.
• Contact information : personal phone number, personal email address. Available to anyone, do not protect this. Get a GMail account and a cricket phone if you are concerned about privacy. MUST have personal email/phone number listed. If you don’t, you make the recruiters hunt for you.
• Summary : Your Summary is good, but you need to include a few major results of your accomplishments. You’ve got plenty, list a couple of unique biggies. Think bullet items, stay away from very long narrative paragraphs.
• Experience : Your experience section all reads like a job description.  You gotta use some bullets and add your business results of the work you did.  It must focus on results of what you did, not just what you did or how you did it.
• Recommendations : You need more recommendations from the right people. Target 8-12 recommendations, max! More than that and it starts to get questionable.
• Groups : Once you craft the list of what companies you want to work for and the hiring managers you need to meet, locate their recruiters. Get involved in the LinkedIn groups they have joined. Start making some innovative, smart comments to those discussions. This is a great way to expand your network and warm-up your introduction opportunities.
• Jigsaw : Check your name in Jigsaw and ensure it has your correct work and contact information. Recruiters also use this tool to get contact information for you.
• Facebook : If you are not already in it, get there. Believe it or not, recruiters are using Facebook more and more to find hard to get candidates. This is not their #1 tool, but I would bet it’s in the top 5. Make sure your profile (the public part) includes good information about where you work, what you do and your work history. You don’t need to make everything public, just the work experience part.
• Resume : Try to keep it to 2 pages. Focus on results, not job descriptions. Results are exciting. The people looking for you know what those roles do already. Tell them who you reported to, a little bit about the scope and dive right into results.  I can send you mine if you are interested. Ensure the dates on your resume and LinkedIn are in line with each other. Don’t give recruiters a reason to ask unnecessary questions.

The idea is to get many different online tools working in your favor while you work the people connection. One supports the other. Let me know when you have updated your profile and best of success to you!

I’d love to hear your comments about this…agree, disagree, any aha moments for you?

Back in the 1800’s in the US, folks headed out West in hopes of finding a vein of gold, mining it and striking it rich.  One of the keys to striking it rich was staking a claim. A claim was a parcel of land that you could call your own and mine it until that gold was found.  If you didn’t get to stake a claim before the best ones were snatched up by someone else, you were stuck working someone else’s claim and panning someone else’s gold hoping to be paid for your labor.

Zoom forward to 2010. Have you staked your social media claim?

For those just getting their hands around the purpose and use of social networking for their business and professional brand, you need to understand there are “claims” to be staked.  Each social media tool (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…) typically enables you to create a unique display name by which you are found in the social networking world. This display name can be something cutesy or something meaningful…it’s up to you.

It’s important to you stake your claim before someone else does.

Over the years, I have tried to reserve “MikeAbrams” as the display name on each social media tool. Unfortunately, there are quite a few “Mike” or “Michael” Abrams in the world who have the same idea. My goal was to consistently create the same display name in each social media tool to ensure I’m easily found and referred to by other people online. This becomes a challenge when I am one Michael amongst many.

In addition, I have no control over what activities the other Michaels are involved in…and not all of it is good.  The Michael Abrams clan activities range from photographer, psychologist, to felon…well you get the picture. I saw one this week that claimed I…err..rather the other Michael Abrams…stabbed George Harrison.  Nice, real nice.

Don’t let your claim go to waste in someone else’s hands. You have a social networking future to protect.

The next time you see one of those lists of the top 10 social media tools, go in and check whether you have staked your claim already.

It only take a few minutes per each one and you’ll be glad you did.

Blog Throwdown:

At the last Marketing Technology Summit in Phoenix the conference speakers kept coming back around to two key questions within social media.

They were:

Is social media a great way to drive sales and achieve greater return on investment,
or
is social media a great way to drive sentiment to achieve greater return on influence.

The presenters and audience were divided among these two options.  Some camps argued the measurement of social media is purely in it’s ability to create direct sales, while others argued sales are the long-term goal of course, but influence is the currency of social media.

An official blog throwdown was issued to Amanda Vega, Michael Abrams and Chris Hewitt by Cindy Kim to debate these questions. We each picked a side and argued our point.

If you want to join the debate, visit the Social Media Debate Ning site to comment.

Team Influence | Abrams & Kim

Michael Abrams | Influence

First, let’s look at each of the options.

SOCIAL MEDIA DRIVES SALES

You tweet, blog, connect with clients and suppliers via social media. Your network grows, more people know about your service and you are able to deliver great product information to potential clients, fast! Not only that, but man oh man, this social media stuff is cheap right? No….well..mostly no. You certainly can leverage social media purely for transactional value. The cost of using twitter, facebook, ning.com, linkedin, friendfeed is worth the price, but your price isn’t in software costs, its in time spent building relationships and loyalty. In order to sell, you need a large audience connected to you, then you need them to listen to your sales pitch, lastly you need them to make a purchase.

In the pure sales model, the return on investment is what….say it with me now…sales. Of course. You must get sales, revenue, moolah in order to quantify the value of your time spent building the network in the first place. Once the sale is made, you’re golden, on to the next client and hope that one comes back to purchase again. As long as people are buying, your valuable time is well used. But…what happens if for some reason people stop buying. Either your pricing is no longer market competitive, or your quality slips, or the economy drops and orders are no longer coming in. If social media is no longer “paying off” in terms of direct sales, then a smart manager would expect you to stop spending time…rather wasting time…doing that social media thing with reduced results.

Social media…isn’t simply a sales engine. That’s reducing it down to a single component. Social media is much more rich and robust for just sales.

SOCIAL MEDIA DRIVES SENTIMENT/INFLUENCE

You tweet, blog, connect with clients and suppliers via social media. Your network grows, more people know about your service and you are …oh wait, we just did this. Your network of social media connections grows, people are aware of you…awareness…aye there’s the good stuff. Having an audience of people who are set to listen to you, to share your thoughts with their networks, to carry your message on to other networks is a very powerful situation. What’s that old saying “a bird in the hand if greater than two in the bush?” Really? What if the birds in the bush have the locations of several other bushes with lots more birds very willing to tweet your message and find even more birds in other bushes. Hmmm…sorry birdy, I’m gonna need to get to know your buddies here.

Yes, sales are good…sales are required for business to function. Sales is the input, service/product delivery is the output…happy customers all around…repeat process until tired.

But as any good sales training will tell you…”people love to buy, but hate to be sold.” By creating a sphere of influence and positive awareness and sentiment for your product, you are increasing the number of people who WANT to buy from you. By increasing the pool of people who WANT to buy from you, you are increasing the number of people who actually will. On top of that, I believe you drive a much more loyal customer base because you took the time to give first, to foster the relationship first rather than ask quickly for the sale and move on.

SOUNDS SOFT and SQUISHY…WE WANT METRICS

Yes, yes of course. If we aren’t going to use sales as the direct measurement of our social media efforts, we still need to measure something. Here are some simple ideas without having to implement a bunch of software to track metrics.

1. Establish a baseline of how many followers you have in your network, your newsletter, RSS feeds, etc…
2. Track the change to your followers week by week. Increase or decrease
3. Track how many people link to you or re-tweet or repost a blog item you wrote.
4. Track the impact of announcing a new blog post via twitter. How many people responded within the first 10-30 minutes. How many people responded after a day or so.
5. Track how many calls you received in response to something you wrote online.
6. Compare the changes in your followers with the traffic to your blog, website, youtube, podcasts, etc… You want to eventually see a direct relationship between these two. As one goes up so does the other.
7. Track how many times you released something into your network…a new video, podcast, blog post, etc…you want to ensure you are not reducing the time spent releasing new content over time.
8. Track how many social media requests for help came in versus phone calls or emails. Moving requests to the social network can potentially reduce the time to respond and increase sentiment to your quality of service.
9. Lastly, summarize all of this on a monthly basis (at least) to see how your social network is growing in relation to real interaction with clients. Your interactions should increase as should your publishing efforts.

In the end…the great news is…if you are growing your network, your sentiment is increasingly positive, your influence becomes strong, you will be seen as a relationship builder..a connector. People absolutely LOVe doing business and purchasing from people they trust and have great relationships with.

BAM…there’s my offering.

Cindy Kim | Influence

George Beckenstein of Digital Media and Social Marketing Strategist recently wrote an interesting post on how business used to be conducted. He noted that anyone you did business with lived in your immediate community. There was no such thing as advertising, marketing channels and brands. You did business with people you knew. It was not an “information economy,” and nothing was mass produced. It was a Trust Economy. In a Trust Economy, your market is your community or network. Trust is mandatory, and influence is king.

Recently, I was at a marketing event where I engaged in a heated discussion about social media with a senior account rep from a local marketing agency. I asked her why they were one of the few agencies not engaged in social media. Her response: “We don’t do social media because there is no ROI.” She also mentioned that it was more appropriate for B2C not B2B. Ironically, we are one of their clients and happen to be B2B, not to mention heavily into social media. -I said social media is not always about ROI – it should be first and foremost about sentiment and driving influence, which could eventually lead to ROI.

This leads me to this blog throw down with Amanda Vega, founder and CEO of Vega Consulting; Mike Abrams, VP of Business Development for TBD Consulting; and Chris Hewitt, senior director of marketing operations at Lumension. Amanda once tweeted to me that whenever her clients come to her about social media, their main driving factor is ROI (return on investment).

Social media by no stretch of the imagination has become an important part of a business’ overall corporate strategy. While many companies may understand the importance of social media, some are misguided in the notion that social media is about directly driving leads and increasing sales. This is understandable given how businesses today face greater economic pressures to perform and show quantifiable metrics to validate their investment. Adding social media to the marketing mix is no exception.

Figuring out ROI on social media continues to be a hotly debated topic. I am a firm believer that social media is a critical asset to a company in terms of building a brand, monitoring customer attitudes, gathering ongoing business intelligence and growing your influence. However, using social media to drive sales shouldn’t be the main focus of engaging in the first place. It’s nice to get those results, but we need to set the right priorities when it comes to using social networking tools. In a world where businesses no longer have control over what people are saying about their brand, products or services, social media gives us the opportunity to quietly monitor and listen to the conversations. If we choose, we can even engage with the broader community and participate in conversations around our brands in hopes of providing a positive brand experience. Why? More than being focused on driving sales as the main motivator, influence is king. Influence drives trust. Trust can lead to powerful Word of Mouth. Powerful WOM could lead to sales and deeper engagement.

There is no question that social media can be a dynamic tool. However, an organization cannot be successful in social media without building brand awareness and engagement first. Without establishing this all-important foundation, one cannot be successful in social media or drive sales. The whole point of social media is the ability to participate in a conversation that’s taking place around your brand or your industry. A company cannot build a social media strategy simply to drive sales without first building trust within its community. This takes a lot of effort in building sentiment, not to mention a lot of time. Once you’ve established trust around your brand, then the community will take the next steps to listen to what you have to say, follow your conversations and get to know your brand.

@tdhurst said to me: “Social media is always about sales.” True – most companies want you to justify their investment, but it’s up to the social media experts to educate them on what the purpose of social media is and what the overall objective is for that company. This way, you can better align corporate objectives with social media strategy.

I had the opportunity to listen to @GuyKawasaki at the recent BOLO 2009 event where he demonstrated different levels of social media successes – monitor, watch, sell, support and engage. Companies such as Starbucks use social media to monitor what people are saying about their latest promotion and their brand while others such as Dell and Kogi use social media to sell their goods. Another good example is Comcast, which uses the platform to provide customer support direct. While major brands like Dell and Starbucks may have the luxury to choose what type of engagement they want to have with the community, it’s still about understanding and measuring brand awareness and driving positive brand engagement before pushing promos. If you don’t have these in place, when it comes to driving sales, you’re SOL.

Let’s face it, whether it’s social media, marketing campaigns or PR, if you don’t have brand awareness, brand trust and positive brand engagement to drive influence, your results would be the same – lackluster interest in your company and products. Social media is another medium where you get the privilege to first monitor and listen to the overall sentiment around your brand before you look to integrate other objectives, such as driving sales.

Team Revenue | Hewitt & Vega

Chris Hewitt | Revenue

Social media: influence or revenue? A question of growing popularity and heated debate, with compelling arguments for both sides.

For me, social media success, as a component of a marketing strategy, is best measured by its ability to generate revenue.

I know…it sounds a bit cold…maybe I’ve been lapping up a little too much of the ‘ROMI’ Kool-aid. I once thought, however, that social media was different. I thought social media had a ‘higher purpose’; to enlighten each and every one of us in marketing to create something better and to triumphantly carry forth a new era of a ’softer sell’…making the world a better place.

The reality is however, that our marketing efforts carry a serious responsibility to generate real results. We are accountable to our Board, boss, teams, and colleagues; that responsibility becomes even more serious for small businesses and individuals when those key stakeholders are ourselves and our families.

The key to generating direct revenue is relevance and value; social media is another tool for us to take the right message and bring it to the right audience.

Almost every message has a relevant audience. This is especially true in our highly customizable, highly portable digital word; a trend Chris Anderson highlighted in his book The Long Tail. Do you find those multi-level marketing Tweets annoying; blocking and ignoring the follows from Twitter users that can make you $300 a day for doing nothing? Well it’s not that their message is wrong…it’s just that they reached the wrong audience.

This is why social media is such a powerful tool for generating revenue; people have segmented themselves. It is now our responsibility to reach them with the right message, offer, etc. and constructively engage them in dialog. There is no reason why we cannot tie our efforts directly to revenue generation.

Additionally, we have to consider the fact that ’social media’, as an Internet marketing strategy, is in its infancy. And while many of us social media ‘insiders’ are being to ask hard questions about sustainability and business value, the vast majority of the population is still wondering how these tools, this whole concept, really applies to their life/job/goal. As a result, it’s easy to lean on metrics like ‘influence’.

A little bit of an industry secret ‘return on influence’ is the kind of nebulous metric that we, as marketers, cozy up to at night; our comfortable, loving teddy bear that lets us know we returned value today. Me? Sure I have a Teddy. Hey, don’t judge, the late 90s were especially rough…I may have wound up on a few email ‘blacklists’, angered email recipients around the word, and generated little to no direct revenue, but Teddy and I always shared in the success of our ‘impressions’ and ‘open rates’.

All stuffed animal metaphors aside, ‘influence’ is a valid measurement of marketing activity…and, in certain circumstances, success. I believe, however, that the actionable nature of social media requires us to apply hard metrics to our efforts and track them back to dollars. We can’t accurately track the influence of a well planned and authentic charity on an organization’s revenue. We can, however, track our links, activity, referrers, etc. in our social media efforts.

So yes, for now, focus hard on using social media to drive revenue. Let’s get back to our roots of sales and marketing; create dial with your message and leverage social media to find the appropriate audience. Track your efforts (’cash for clicks’ and ‘clicks to cash’), continue to enhance your message, and return value. In doing so, maybe you will use social media to make the world a better place…well…maybe for your happy, newly acquired customers anyway.

Amanda Vega | Revenue

For corporations, social media is about “show me the money”

There is little doubt now that social media is a necessary piece of any corporate marketing mix. As practitioners in the space for many years now, the importance of social media has been a conversation we have daily with clients and colleagues alike. The bigger question these days seems to be “how do we monetize social media?” In this blog throw down between three industry trenchers, we are discussing different points of view and answers to this same question. My take on the question: social media is about the money more than anything else.

Of course it goes without saying that there is value in social media that goes far beyond revenue. Brand extension, reputation management, connecting with your clients in a real way, and the immense on-the-spot market research you gain when actually engaging in social media (beyond having a Facebook fan page, people…) are incredible and should certainly be assigned a value. And we can all argue that extension of reach and visibility drives profitability – at least in theory. But that’s just not enough.

When we are sitting in front of the decision maker at a client who has to answer to his or her boss, or worse, a board of directors, the only thing that matters is whether or not you can assign actual monetary gain to the engagement. Businesses are responsible for generating profit, period.

Our social media management engagements simply have to be tied to a revenue stream – one way or another. And all of the fluff explanations about branding are of no interest to the stockholders or the CEO. They may say so in nice little PR snippets, but when you peel away the onion, it’s about the money. So how do you tie social media to revenue? There are a few things to consider.

1. You can tie your efforts into trackable things like custom URLs, coupons, and actions such as submittals of receipts from purchase for prize. This ties directly into sales.
2. You can use social media to drive people into stores. And more importantly, if you are product who is at the hands of a distributor or chain, you can use the reports on reach you gain in social media to vie for better shelf space or position in the stores – which drives sales.
3. The proper use of real social media can cut market research prices way more than half – which decreases your overall spending – allowing for more profit margin.
4. If you engage real zealots for your brand on a daily basis you can create the same (or better) reach and frequency than most ad campaigns which cost far more that engaged social media…adding to the bottom line and ROI measures.
5. Social media doesn’t have the same costly fees associated with it that changing a print campaign or TV ad does if your message is failing – and as a bonus, they don’t require as much in terms of revenue to test or create the original messages to begin with.

At the end of the day, you can monetize social media. It’s not as hard as you may think – actually social media is more trackable than most traditional media. And while the added benefits of social media (brand extension, share of voice, etc.) are important, they are not the MOST important – at least not to the CEO, or our paying clients. If I can’t associate an ROI with real numbers, then they aren’t going to buy. At all.

I was reviewing some old files and links of mine and came across this gem from just over 1 year ago.  This features an interview between Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki for Fastcompany.TV. The interview covers many topics from Kawasaki’s new book (at the time), to Steve Jobs as a boss and the tipping point for Alltop.  What got my attention was the comment “Twitter is my marketing weapon.”  In a years time, it was interesting to reflect back on my own use of Twitter.

Twitter has been good to me over the past year. I’ve connected with people in ways I could not have without this communication vehicle.  During a conference in Chicago almost one year ago, I used Twitter to create an open invitation to dinner one night.  I was pleased to have a small group of folks Tweet me back and help arrange a dinner for us that night. There were 27,000 conference attendees that week and I connected with five of them, whom I did not know before-hand, before the conference ever started.  I was really happy to have made these connections in the healthcare industry as well as put Twitter to such effective, real-time use. I’ve made many friends and business contacts via Twitter over the past year. I can honestly say it has been the biggest addition to my communication process.

I’m inviting you listen to the video and consider what new ways you or your organization could you be leveraging Twitter, in your business.

If you’re still drawing a blank of ideas for usage of Twitter, here are a few simple ideas to consider for 2010:

• Provide real-time pre-sales support to potential clients via twitter enabling many other potential clients to see responses to questions they may also have.
• Locate and engage potential new clients by becoming a contributor to the hashtags/topics they most likely interested in.
• Promote internal corporate communication through twitter from employees to HR, IT, management, or executives.
• Create a unique polling platform for town-halls or training events through tweet-chats.
• Provide valuable post-sales support to clients via Twitter.  This enables them to retweet your information to their network, thus creating unsolicited search-able tweets…great publicity and great goodwill.

There are many others.  If you take a few minutes and really brainstorm the possibilities, you’ll find at least one reason worth you taking the leap.  TWEET ON!

Posted by Michael Abrams (http://www.twitter.com)

I dig the simplicity of this video by Alexis Ohanian of Reddit talking to a Ted crowd about the Ah-haa of Social Media.  He’s not talking about the sexy of the tech (except for the Reddit plugs of course) but stays focused on the end results and how it got there.  End result…increase of awareness of whales in danger. How did it get there…crowdsourcing through social media.  The final message ‘you have to let go and not control it’ is of course powerful and a prerequisite for all things viral.

Outside the Marketing and PR aspect of this video, are there lessons to be learned that can make a measureable impact to your organization’s bottom line? Can the lessons of Mister Splashy Pants be applied to ensure we don’t lose our A-players to other companies looking for an edge.

Social Networking as Watercooler

Remember the watercooler? It was the ubiquitous cultural gather place for employees to plug into the grapevine to praise or punish some manager or corporate initiative. These days the watercooler might have been replaced by the coffee machine. The watercooler was an understood place to go to learn about the word on the street of how employees are feeling.  Over time we tried to manage the watercooler activities by creating the annual corporate survey to gauge the state of mind of our employees.

What about the ‘other’ watercooler? The digital watercooler that moves information faster than the verbal one ever did.  Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and anonymous external blogs have taken over as the place to spread the word privately and publically.  Employees can share and tear, good news and bad out into the ether and you’ll be none-the-wiser that it’s happening, unless you happen to travel in those digital circles.

So what’s a company to do to plug into the sentiment of their employees in a digital world…outside of converting the annual survey to online.

Give Employees a New Watercooler

Bring social media tools in-house, behind the firewall and treat them like the watercooler.  Management purchased the watercooler, probably chose where it would go, and gained unofficial boss points by hanging out there now and then to answer spontaneous questions from passerby.

Give your employees a place, inside your firewalls, to share thought on corporate initiatives, brainstorm ideas, ask for help, share information and mostly engage with you on matters that concern them most.  Don’t create Big Brother-esque policies about how much time they can and cannot spend online.  Don’t take the excitement of social networking out of the mix by ruling it with an iron fist. Give it room to grow, breathe and gain value.  The best way to ensure abuses don’t occur within social networks is to be a regular value-adding participant yourself. People tend to not abuse things that truly provide value.

Employee Engagement drives Customer Engagement

When you have employees who feel they can get answers to questions or share via the internal social networking sites, you will have the foundation for growing your employee engagement.  Employee engagement is about giving your employees the feeling that they are valued, listened to and supported.  Leverage social networking communities in your organization to create an engaged workforce.

What’s the power of employee engagement to my bottom line?  Employee engagement has been proven to be a key indicator of the health of a company and the ability to grow. According to Gallup research,

“…we have proven that engaged organizations have 2.6 times the earnings per share (EPS) growth rate compared to organizations with lower engagement in their same industry.”

~ Gallup “Employee Engagement”

So take control and let go.