Transcript Punch Above Your Weight” with social media

“Punch Above Your Weight”
with Social Media
By Lisa Harris, University of Southampton
9th February 2010
3MARKET Social Enterprise Event
Lisa Harris
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Teaches Digital Marketing at the University of Southampton
Programme Director for the MSc in Digital Marketing.
Qualified e-tutor for the University of Liverpool online MBA.
Lisa has run a research project with Alan Rae called ‘Punch
Above Your Weight’ which tracks how small firms promote
themselves, network and grow their businesses using Web 2.0
technologies.
• Running various projects to integrate aspects of open learning
into the MSc curriculum at Southampton
• Lisa’s current work is investigating the growth of digital
presence for career or business development
Objective
This session will demonstrate how you can
develop your digital presence in order to stand
out from the crowd, by using blogging,
Facebook, Twitter etc to build your profile and
that of your business.
How many of these activities are you
developing…?
“Change we can believe in”
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$28m average raised per month in online donations during 2008
92m views of display ads per month
2.2m site visitors per month
9.8m video views on YouTube
5,455,665 supporters of the Obama Facebook Group
285,467 followers on Twitter
Rationale
• Entrepreneurial activity increasingly involves understanding
how today’s networks work and how to deploy them
effectively, both online and offline.
• Building and maintaining a personal brand in this way is
becoming a critical aspect of business development
• Without an online profile, does your business exist in the
mind of prospective customers?
• Active management of social networking profiles can provide
valuable ‘google juice’
• We draw upon the results of an ongoing research project
investigating the use of new technologies by entrepreneurs to
build their personal brands.
“Digital presence” is about branding...
• According to Olins (2003), a brand is “a symbolic
embodiment of all the information connected to a
company, product or service”.
• Chris Brogan (www.chrisbrogan.com) notes that a
strong personal brand is a mix of reputation, trust,
attention, and execution:
“A personal brand gives you the ability to stand out in
a sea of similar products. In essence, you’re
marketing yourself as something different than the
rest of the pack.”
For a comprehensive set of resources on personal branding:
http://www.personalbrandingblog.com
How social media has helped my work
• Developing new contacts (joint article in
progress with BCU, guest speakers)
• Sourcing newly published articles, calls for
papers and relevant events to attend
• Tracking and commenting on the blogposts of
key contributors to the field
• Keeping in touch, real time, with project
participants and other key contacts
Business Networking Trends Survey (UK)
• 80% of UK entrepreneurs had achieved business wins through social
networking sites
• LinkedIn was preferred to FB for business networking
• 92% said that they would recommend networking professionally
online to their business contacts
• 24% of small businesses are now using sites like Twitter for business
networking.
• More traditional face-to-face networking continues to grow with
36% regularly attending networking meetings.
• 50% plan to maintain the same levels of F2F networking in 2010,
55% plan to increase the time they networking online.
Source: http://www.b2bm.biz/News/SOCIAL-MEDIA-NEWS-SMEsshy-away-from-Facebook/ (Jan 2010)
SME use of social media: USA
• Facebook ranked as the most beneficial social
network for small businesses, followed by
LinkedIn and Twitter (Ad-ology survey, US,
11/09)
• Benefits of social networking were:
– ability to generate leads
– keep up with their industry
– monitor the online conversation about their
business
Facebook
• 23 million UK users as of January 2010.
• To find local users, click the ‘advertising’ button. You can
ask FB how many people are registered within a 10 mile
radius of a town. The figure will be far higher than local
newspaper circulation.
• Pull in RSS feeds from your blog or twitter account
• Post video and photos
• Set up a Group:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=312
0520301&ref=search&sid=581338827.4171081781..1
• Or a Fan page:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/TheIntelligentGard
en?v=wall&ref=ts
Royal British Legion
Facebook Group
www.twitter.com/dogstrust
Personal Branding with Twitter
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Provide feedback. Become known as a reliable and informative source of help
to your network
Get Feedback. Ask for advice and you’ll receive ‘collective intelligence’ from
your network
Direct traffic. Include links in a tweet to direct traffic to your blog or to the
recommended posts of others.
Read News. subscribe to feeds for specific websites/conferences, or from
content providers such as the BBC.
Make New Friends. Twitter allows you to befriend and track the messages of
other users.
Network for benefits. Interact with other like-minded people, or experts in your
field. Develop relationships for future mutual benefits such as testimonials or
peer recommendations.
Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or
clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter
Search and then follow users.
Provide Live coverage. For example to provide real time coverage of conference
keynotes
Set Up Meetings. An informal and casual way of arranging adhoc meetings.
www.theintelligentgarden.com
‘Givers gain’
• Ask not what the community can do for you, but what you can
do for the community…
• The best long term way to build brand influence is to be seen
as a ‘giver’ of good quality practical information and advice.
• An authentic personal brand therefore delivers both a track
record and a promise of the ongoing delivery of value.
• How exactly will *you* deliver value??
• Twitter guides can be linked from:
http://www.twitip.com/personal-brand-how-to-build-yoursin-twitter
• www.teachertrainingvideos.com has useful beginner guides to
using Twitter (by @russell1955)
LinkedIn
• 30 million members worldwide
• How does it work?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzT3JVUG
UzM
• Recent addition of partner applications such
as Slideshare and Wordpress add significant
value, see www.linkedin.com/in/lisajaneharris
• http://grads.linkedin.com/ (see video)
LinkedIn
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Recent timely increase in functionality through partnerships with companies offering
Web 2.0 based services:
– Work collaboratively by sharing files with your network through private workspaces
(Huddle)
– Share information and keep up to date – eg what you are reading through the
Amazon application and where you are travelling through TripIt.
– the Google Docs application allows presentations to be embedded on a profile
– SlideShare allows sharing and commenting on presentations within a network
– WordPress allows a blog to be showcased.
– Company Buzz allows conversations about a prospective employer to be
monitored.
By actively updating a LinkedIn profile, the likelihood that people will see that profile
displayed when they are searching for someone to hire is increased (Google Juice)
In order to progress job applications to interview stage, a ‘complete’ LinkedIn profile is
now a prerequisite for many recruiters, meaning:
– a minimum of three testimonials from past employers,
– full employment details, affiliations and educational background.
Do’s and Don’ts
• Develop a plan with reasonable timescales and
measurable objectives
• ‘Lurk’ before you leap
• Don’t expect to ‘build it and they will come.’
• Cross promote the business website with pages
set up on social media sites, and with offline
materials
• Don’t treat social media as a one-way
communication channel – engage!
Measuring Success
• How can you tell whether your brand building
efforts are paying off? Check out these
measurement tools:
– Google alerts
– Twitter alerts
– Comment alerts
• http://www.davidrisley.com/2009/02/16/3powerful-tools-for-monitoring-your-brand/
Personal branding challenges
• Ongoing time and effort is required to develop and maintain
online profiles, learn new tools and ascertain when best to
integrate them into the mix.
• F2F brand building elements should not be forgotten – Harris
and Rae (2009) show that it is not a zero sum game, because
good online networkers also tend to be effective
communicators offline.
• As with most things in life, you get out what you put in, and
persistence pays off.
• It is critical to be authentic. If personal branding is developed
at only a superficial level, for example by basing it simply on
ego, spin or piggybacking off the work of others, then it will
not be enduring.
Action Plan
• So what exactly are *you* going to go away and
do to develop your personal brand
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• Thank you for participating – I look forward to
seeing you online 
• Source documents for this presentation are
available on www.delicious.com/lisaharris1