Social Media is a Responsibility for Educators and Everyone

Last month, I moderated a chat on social media in education so when I saw a post by a local TV station asking if there was a reason for teachers and students to connect on Facebook, I wanted to give a counterpoint to the “teachers shouldn’t use social media ever” stance that many people seem to have.

Schools that have taken the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the social media curriculum are neglectfully choosing to look the other way as students communicate, collaborate, and connect in worlds devoid of adults.

~ Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator

I’m not naive. I know that educators can act inappropriately, and unfortunately sometimes they do. However, I also know that there are ways for Facebook and other social media to be used effectively as a teaching tool, for communication between teachers, parents and students, and for the pure “social” aspects that Facebook and other social media platforms have to offer. According to a 2009 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), when polled about why they chose to stay in school, almost all students named a specific student, faculty or staff member who gave them the support and encouragement they needed to keep going. What better way to keep in touch with that teacher than via social media?

As a marketer, I have seen the value of social media by being a part of the community and conversation happening online. Not that long ago, marketers had to justify to the C-suite why companies should be active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media channels. My response to that has always been that the conversation is happening, don’t you want to be a part of it? And don’t you want the social media profile found in searches to be yours rather than one that was made for you? There have been several cases where students have posted made-up social media profiles for teachers and administrators. If you’re not on social media, or actively monitoring the channel, how will you know?

Connecting with students and their families on Facebook gives teachers the perfect opportunity be a part of the conversation where there students (and parents) are, rather than attempting to force the communication into a less often visited channel like the school’s website, etc. The CCSSE study found that most students are already using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, texting and instant messaging outside of the classroom – and that was in 2009, so you can image the adoption rate for social media now!

Connecting with educators on social media also gives the students a chance to see how social media should be handled (assuming the teacher is socially responsible with their posts). Leading by example is a great way to get students to understand that they need to manage their digital footprint and only post in ways that they will be proud to see themselves and have others see them. It is vital that young people learn that their social media interactions WILL impact their future. College recruiters are checking Facebook pages and so are Human Resources Departments when you’re ready to get a job.

With all of the “pros” for increased social media interaction between students and teachers, I do have some caveats:

  • Students need to be 13 or older, but that’s in Facebook terms of use, so if a younger student is using that channel then it needs to be brought to the parents’ attention.
  • Teachers need to post responsibly, but then EVERYONE should post responsibly!
  • Teachers should be trained on the proper use of social media. Sort of a “train the trainer” session on why it’s important to only post things that are appropriate for public viewing, and that once something is posted online, it will never go away. This training should be updated as privacy changes are made as well as when new social media platforms are introduced (like Google+).
  • Teachers don’t need to “friend” students on their personal social media page. There are ways to set up pages for “public figures” where teachers can post what they want their students to see, and still keep their personal profile separate.

So what do you think – SHOULD teachers connect with their students via social media? What tips would you have for them? Do you have any positive examples of teacher-student or teacher-parent interaction on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Please comment below to share your opinions and experiences.

Read More

Book Marketing Recap – Part 2 Marketing Methods

A few weeks ago, I was the moderator for a great #smchat conversation on book marketing and publishing. There were so many insights that not only was I able to compile one post-chat blog post, I created TWO! The first half of the chat was on book publishing and the post below contains some of the book marketing insights I learned from the lively #smchat discussion:

Q4 You’ve written a book-now what? Do you need special book marketing skills? What role does social media play?

@JimKukral: Book marketing starts at book conception. BEFORE it’s written.
@WhereitBlooms: But SM does help in determining your audience. Is there a need for the book? Who will have interest?
@ambercleveland: A4. Tons of book marketing resources available, do your homework. Social media plays a huge role, gives audience access to authors

Q4b: How soon should you begin promoting your book before it is finished & is it possible to promote “too early”? @akstout18 asks, “Is there a risk in letting ppl know about your book idea before it’s finished?”

@thehealthmaven: Use SoMe to find out where your target market is & what they are taking about, build & leverage tribes before book comes out
@AndreaPatten: Non-fiction gets submitted as a proposal. fiction needs 2b complete
@novelpublicity: For fiction, you definitely want a completed and polish manuscript before submitting. Nonfic has different rules
@CreativeSage: For non-fiction, submit an outline + 3 chapters and your marketing position (after your research) to agent/publisher (cont.) For novels/memoirs, the writing is more key, often need to finish book & get editor before submitting manu.
@JimKukral: Nobody is going to steal your idea. Block and tackle. Ideas are worthless, implementation is everything
@novelpublicity: New authors often worry about ideas being stolen. Once you see how hard it is to sell an idea, you’ll get over that 😛

Q5 Videos, TV spots, print and online display ads – what’s the most inventive way you’ve seen a book marketed?

@ambercleveland: A5. Use a QR code on your business card that takes them to your site where they can purchase your book
@CreativeSage: Inventive video “trailers” & author interviews; integrated approach w/ social media, PR, targeted mktg, crowdsourcing
@novelpublicity:Do you see the little button on my Twitter avatar? That’s called a PicBadge, and it’s another creative marketing tactic (cont.) PicBadges are all about solidifying your brand – keep a primary author page, integrate book in picbadge (cont.) I actually blogged about that today with a step-by-step guide on how to create a PicBadge for your book > http://t.co/DIP2u4CN
@tcgagency: Q5 Sending advanced copies to a small group of people and asking them to leave an Amazon review, good or bad.
@sharonmostyn: A5 I love book trailers! Author @ToniMcGeeCausey talks about them here http://t.co/WuNE0TIn

(cont.) Also interesting when authors interviewed-ex. @barbaravey interview of Tori Carrington http://t.co/N5cWerOl (cont.) Also love videos by fans/friends about #books, like this by @shelleyryan http://t.co/n91EgOL0 for @thecontentrules
@novelpublicity: Create a truly engaging book trailer, then purchase PPC advertising on YouTube. I’m doing that with > http://t.co/VyS53lLU
@ProminencePR: The hangout feature on google + is really great. You can invite key people that you want to network with.
@LarsDHHedbor: What’s the best way to reach out to book clubs? GoodReads presence? Amazon Author pages? Other?
GoodReads.com got a mention by several of our participants, one going so far as to say it is “is the single most important site for writers, even more so than Twitter and Facebook.”

If you are really interested in the book marketing topic, @ambercleveland recommends #BookMarketChat with @ClaudiaC Thursdays at 4PM ET. And we’ll end with this reminder from @JimKukral: Nothing can happen until you write something. Get to work.

Read More

Marketing and Social Media – Community Building

Join #SMchat Wednesdays at 1P ET
Join #SMchat every Wednesday at 1PM ET

The Twitter chat #SMchat is a community that I have been a part of for quite some time now. Every Wednesday at 1PM ET, there is a great conversation about a social media topic. Since March 2010, on the 3rd Wednesday of each month, I have been moderating the Marketing session of the Twitter chat #SMchat. Occasionally there will be guest moderators when I’m not available, but generally a few days before the chat, I write a framing post so people joining the chat can have the questions in advance. It’s not required that you read the framing post to join the Twitter chat, but it does give you an opportunity to read the related links and to formulate thoughtful answers to the topic.

The Marketing and Social Media topic for June 2011 is Building Communities and starting this month, you can find the framing posts on the new #SMchat website at: http://socialmediachat.wordpress.com/

Please feel free to leave a comment either below or at the new #SMchat website and join the conversation every Wednesday at 1PM ET to chat about social media.

Read More

Social Media Best Practices at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum

Turn Up The Heat!
Turn Up The Heat with Social Media Marketing!

Snow in Austin, TX? The theme for the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum 2011 was “Turn Up The Heat” but I didn’t realize they were talking about the weather! Rather than cancel the event, the MarketingProfs team really stepped up by working with the speakers and attendees who were caught in the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 by offering an online version of the conference for those who couldn’t make it in person, as well as rearranging sessions to allow for delayed keynote speakers.

I was honored to be a panelist on the Social Media Best Practices to Heat Up Your Marketing session and I was very happy that I was able to make it to the conference before the blizzard ruined my travel plans. Of the other panelists in my session only Jeff Cohen (@JeffreyLCohen) from Social Media B2B was able to make it. Unfortunately, Alan Belniak (@abelniak) was stuck in Boston and couldn’t attend our session in person, although he was with us in spirit.

Here is the description MarketingProfs used to describe our session:

Social Media Best Practices to Heat Up Your Marketing

Are you an expert marketer but new to social media marketing or need a refresher of best practices? Then don’t miss this session! We’ll talk about developing a social media strategy for your company, establishing social media guidelines, and tactics to integrate social media into your existing marketing programs to increase ROI. We’ll show you examples of companies using blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn successfully to meet their overall marketing and business objectives and how to measure the results.

MarketingProfs conferences are smaller than some other conferences I have spoken at, but one of the things I like best about them is that people come up with really good questions. We received several questions during our “live” session and there was even a question form the online audience! After the session, one of the fantastic MarketingProfs staffers forwarded this question from Sylvie H.:

What if you conduct some listening and learn that really people are not talking about you very much at all (and you’re a pretty big regional company). Is it still worth creating conversation in this space?

I emailed the following response:

If you aren’t participating much in social media or don’t have a solid brand presence, people may not be talking about you specifically. The question is, are they talking about what you do or topics you are interested in?

An example of this from today’s presentation is the Fiskateers from Fiskars scissors. There are few people talking about scissors online. Even fewer are discussing Fiskars brand scissors. But there is a lot of conversation going on around scrapbooking and by talking about something their customers were interested in, Fiskars developed top of mind presence when a scrapbooking fan is in need of advice on crafting and scrapbooking which lead 600% more brand mentions and ultimately more sales. If you want to read more about the Fiskateers case study, you can see it here:
http://www.whatsnextblog.com/2008/10/fiskateers_how_a_social_community_became_a_veritable_sales_force/

Basically, find the conversation and listen to what people are saying and then join in!

If you’re interested, you can find the slides to our presentation on SlideShare or contact MarketingProfs for a replay of all 26 hours of sessions so you can ask your own questions. You can also read what others had to say about our session here:

Spredfast Blog – Getting Back to the Basics – Social Media Marketing Best Practices

The Cross-Channel Conversation – Social Media Back to Basics Everyone Forgets

Search Marketing Sage – Social Media Best Practices To Heat Up Your Marketing

Plus, if you leave a comment below with the slide number for the “what NOT to do” example in our slide deck, you could win a tchotchke from the conference! I’ll pick one random comment on this post with the correct slide number and send them their choice of either the Einstein or Shark squeeze toy that I picked up at the Digital Marketing Forum vendor tables!

Read More

2010 Blog Post Recap and Looking Forward to 2011

Mistletoe=Dung on a Twig. Eeuuuwwww!
Mistletoe=Dung on a Twig. Eeuuuwwww!

In January, 2010, I posted about how I was lucky at Affiliate Summit West 2010, and I’m ending the year with some lucky affiliate news from buy.at – I won their final Christmas quiz! I was able to determine the literal meaning of the word mistletoe is “Dung on a twig.” Can I just state for the record: YUCK!!! I now have an entirely new mental picture whenever someone talks about kissing under the mistletoe…

It seems affiliates were lucky for me in 2010, and maybe not so surprisingly my most popular blog post mentions no less than EIGHT affiliate marketers mentioned in it! Listed below are my top ten 2010 blog posts, ranked via pageviews according to my Google Analytics account. Count them down with me as we count down the last few hours of 2010:

10. Affiliate Summit West 2011 and Social Media Marketing 2011

9. 5 Questions About Building Brands Via Social Media

8. Talking SEO for our 1st Blog Birthday-Anniversary-Blogiversaryday

7. Testing, Testing, One, Two, Three…

6. How Do You Know Who To Interact With On Social Media?

5. Why Didn’t I Ask “How Did You Hear About Us?” I Already Know.

4. Twitter Chats – Fantastic for Insights and Visibility

3. Putting The Social Back In Social Media

2. Top 12 Twitter Chats by Day – What are your Favorites?

1. 2010 Internet Marketing Olympics Dream Team

Happy New Year – 2011! My wish is that the new year is happy, healthy, and prosperous for us all!

If you look at the topics of the blog posts above, there is a wide mix of marketing topics including social media, Twitter chats, brand building, SEO, and even some web analytics and email testing. What would you like to see more of in 2011? Please leave a comment below and let me know!

Read More

5 Questions About Building Brands Via Social Media

Social Media for Brand Building?
Social Media for Brand Building?

At the suggestion of Chris Jones, aka @SourcePOV, I’ve been reading a lot recently on how brands are using social media. Here are some links I’ve come up with – examples from around the globe on how companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Dell, Kenya Airways, Cadbury, Vodafone, Volkswagen, and K-SWISS are using social media to increase brand recognition and positive brand interactions:
Building Brands Through Twitter
Starbucks’ Schultz: Social Media Is Key to Building Brand Trust
Building Brands via Social Media
Building European Brands Through Social Media
Digital Media Law: Building Brands In a Digital World

For the October 13, 2010 #SMchat, we will be discussing the following 5 questions:

  1. Is social media the best way to build a brand online? Why or why not?
  2. Do B2B and B2C brands need different social media brand-building strategies?
  3. Which social media channel is the best for brand building and why?
  4. Is there a best channel for brand engagement? Does it depend on the product?
  5. What about brand loyalty? Is one channel better than another?

Did I miss any good branding and social media articles? Please feel free to post links in the comments below and don’t forget to join us for #SMchat on Wednesday, 10/13/10, at 1PM ET! We look forward to chatting with you.

Read More

Affiliates & Social Media: #SMchat Topic July 2010

In November 2008, Dr. Ralph Wilson interviewed Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins and the video of that interview contains several great ideas that are still relevant and able to be implemented successfully today! Shawn talked about being a part of the community on Twitter (and all social media) and since it’s the last #SMchat I’m moderating before Affiliate Summit East 2010 so I wanted to find out the prevailing attitude of my community about affiliates in the social media sphere.

Are you an affiliate, merchant, network, in-house or outsourced program manager? Don’t know anything about affiliate programs, but want to learn more? Please share your opinion and your insights on affiliates and social media during #SMchat, Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 from 1-2P ET, and/or meet me at Affiliate Summit East 2010 (an affiliate link in honor of my affiliate friends) and let’s chat in person!

After introducing yourself and letting everyone know what your interest is in affiliate marketing (“just curious” is definitely an option here…), I’d love to know how you feel about affiliates using social media marketing. Here’s what I’m wondering:

1 ) Should affiliates be able to promote using social media? Why or why not?

2 ) Is there a social media channel that is better for affiliates to use? Which one(s)?

3 ) Can a merchant’s Terms and Conditions exclude affiliates advertising via certain social media activities? (How does that impact affiliate sign-ups, etc.?)

4 ) How should affiliates disclaim the FTC Revised Endorsement Rules in social media? Do they need to do it at all?

5 ) How do you monitor use/abuse of social media by affiliates? Are they allowed to link directly to your site similar to direct-to-merchant pay per click (DTM PPC)?

What other questions do you have? Please feel free to leave them in the comments below or ask them when you join us on 7/14/10 from 1-2P ET on the Twitter chat #SMchat – see you then!

Read More

Does Your Corporate Strategy Include Social Media?

The 6/2/10 #SMchat is all about social media and corporate strategy. I really liked this infographic from Willis Wee that shows how social media is changing business. It presents a lot of questions on how to incorporate social media into your strategic planning.
1 ) Is social media part of your corporate strategy? Why or why not?

2 ) How can you include social media as part of your corporate strategic initiatives? Which ones?

3 ) Can you afford not to include some form of social media?

4 ) What social media platforms work best for your strategy and why?

5 ) Link from @cacildanc: Is social media better at destroying value than creating it? http://bit.ly/bmkDRa – Do you agree?

6 ) Link from @leeodden: 7 Common Soc Med Mktg Problems http://bit.ly/d0razv – What problems are you finding?

7 ) Is a social media “face” (real person behind the name) part of your corporate strategy? What happens when the “face” leaves?

8 ) Link from @harvardbiz http://bit.ly/cJtqS7 talks about big budget social media – what can you do with a smaller budget?

Read More

Don’t Put All of Your Eggs In One Basket

Easter Bunny says, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket!"
The Easter Bunny says,

The topic of the first Twitter chat that I moderated was Jack of All Trades or Master of One. You can read more about it here. This past weekend was Easter, and even though the kids are growing up, the Easter Bunny was still hopping!

That combination made me start to think about the way some companies put all of their budget into one channel. During #SMchat, the focus was on individual growth rather than corporate, but the general consensus was that in order to grow you needed to have experience in more than one area of marketing. If it makes sense for the marketer to diversify, it should also work for the companies that they represent, right? That’s why it is surprising to me that so many companies don’t make use of all of the online and offline marketing venues that are available. The explanation that I’ve heard is that there is not enough money in the budget to cover all of the media channels. My response to that is you’re doing your company an injustice if you don’t test every available area of marketing. You never know what will work best for your company without testing.

Testing marketing channels can be done relatively inexpensively, and once you have proven ROI you can determine how much more you can spend in that media. For example, I have worked for several companies who felt that TV is too expensive for their budgets, but I’ve run national DRTV (direct response television) tests that cost far less than what they’re spending on PPC SEM (pay-per-click search engine marketing) campaigns and bring in more revenue for the money spent, plus have the advantage of reaching offline viewers that may not see your ads online.

Another really great marketing channel to test is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is wonderful because there are so many options and it is the most easily tracked – you can pay for the click, the sale, or even the phone call if you convert better over the phone than online.

Email traditionally has the highest ROI of any marketing channel but you need to test email marketing to see how it works for your company, plus you need to build your email list organically in order to have email perform at the levels it is capable of producing. You won’t get those high ROI numbers on a rented list.

Social media is the “new kid” and people are having difficulty determining ROI from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the other social media venues. I see social media as the glue that brings the company and the customer together. You need to be where your customers are – and more and more people are on social media sites than any other with the exception of Google.

Do you agree – should your marketing budget be spread across multiple channels or should you focus on one aspect of marketing in order to spend your budget wisely? Please comment below to let me know!

Read More
Copyright © Sharon Mostyn. 2009 - . Some rights reserved.

Powered By Novalera

Go to Top