Building Digital Presence with Social Media

“Punch Above Your Weight” with Social Media
By Lisa Harris, University of Southampton
9thFebruary 2010
3MARKET Social Enterprise Event

Lisa Harris
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”
$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-SMEs-shy-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=3120520301&ref=search&sid=581338827.4171081781..1
Or a Fan page:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/TheIntelligentGarden?v=wall&ref=ts

Royal British Legion

Facebook Group

www.twitter.com/dogstrust

Personal Branding with Twitter
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.

‘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-yours-in-twitter
www.teachertrainingvideos.com has useful beginner guides to using Twitter (by @russell1955)

www.theintelligentgarden.com

LinkedIn
30 million members worldwide
How does it work? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzT3JVUGUzM
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
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/2009/02/16/3-powerful-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
??????????????
Thank you for participating – I look forward to seeing you online 
Source documents for this presentation are available on www.delicious.com/lisaharris1

Building Digital Presence with Social Media

by lisa harris on Feb 09, 2010

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