Step Into Social Media Liw 2009

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+ Ray Algar 2 months ago
Hello Sue

I enjoyed your presentation last week. There is a bit appetite for social media judging by the questions you received.

Ray

Sue – General introduction including: our names, what we do in the UK, some of the operators we have worked with. KS - This is our third year at IHRSA and in the past we have talked about how to engage with the community beyond the walls of your facility. This year we are going to be exploring how better to communicate with the people close to you – your staff and your members. Effective communication is absolutely vital to the success of your business yet it is something that the majority of us spend very little time considering. We are in a people business and communication is absolutely core to our business. Despite this, how many of you have put aside training budget this year to specifically make you more effective communicators? This is not unusual. We all get so wrapped up in day today operations and issues that need our immediate attention, staff recruitment, H&S checks, member tours etc that it is sometimes difficult to stand back and consider fundamental issues. In the last 30 years, technological developments have hugely increased the opportunities to communicate to the people close to us. With the simple push of a ‘send’ button we can send a message to literally thousands of senders in seconds. Scary stuff that offers huge benefits but also introduces some dangers too, the danger is we get so used to sending emails that we forget about the importance of human contact and intimate relationship building. During this presentation we have an opportunity to take 90 minutes out of our busy schedules and really think about the communication practices we are involved in every day. Ultimately better engagement with staff and members will result in better retention, all impacting bottom line.

One of the things that operators have talked about for many years is trying to extend clubs outside the physical walls of a club to create more of a community. The incredible growth in social media in recent years means there are now incredible opportunities for clubs to engage with their members on a regular basis creating Valuable relationships that will ultimately create long term memberships. With so many hundreds of social networking applications now available its simply a matter of your choosing how you want to communicate with your members. In this part of the session I am going to explore how you might use Web 2.0 and the area of social networking to communicate with your members and potential members. Clearly, in the 30 minutes I have left it would not be possible to examine the massive range of tools that exist, but what I plan to do is to highlight why you should be using social networking if you’re not already, give you some tips for getting started and some golden rules to follow to ensure you get the most from this opportunity.

Thanks Well Katie has talked about how you get the most from communicating with staff and members within the club and I am going to look at how you can make the most of the tools now available to reach members when they are not in the club. One of the things that operators have talked about for many years is trying to extend clubs outside the physical walls of a club to create more of a community. The incredible growth in social media in recent years means there are now incredible opportunities for clubs to engage with their members on a regular basis creating Valuable relationships that will ultimately create long term memberships. With so many hundreds of social networking applications now available its simply a matter of your choosing how you want to communicate with your members. In this part of the session I am going to explore how you might use Web 2.0 and the area of social networking to communicate with your members and potential members. Clearly, in the 30 minutes I have left it would not be possible to examine the massive range of tools that exist, but what I plan to do is to highlight why you should be using social networking if you’re not already, give you some tips for getting started and some golden rules to follow to ensure you get the most from this opportunity.

To understand the context for social media you need to understand that there has been a big change in the way businesses market themselves. Many of you may have just seen Seth Godin’s presentation. He coined the phrase ‘interruption marketing’ for the way in which in the past companies have tried to reach their customers by interrupting what they are watching or listening to and blasting a message at them. The way in which companies will communicate with their customers in the coming years has completely changed. Now longer will it be a matter of ‘pushing’ information out to people. It’s now a matter of ‘pulling’ them to you. And you do this by sharing information.

Research shows that on average person is subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed said they feel “constantly bombarded” by ads, and 59% said the ads they see have little or no relevance to them.”

You share and create relationship and dialogue with your customers

Listen – find the tools that work for you (technorati, GoogleBlogSearch, Google Alerts, BlogPulse, etc.) * Determine where your customers participate, listen, read, and speak with them on their terms * Assign a community manager or multiple managers and start commenting, reading, writing, sharing, and participating

Find the tools that work for you (technorati, GoogleBlogSearch, Google Alerts, BlogPulse, etc.) * Determine where your customers participate, listen, read, and speak with them on their terms * Assign a community manager or multiple managers and start commenting, reading, writing, sharing, and participating

Powerful tools like ‘Twitter Search’ mean you can simply

Here are a couple of sites that demonstrate this clearly! But just type in a few brand names to Twitter Raptor of Googleblogsearch and you will soon see what people are saying

Participate as a contributor and not a marketer.

social media is about sociology and less about technology

Find out where your members are and what they are talking about and begin to join in the conversations – honestly and openly

Forget control. This is about enabling conversations, facilitating connections & “engagement” and eventually, if you lay the foundation well, you’ll have the ability to INFLUENCE. But never to control.

The key is to share a lot and when you think you have then share some more. That might be on your site or on Facebook etc

In terms of some simple tips and rules for how you go about communicating with your members via social media this phrase sums it up for me…‘Giving Back is the New Black’. This follows through all you do in new media and here are a few examples…