Social Networks | Professional Blog Service

5 Signs You Suck at Twitter

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I’ve been playing around with Friend Or Follow over the last few days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of people suck at Twitter.

Friend Or Follow is a Twitter tool that shows people you’re following, but aren’t following you; people who follow you, but you’re not following; and people you have a mutual followship with.

I dumped over 500 people from my Twitter account this week with FOF. I checked out each account I unfollowed, and frankly, some of you people are just doing it wrong. That’s why I unfollowed you. Not sure if this includes you? Then check out the…

Five signs you suck at Twitter.

You claim to be a social media consultant/pro/expert/guru (CPEG), but your following to follower ratio is 10:1. That is, you’re followed by 5,000 or more people, but only following 500. Social media consultants looove to say “have conversations with people.” But shouldn’t people who truly value conversation be willing to, I don’t know, have them?. Or at least fake like you are? If you’re a CPEG, you should have a ratio fairly close to 1:1. This is not to say that everyone should have a 1:1 ratio. Just the CPEGs. (Pro tip: you’ll also have more than 200 followers. I’m just sayin’.)
Nearly every one of your tweets is some motivational or inspirational message. Why do I need to get ten motivational messages peppered throughout the day? If it didn’t help me at 8:30 — 29 minutes after your HootSuite-scheduled “Good morning, my tweeps! Make this an excellent day!” — then it’s not going to help me at 9:30, 10:30, and so on. Don’t regurgitate someone else’s cleverness, show me yours. If you really want to motivate me, tell me about the cool stuff you’re doing.
You’re trying to amass as many followers as you can. If you’re a celebrity, a public figure, or someone who’s really, really interesting, that’s great. If you grew your network through hard work and earned those followers, more power to you. But if you resort to computer scripts, trickery, and joining follower-building networks to boost your rankings, then stick with being a LinkedIn LION. Twitter is not a competitive sport. Despite what you’re already doing to LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter isn’t just one more race to the bottom of mediocrity and uselessness.
Your Twitter bio has the words “money,” “fast,” and “make” in it. I spam-block every single person whose bio says they have some money making system they want to share with me. Stick to peddling penis drugs and fake watches by email.
Your time between tweets can be measured with a calendar. You don’t have to tweet many times a day, but at least once a day wouldn’t kill you. Even every other day would be fine. But when you’re only tweeting every 3 – 4 weeks on a regular basis, then Twitter isn’t a communication tool, it’s an afterthought, like calling your mom the day after Mother’s Day.

What is your Twitter pet peeve? What sort of annoying behavior have you seen?

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.

Tags: facebook, linkedin, social networking, social networks, twitter
Posted in Networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

5 Photo & Video Sharing Sites Travel Destinations Should Use

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Yesterday, I talked about the 5 Reasons Why Travel & Tourism Destinations Need Social Media, and how social media is being used by more and more people than you may have realized.

Social media helps people share news about their lives with their friends and family. Not only are they telling people they went on vacation, they’re able to show them where they went, what they did, and all the good times they had. They’re especially doing it on the photo and video sharing sites. Here are fives sites you should use to promote your own travel and tourism destination.

YouTube (VIDEO)

What it is: This is the website everyone knows when it comes to video sharing. According to one source, there are 1,500 years worth of videos on YouTube right now. But that’s because they make it so easy.
Get started:Go to YouTube.com and set up your account. If you already have a Google account of some sort (Gmail, iGoogle, Google Docs), you already have an account, because Google owns YouTube. Start finding other friends and guests by importing your email address book. Then follow the instructions to upload your videos.
Strategy: Encourage guests to upload their own videos and tag your destination in it. (This helps you get found for any searches on YouTube.) Upload your own videos (regular or HD) and embed them in your blog or link to your Facebook account.

Vimeo (VIDEO)

What it is: Vimeo is another video sharing site that’s not nearly as big as YouTube. The benefit to you is that you get to be a bigger fish in a bigger pond. According to their website, it was originally “. . . created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their creative work, along with intimate personal moments of their everyday life,” so there tends to be more of an artsy feel to it, but you’re not limited to only being a filmmaker or artist.
Get started: Go to Vimeo.com and set up an account. Import your email address book (Google or Yahoo), and make connections with your guests.
Strategy: Same as Facebook. If your guests use Vimeo, encourage them to upload videos and tag your destination in it. Upload your regular and HD videos, and then use the embed code to place them in your blog or link to your Facebook account.

Flickr

What it is: Flickr is one of the two most popular photo sharing sites. In fact, by strict definition, it’s a social network centered around photo sharing (actually, all the video and photo sharing tools are considered social networks). You upload your photos and share them with your friends, embed them in blog posts, and link to them in Twitter messages.(Note: Flickr has begun accepting 90 second videos for uploading. While they won’t give YouTube a run for their money, they are making it easier for Flickr fans to keep their video in one place too.)
Get started: If you already have a Yahoo account, you have a Flickr account. Otherwise, sign up, import your email address book, and then start uploading photos. If you have an iPhone or Android, you can also upload photos directly to Flickr from your phone. There is also a digital camera storage card called the Eye-Fi that will not only store your photos, but upload them whenever you’re in a wifi hotspot.
Strategy: Hold a best photo contest and encourage guests to upload the photos to Flickr and Picasa (next section), and then embed the photos in the comments section of your website or your Facebook page.. Post the entries to your website, and allow voting for the best photo (use SurveyMonkey.com). Use the best photo(s) on your promotional materials. Also, consider using a Creative Commons license with your photos (this lets other people use your photos as long as they give you credit), and let them use photos that link back to your Flickr page.

Picasa

What it is: Another photo sharing site, but this one is owned by Google. I like Picasa a little more because it’s easier to integrate with a Blogger blog, plus they have different paid subscription levels. You can get 20GB for $5, or 200GB for $50.
Get started: If you have a Gmail account or a YouTube account, you’re all set. Otherwise, go to picasaweb.google.com Next, go to Picasa.com and download the Photo Uploader. This will let you upload photos in batches, rather than a few at a time.
Strategy: First, don’t worry about whether you can upload videos to Picasa, because you can also use YouTube. (Remember, they’re both owned by Google.) Next, just like with Flickr, hold a photo contest, and use the best photos in your promotional material. And consider using a Creative Commons license with your Picasa photos.

Facebook

What it is: The biggest social network in the world. We talked about it previously.
Get started: Hopefully you already started a Facebook account, but if not, go to Facebook.com and start an account. Get comfortable with it and then start a business page (what they used to call a “Fan Page”) for your own business. Invite friends to “Like” your business page, and do it more than once (people need reminding).
Strategy: While this won’t be the hub of your social media campaign, it needs to be a major part of it. Facebook will have more of your guests and customers on it than any other social network. This is where you need to push a lot of your marketing message, which will drive people back to your main website or blog.

Where should you start?

While there is a chicken and egg question about whether you should join social networks first or start with photo and video sites, it ultimately doesn’t matter. It will take a few days to get everything ramped up. Focus on one video site and one photo site. Pick the one you like the best, and the one that is easiest to use, and just start using it.

At the same time, pick the social network you want to start on (I recommend Facebook, since that’s where everyone is), and work on that one as well. You’ll ultimately spend more time on Facebook than you will on your photo and video sites, so consider these sites as supporting sites for your social network.

Tags: facebook, Flickr, Picasa, social networking, social networks, Vimeo, youtube
Posted in Facebook, Lead Generation, Networking, Photo, Public Relations, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networks, Video | View Comments

5 Reasons Email Is NOT Going Away. I Don’t Care What Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Says

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Email is NOT going away.

South African blogger Arthur Charles Van Wyk thinks Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg is just a bit crazy when she says that email is going to die off, because only 11% of teens are using email these days. (You can watch the video below.)

Email is not obsolete. Not yet, anyway.

The premise is an interesting one: if you want to figure out what kind of consumer technology we’ll be using in several years, look at what the teens are using right now. And the teens aren’t using email, they’re using SMS on cell phones, or they’re using social networks like Facebook.

Does this mean that we will all write in text speak? Will sexting become an appropriate form of communication?

I don’t care what anyone says. Email is not, NOT NOT going to die off. Here are 5 reasons email is not going away:

Email is widely used in the business world. We’ve got so many companies using it, it’s never going to be dislodged, at least not in my lifetime. Until someone finds an easier way to transfer large documents and files only to specific individuals, it’s going to be the communication tool of choice. Can you see corporations — many of whom were reluctant to start letting people get email addresses and Internet access in the first place — dropping a tool that they fought against adopting? They’re still using fax machines, for God’s sake! So, sure teenagers aren’t using it now, but wait until they get assimilated into the corporate collective. They’ll be forced to use it whether they want to or not.
How do you get notified when you get a new friend, get tagged in a photo, have someone comment on your status update? Right now it’s by email. Do you really want your phone to buzz every time someone wants to be your Farmville friend on Facebook, or responds to someone else’s status update? While everyone likes their mobile phones, getting buzzed by an abundance of social network messages is going to get tiresome.
Our mobile phones can only hold so many texts. I have emails from 5 years ago that I still need to keep, but I can’t say the same for text messages. But if I did what happens if my cell phone gets too full? And then what if I lose it? Sure, those things can be saved in the cloud, but that’s where my email messages are anyway. Plus, my emails are easier to organize and search for.
Mobile phones and text messages are not ideal for important communications. While email may be less formal than, say, a certified letter, it’s more formal than a text message. What kind of damage are you doing to your personal brand if you tell a potential employer, “just text me,” especially if you’re someone who got a cell number that spells a naughty word? Or what if you got a job offer (or didn’t)? Do you want to get “Dude, u r not hired. Sry. Better luck nxt time” from an employer? Communicating with people who will be important to your life needs to be done in a way that’s more dignified than a cell phone.
Email is free, text messaging is not. I have to pay $10 every month to get unlimited texting, but my Gmail account is free. Admittedly neither cell phones nor computers are in every home in this country, but while text messages still cost money — even though they cost the cell carriers nothing to send (don’t get me started on that!) — it’s going to be a barrier for people to adopt it wholesale around the country

Email may not be the communication tool of choice, but it’s not going anywhere. And while SMS will become more prevalent in this country, I don’t believe it’s going to kill email, and I think people who say so are doing it for shock. We haven’t even killed postal mail, and yet the hip thing to do is to declare the death of free mail?

Kill off postal mail first, and then I’m more likely to believe you.

Photo credit: Jparise (Flickr)

Tags: Communication, email, social networks
Posted in Communication, Facebook, Networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

No One Likes My New Job Title

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

It was a brief spark of an idea, and one I got a little excited about: I wanted to change my job title.

I am currently the VP of Operations and Customer Service. It’s a little wordy, but accurately describes my position here. (I’m also a co-owner.)

“I know,” I said to myself. “I’ll change my title to Chief Blogging Evangelist. That’ll be cool.”

I asked Paul Lorinczi, my business partner, about it, and he said it sounded kind of buzzwordy.

“Bah!” I thought, and emailed Jason Falls whether he thought the title sounded “cool” or “eww.”

I’d say “content” evangelist to stay hip with on- and off-site services.
I don’t think it’s bad. Not necessarily “cool” but not bad.

So I threw it open to my Twitter network. We’re always preaching about using one’s network, so this was going to be my chance to do it. I was looking for confirmation that Chief Blogging Evangelist was a cool title, and that it would help me land more speaking gigs, and make me look really cool (I mean, cooler) when I go to my high school reunion next month.

I received 37 responses on my SurveyMonkey.com survey, and was stunned at the results.

Question #1: When I first saw the title “chief blogging evangelist,” my first reaction was:
Love it!
Meh
Don’t care for it.
That’s stupid.

Out of 37 responses, 1 person loved it.

(One person?! And I didn’t even vote! What the hell? This is cutting edge! This is Job Title 2.0. This is the epitome of social media coolness. And only one person liked it? If I didn’t know any better, I would think my mom had voted.)

It gets worse: 15 people thought it was “meh,” 11 people “didn’t care for it,” and 10 people thought it was “stupid.” In other words, 21 people either didn’t like it or downright hated it.

In question #4, (I think the title “Chief Blogging Evangelist:”), 36 people said it was either too buzzwordy or trendy (23), or it would scare off customers (13).

If I ever wanted proof that I can have some fairly dumb ideas, my Twitter followers and SurveyMonkey just showed it to me. (Except I didn’t want proof. I like being blissfully ignorant and thinking my ideas are awesome.)

So I asked for a few alternatives. And people were very helpful and creative. Some of my favorites were:

VP, Verbal Artistry
VP of Social Media
VP of Creative Services
Creative Vice President of Operational Services
Chief Social Media Evangelist
VP of Communications
Chief Blogging Atheist
Big Daddy Blogger

But my favorite response was:

It made me laugh, but then I said “seriously?”

So, I don’t know what my new job title will be, or if I even need one. But I know what it’s not going to be.

Of course, “Big Daddy Blogger” has a nice ring to it. I wonder what that would look like in a Garamond. . .

Tags: blogging, job title, networks, Professional Blog Service, social networks, survey, twitter
Posted in Networking, ProBlogService, Research Desk, Social Media | View Comments

Gmail is the New Black: Why You Should be Using Gmail Right Now

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Do you use Gmail or some other web-based program, or are you still accessing email strictly on your computer, cursing Outlook, and praying for the sweet, sweet release that ~~death~~ a hard drive crash will bring? Do you have a backup of your address book and necessary emails, should that blessed day ever come?

When I give a social media talk, I tell everyone to use Gmail for basic contact management. It has saved my bacon more than once, and I’ve become such a raving fan that I use it as my only email interface. I even forward my work email and other addresses into Gmail, so I have one window, one set of contacts, and the cleanest, least buggy interface I’ve ever had the joys of using. I can send email from any of my addresses, but the interface is all Gmail.

The joys of Gmail

If you’re not using Gmail yet, here are a few reasons why you need to:

Social network building Any social network you join is going to have a way to import your address book into the network so you can see if your friends are on there. Gmail is the easiest one to bring in. Some networks don’t even import web-mail programs like Hotmail. Others are a little more forgiving and will let you import Apple Mail, Outlook and Outlook Express, and comma-delimited CSV files.
Offsite storage of your contact list Let’s say that your work computer crashes, and you lose everything. Or you are, um, no longer allowed to. . . access your work computer due to a new arrangement you have with your now-former employer, and you need to let your friends and colleagues in other companies know about your new work situation. Having a copy of your address book in your control will make this a lot easier. You can even sync Gmail with Outlook, so any time you change or add a record, that is reflected in the other. Warning: some solutions will split up multi-email records, and then sync all those brand new records into Gmail. I had that happen twice, after I spent hours cleaning them up.
Emergency access If you ever need to reach people over the weekend or in the evening, but your computer is at work, you can still do so. This is especially important for people in crisis communication whose organizations are still planted firmly in 1997. If you’re counting on your email server and your email list to be available if you need to do a press release or media alert, you’re totally hosed if that thing ever crashes because of a large-scale disaster. When I was in crisis communication, we had to come up with some plan to work around just that contingency. And if you’re in the middle of an emergency, and you can’t get access to your email server, you need another solution. There are so many workarounds to getting online, as long as you can get there, you can communicate. But if you’re depending on one computer’s data, forget it.
Enterprise email You can even use Gmail for business. For $50 per user per year, you can get 25 MB of storage per user, plus it syncs with Outlook and Blackberry. (For the record, I can also sync my personal email with my HTC Droid.) You keep your corporate identity and addresses, but you have the security and ease of use of Google’s email, calendar, and Docs.

What about you? Why do you use Gmail (or your favorite web-mail application)? Why should people switch to web-mail from computer mail? Or, why shouldn’t they?

Tags: Gmail, Social Media, social networks, twitter
Posted in All Posts, Crisis Communication, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

A Year in Review

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Professional Blog Service started a year ago out of Indy Associates to assist companies in generating content they need for most of their Internet marketing activity.

While at Indy Associates, we always recommended blogging as a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. With the popularity of social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter, the strategy has become even more important. The challenge for most of our customers was the blog content generation. Most companies do not have trained content writers that are able to develop conversational blog content, while writing for the search engines. Most important, many of clients have great ideas with no time to share them.

So, what have we learned in 2009?

Most companies still do not have the resources, or the time to write their own content.

2009 saw the unemployment rate hit 10% in November. It was reported that many companies laid off many in their workforce leaving those left behind with more work to do and little time to get it done. The last thing on anyone’s mind is getting blog content written, even though everyone agrees that marketing is still important in a down economy.

Blogging and Social Media continue to evolve from AOL of the 90s to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter heading into a new decade.

“Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time, according to a Nielsen report published in March of this year, “Global Faces and Networked Places.” These numbers keep rising as the year progresses. By 2012, IBM predicts that globally, a quarter of the global population will be using social media in some form.

Results still matter to most companies.

Learning how to play in social media is one thing. Getting people to interact with you is another. Your clients may or may not interact with you through social media. The challenge for all companies is finding out which ones they should engage. You may be able to sell like Dell, or respond to customer complaints like Southwest Airlines and Jet Blue Airlines have done. (Note to my former colleagues at American Airlines – take note!). Either way, Social Media and Blogging is measurable in some way depending on the strategic approach you take with it.

There are great tools like Yahoo Analytics (shameless plug as we are a Yahoo Analytics consultant). Radian6 and Scoutlabs can track who’s talking about you, and help you decide whether to act on the positive or negative media being generated.

We predict that 2010 will be the year of results with blogging and social media. In a nutshell, you are doing it to build your marketing list, or to generate interest in your products or services. To succeed, you will need:

An understanding of how your market uses blogging and social media, if at all
A plan to participate
Execution and commitment to the plan
Measurement of the results over the course of the year, not a month

If you can learn how to do it before your competition, you win. It will take them 12 months just to figure out what you have done.

Happy New Year from Professional Blog Service

About the Author: Paul Lorinczi
Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.

Tags: blogging, business blogging, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, social networking, social networks
Posted in Blog ROI, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Analytics | View Comments

Social Media & Internet Creating Communities, Reducing Isolationism

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

I was an early adopter of AOL. In the 832,000s. They hadn’t even cracked a million by that time.

And as the Internet grew more popular, people started worrying that this was destroying communities, increasing isolationism, and making it too easy to shut ourselves off from the outside world.

I was talking with my friend Lalita Amos one day about this idea, and she pointed out that it wasn’t the Internet that destroyed communities, it was television. If anything, the Internet has restored community.

Think about it: Back before the days of TV and radio, you had to rely on everybody else to survive. It took a village just to get through a year, let alone raise a child. You were close to your neighbors, family lived nearby, and you took care of each other.

Then radio and TV came along, and people started spending more time inside. Pretty soon, we were in our houses being entertained.

“Our shared experiences were what we saw on TV,” Lalita said. “It wasn’t what we did together, it was what we all saw on TV and talked about the next day.”

As we got more channels, and as technology advanced, people had more things to watch, with fewer things we held in common.

Now, thanks to things like Facebook, Twitter, and specialized sites like Smaller Indiana, we’re getting connected in ways we never could. We can find people we have odd things in common with. People who like independent coffee shops. People who write radio theatre plays. People who collect marbles. There’s a community for everyone just based on your interests alone.

Or there are mini-communities within geographic communities. I belong to a community of networkers, a community of social media professionals, and a community of Indianapolis Colts fans.

In fact, I met Lalita Amos strictly because of Smaller Indiana and Twitter, two online communities. We never would have met if it hadn’t been for those online communities.

And what do we talk about when we get together? Our shared communities, not television. Thanks to social media, we’re no longer sharing what we watched passively; we’re actively doing things, creating content, sharing ideas, and talking about that.

To all the naysayers who think the Internet is destroying our communities, look again. Sign up for a Facebook account and see if you can find people you went to high school with, used to work with, or have something in common with. Create the community you want, rather than being stuck with the ones you live with.

Tags: community, Social Media, social networking, social networks
Posted in Networking, Social Media, Social Networks | View Comments

19% of Internet Users Are on Twitter

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Want proof that Twitter is not just a flash in the pan? Check out the latest research from Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, and Aaron Smith at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

According to their most recent report, 19% of all Internet Users are now using Twitter or some other micro-blogging service. This has grown from December 2008 and April 2009, when only 11% of Internet users said they used a micro-blogging service. This report follows 10 months after Pew Internet reported that 35% of all adult Internet users have a profile on at least one social network.

In other words, not only are the adult populations on social networks growing, but Twitter and micro-blogging usage is growing as well.

There are three populations who are responsible for this growth: social network users, mobile Internet users, and younger (under 44 years) Internet users.

(Let me first take this opportunity to thank the Pew Internet & American Life Project for recognizing that 42 is still young.)

I was particularly interested in these findings, and the idea that people who are on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are 35% more likely to use Twitter, as compared to the 6% of Twitter users who don’t use anything else.

The message to marketers, public relations flaks, and crisis communicators is that while you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one social media basket, you are more likely to reach people if you stick with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, because they’ll be on more than one network.

Find the two or three networks they’re likely to be on, and focus most of your energies on them creating deep and wide networks, rather than spreading yourself out to 8 – 10 different networks and keeping a shallow presence on each of them.

(Hat tip to my good friend Lalita Amos for turning me on to Pew Internet & American Life. These guys are a font of information!)

Tags: micro-blogging, Pew Internet & American Life, social networks, twitter
Posted in Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

How Health Departments Can Use Twitter to Monitor Public Health Emergencies

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

This post was originally published at the DeckersMarketing.com blog

A couple years ago, I worked at the Indiana State Department of Health as the Risk Communication Director, otherwise known as “Oh shit!” PR. (Because that was my first reaction every time one of the epidemiologists called me with an emergency like this recall of lead-contaminated children’s library toys (my first incident, two weeks after I started the job. I swore a lot that week). Or this. Or this. That’s when I had to deal with the media, who sometimes had the same reaction.)

When I was the ISDH, we still had our feet firmly planted in the 20th century. Sure, we were using email and BlackBerrys to communicate with each other, but it was 2006 and we were, well, using email and BlackBerrys to communicate with each other. To make matters worse, if we had to email each of the state’s 94 local health departments (LHDs) – we had a distribution list, which made life easier – it could quickly get clogged with Reply Alls, email threads that were miles long, and 94 people all chiming in at once with a their thoughts about what to do about this particular incident, or what everyone’s response should be.

We occasionally did exercises with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, and they had an expensive piece of software that was supposed to monitor this sort of thing, but it was heavy and cumbersome and a general pain in the ass to learn, let alone use. You could put in information, sort of like a wiki, but it was awkward to access, and you couldn’t easily find the information if you weren’t familiar with it.

Enter Twitter. It slices, it dices, it lets you easily follow as many people as you want. For free. (And since state and federal government budgets are being cut, especially those in the Preparedness world, free is about the only way to get new technology now.)

With the increased popularity of Twitter, this has become an important tool for anyone in the crisis response business to use. And since many first responders use BlackBerrys, this is still a viable option.

So how can 94 LHDs hop on the Twitter bandwagon and use it to keep up with what’s going on in your district, the state, or even the country. Here’s a step by step process of what to do, what to use, and where to find it.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your LHD. Go to www.Twitter.com, and sign up for one using your county and title. If you’re the Local Public Health Coordiantor (LPHC) for Clark County, register as Clark_LPHC. If you work for the state, use the agency acronym and your title (ISDH_RiskComm)(Government types LOVE standardized naming systems, and this makes it easy for people to see where you’re from, and what you do. Plus, it makes you NIMS compliant.)

Be sure to fill out your bio, including your role and the name of your local health department. Be sure to include the name of the state too. (You’ll see why in a minute.). Try to avoid abbreviations like LPHC, in your bio.

“Bob Smith is the Local Public Health Coordinator for the Clark County Health Department in Indiana.”

If you want to set up a personal account, be sure to use your home or private email. Don’t tie it in to your work account. If you leave the position, you don’t want to lose access to this account.

IMPORTANT: During setup, click the Protect My Updates box if you want to keep your Tweets (Twitter messages) private. This may be important during a public health emergency. If you want the public to be able to follow you, consider setting up an account for the whole department (ClarkCounty_HD).

2. Go to http://search.twitter.com or www.Twitterment.com and do a search for other LPHCs. Use “Public Health” and “Indiana” in your search terms. Follow those people. You will also receive an email whenever someone follows you. You’ll need to approve them, since you protected your account.

3. Download TweetDeck, a Twitter client you can use on your computer desktop. You can create different columns to collect groups of people you follow. Create a group for your district, and one for your county emergency response departments (because you’re going to get them to use this, right?).

I also like Twhirl, a client that lets you run several accounts in several windows at once (TweetDeck doesn’t). However, Twhirl only has a single column view, not groups, like TweetDeck. You may have to make a tradeoff, or during an incident, run both programs on two different computers or monitors.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss how health departments and first response agencies can use Twitter to monitor public health emergencies.

Tags: Indiana State Department of Health, local health departments, Social Media, social networks, twitter
Posted in Crisis Communication, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

Most Corporations Block Social Media

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

When I worked in crisis communications at the Indiana State Department of Health, I was blocked from a number of sites that I actually needed for my job, and had to get special permission to be able to see. Once, when the State Health Commissioner had made a video that was put on YouTube, everyone in the department was blocked from ever seeing it.

This apparently is not uncommon at all. According to a survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100+ employees, 54% of them completely block employees from using social networking sites at work.

Why? Because, depending on how you look at it, most corporations don’t believe employees should enjoy themselves at work or a lot of employees will abuse that access and waste boatloads of time at work.

I think it’s a combination of both.

According to the survey, which was done by Robert Half Techonology, only 10% of those surveyed let employees use social networks with no restrictions. The remaining 36% have some sort of restriction, like only allowing it to be used for business purposes. The actual results are as follows:

Prohibited completely – 54%
Permitted for business purposes only – 19%
Permitted for limited personal use – 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use – 10%

I remember a discussion I had with a friend about whether his large corporate employer would start using social media as a company.

“No, because we don’t want the secretaries updating their Facebook pages all day,” was his response.

“But it’s more than that,” I said. “It’s the marketing department trying to reach your customers and end users. It’s promoting your product in the places where the people actually are, not in newspapers and cable TV advertising in every city in America.”

“Yeah, but the secretaries will update their Facebook pages all day,” he said again.

Ah, the old “if we let one person do it, we have to let everyone else do it” excuse. I hate that excuse.

I understand that you’re going to have people who are going to abuse their privileges, but they thought the same thing about giving employees phones, email, and computers years ago. While some people will screw it up for everyone, you can deal with those people.

Social media is becoming more and more prevalent, and regardless of what your company does/sells/produces, your customers are already on there. If you’re a government agency, your citizens are using social media for communication. If you’re a nonprofit, your donors and volunteers oare on social media.

So why aren’t you?

Sure, your secretaries may update their Facebook pages, but deal with that situation when it arises. Don’t screw up a good marketing tool for your sales and marketing people because you have staffers with work-life boundary issues.

Try some of these solutions instead:

Give your marketing people access to launch any social media marketing or communication. Monitor the results and the time they spend on it. If you see abuse, shut it back down.
Anyone who handles emergency response should have immediate access to social networking tools and permission to use them as they see fit. Believe it or not, “playing” on Facebook and Twitter is actually useful when it comes to establishing credibility and building up followers and/or journalists. (On the other hand, playing Pirate Clan or Castle Age for hours does not constitute any kind of credibility building. Crisis communicators, don’t screw this one up here!)
Let your customer service have access to Twitter and show them how to use it. Frank Eliason — @ComcastCares — shook up the customer service and Twitter worlds when he dragged Comcast into the 21st century by creating a Twitter account for the beleaguered cable company. Read Twitter Marketing for Dummies on how to use Twitter for customer service. (Full disclosure/complete bragging: Even though my name is not on the cover, I co-wrote this book. It’s a long story for another blog post.)
Let several of your trusted employees use social media and use it to answer marketing and customer service issues on the different social networks, forums, etc. People are already talking about you online. Let some of your employees respond, answer questions, handle problems, thank, and maybe even defend your company online.

Tags: facebook, Social Media, social networks, twitter
Posted in Social Media, Social Networks, Tools, Twitter | View Comments

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