10 free tools to manage your personal brand and online reputation
Personal branding dilemma (Photo credit: stefano principato)
Do you Google yourself and find another person with your same name pops on the screen?
Want to prevent a recruiter from seeing those drunk college photos that your friends posted on Facebook?
Want others find out quickly who you are, what you do and what content you are sharing online?
If your answer to all those questions is “yes” then you will want to monitor and be proactive about your personal brand and online reputation.
Managing your personal brand and online reputation is not an easy task but here are 10 FREE tools that can help:
This website is a great way to manage and take ownership of your search results. This tool makes sure that the search engines like Google and Bing find the “real” you and not someone else who may have a name close to your name (or in some cases the same name). It helps you put your most relevant results at the top and improves your personal brand.
2. About Me
This website helps you create your own personal homepage that is a central place for all of your online website properties like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and blog. This tool can help you improve your presence on the web and help others quickly learn about who you are and what you share online.
This tool sends you alerts of your keywords. It analyzes when you are mentioned and how important those mentions really are. In other words, it is social media search engine. It searches user-generated content like blogs, bookmarks, comments and videos.
This tool is similar to SocialMention in that it alerts you of your mentions. It helps you search for conversations that you care about the most.
5. NameChk
Want to know if your name is available on a social network? This tool is helpful in making sure you secure your domains and don’t let cybersquatters steal your name on social networks. It helps you figure out if your desired social media username or URL is still available on tons of social networks.
6. HootSuite
This tool helps you manage and measure your social media presence in one simple dashboard. You can manage multiple social media profiles, schedule messages and tweets, track mentions of your name and analyze social media traffic.
These alerts are still a must-do today for searching for the keywords you want to know about such as your name or nickname. It also helps you stay up-to-date on keywords you are interested in like public relations, content marketing, brand journalism or social media.
This tools notifies you when your personal data like email address or phone number gets published online. This helps you keep up-to-date on what information is being published about you and whether you need to take action or not.
9. Yasni
This tool can help you search for a phone number, email address, profession and location of any person. The tool provides news and links about any individual.
10. Naymz
This tool measures and manages your social reputation. This tool gives you a score based on how people find you. You can calculate your social influence and earn badges/endorsements of your strong reputation and influence like Klout does.
What free tools have you found helpful to manage your personal brand and online reputation?
The 7 Cs of a successful social media strategy
A lot of people and companies decide, after using social media for a while, that they need a strategy. Of course, that approach is like putting the cart before the horse. To ensure success, think about your social media strategy in the context of the seven C’s.
1. Community
Like all good communication, it is best to start by determining your target audience. Where do they spend time online? What social media channels do they use? Before your social media efforts can take shape, you should listen and learn about your community. For example, a B2C consumer goods brand like Oreo, one of their top social media communities is Facebook. Their recent salute to the Mars landing was a huge hit with their 27 million Facebook fans. For a job seeker, he or she will most likely find a community on LinkedIn because according to a recent survey, 93 percent of job recruiters use LinkedIn to find qualified candidates.
Finding out where your community interacts on social media is the first step of a successful social media strategy. It is important to first determine what type of conversations are taking place about your brand and in your industry before engaging in a community or building a community from scratch. If you decide that your brand should build a community from the ground up, you should learn from Gini Dietrich (@ginidietrich) and how she build an engaged community on the popular Spin Sucks blog or you may want to talk to Mark Ragan (@markraganceo), the publisher of the Ragan’s PR Daily.
2. Content
After you figure out how your community engages with social media, you should next figure out what content you are going to share with your followers. For example, if you are looking to grow your personal brand, what articles are you going to share to highlight your expertise about your job or personal interests? If you are a company, how can you show your clients and prospects that you are a thought leader or that you are trying to make their lives easier? To learn more about the importance of content, you may want to read the Content Marketing Institute blog.
3. Curation
You can’t think about content, without mentioning curation. Curation is a way of sharing other people’s content. According to Beth Kanter (@kanter) in her post Content Curation Primer, content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way. Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava) in his post Manifesto for the Content Curator defines a content curator as someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content a specific issue. Content curation is one of the easiest ways to share content because you don’t have to create anything. This leads well into the next “C”: creation.
4. Creation
Creation is the act of creating content online, whether it be in the form of text, images or video. If you have posted a blog post, uploaded a video to YouTube or took a picture and posted it to Instagram, you are in the creation business. One of the ways to help you create content is to create an editorial calendar. It may be helpful to use this editorial calendar template. If you don’t like spreadsheets, then you may want to consider using an application like Divvy. For the more advance content creators, using a content marketing software platform like Kapost should be something you consider.
5. Connection
After you have either curated and/or created content, the next C is the physical act of sharing content. This C is about connecting with your community and getting a deep understanding of what your target audience likes about your social media activities and strategy. Based on measurements and data, what content are your communities attracted to and willing to share with their friends and colleagues?
Many brands today have created buyer personas so they can better understand and connect better with their target audience. In other words, personas are fictional representations of your ideal clients, based on real data about demographics, online behavior, along with educated assumptions about their history, motivations and concerns. On the personal branding side, use these 5 tools to manage your relationships online.
6. Conversation
This C is all about having a conversation with your community. This C is very similar to the community, but the important difference is the actual engagement part of communicating with your communities. To help you with this concept, learn the 3 key social media conversation starters.
7. Conversion
The seventh C is conversion. You can’t talk about social media without having a return on investment (ROI) conversation. The important thing to remember here is that your social media strategy should be tied to your business strategy. To help you get started, you may want to look at these 14 social media ROI metrics.
When thinking about this from the company perspective, it is important to remember to look at it two ways: the external view by your clients and prospects and the internal view by your employees. To develop a successful social media strategy, it is important to communication, convince and most importantly, convert social media into action, both externally and internally. Whether your social media metrics are at your company, they will be boil down to three main categories: awareness, sales and loyalty.
On the personal branding side, social media is a way to help you advance your career—whether it be successfully climbing the corporate ladder or launching a successful business. You can judge the success of your personal social media strategy by whether or not you are top of mind with your network and whether it helps you get that interview or land that perfect job.
One of the ways to maximize conversion with your social media strategy, you may want to learn about the social media maturity model. According to Forrester, there are 5 main stages of social media maturity and adoption.
More than 7 C’s
In conclusion, a successful social media strategy should include: finding and engaging your communities and/or building a new community; making sure you have the right mix of content curation and creation (according to research, the sweet spot of curation to creation is 60-40); connecting well with your community; having relevant and meaningful conversations; and converting on your goals. Just like the 4 P’s of marketing has grown to the 9’s P’s of marketing, I am sure there are more C’s than seven. What C’s would you add to this list?
Some additional resources
You don’t have to take my word for it. There is a lot of great information online about developing a social media strategy. Some my favorite blog posts on this topic include the post by Amy Porterfield (@amyporterfield) on the Social Media Examiner about the 3 steps to an effective social media strategy, the post by Jay Baer (@jaybaer) on his blog Convince and Convert about how to develop a social media strategy in 7 steps and the post by B.L. Ochman (@whatsnext) on Mashable about the three things you should know about social media strategy.
5 ways to create expert content with limited resources
In the world of tighter budgets, less staff and more workflow, who has time to write content? How much do you have to write to be effective? Why write it at all?
A recent business study showed that 75 percent of buyers are likely to use social media in the purchase process and 55 percent of B2B survey respondents search for information using social sites. Remember all those social platforms you put up for your company? Better have something to say on them, or better yet, have something to pass along. Content is your currency, make it worth sharing within your target community!
Below are five ideas on how you can create expert content, with limited resources:
1. Curate
This is the cornerstone of a robust content management program. Similar to a museum curator, you don’t create the artwork; you collect and assemble it into a relevant showpiece. This involves organizing just where you are going to get your content from, and that’s not Wikipedia. A well-organized collection of useful information will motivate your audience not only to read, but also share with others.
Just ask Guy Kawasaki. He’s a master curator, employing a staff to help sort through the mountains of information buzzing across the web. In fact he uses Twitter to send folks to his website at Alltop.com by tweeting links to his “online magazine rack,” in other words, the content he has aggregated from original sources.
Trusted, credible sources are key to curating good content. Start by building a go-to list of sites that you rely on regularly. For me, as a social businessperson, a few I subscribe to via email for updates are:
In addition, I use Facebook to like pages such as Mashable.com/tech to get all the technology news by the master curated site on the web.
2. Crowdsourcing
Here’s yet another way of collecting knowledge from different sources, where the aggregated collection is the value. You’ll want to ask subject matter experts in your network a specific topic based question or two and aggregate your findings. Here’s an example of expert shared tips, which makes for a perfect published piece: Laptop Life Tips: Experts Share 10 Tricks To Make Your Computer Last Longer.
Or you can take a more public poll. Facebook recently added a Poll app called “Ask a Question.” Survey Monkey also allows free surveys and gives you a link to drive traffic to. LinkedIn Answers offers a chance to ask industry professionals for feedback and opinions.
Here’s a question: “What percentage of your marketing budget are you going to use on creating content this year?”
3. Comment
I just read a story about Big Data and where it’s headed. Well, if I’m a systems architect, I just may have a lot to say about that. I cite the story, and then add my commentary. It’s also good practice to notify its author and build a warm relationship. Follow him/her on their social sites as well, you’re building press credentials for later.
4. Use Numbers and Lists
Research shows that the highest rated posts on the web organize their content into numerical lists. 5 ways to create content, 3 top server consolidation methods, 7 of your favorite blogs (this one included). A list that is well sourced and has meaning will inspire your readers to comment and engage. No room for fluff here. Quality is the key as shown in this article by HubSpot, “The Top 10 Qualities of High Quality List Posts.”
5. Interview
My colleague, Kathy Tito, from New England Sales & Marketing does this very well. In “The Bootstrap” blog, she finds people of interest in technology marketing and interviews them Q and A style in a candid, no-nonsense way. Not only does it make for some great storytelling, but also she has acquired some great business contacts along the way.
What would you add to this list? How are you creating content with limited resources?
This post is courtesy of guest blogger Anita O’Malley, who is a social and marketing business communications expert. She recently curated her own company, Perspectiv3. She can be reached at anitaom@perspectivmarketing.com.
When is the best time to tweet?
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We all want our tweets to get noticed, read and retweeted—whether they are your personal tweets or you are tweeting on behalf of a brand.
The purpose of this blog post is to give you some information about what research says about the best time to tweet and show you some tools so you can tailor your tweeting times to your followers’ habits.
Time of Day
According to the Twitter vs. Time infographic produced by the marketing company Lemon.ly referencing Twitter and Sysomos data, the most traffic on Twitter occurs between 9 to 11 a.m. ET and 1 to 3 p.m. ET. According to Hubspot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella’s research, the best time to tweet is 5 p.m. ET. The takeaway: Spread your tweets out throughout the day with an emphasis toward later in the day.
Time Zone
Pulling data from Dan Zarrella, the Science of Social Timing infographic created by KISSMetrics, shows that the breakdown of tweets in U.S. 48% of tweets are from the East Coast, 33% of tweets are from the Central time zone and 14% are from the West Coast. It is important to remember that nearly 80% of the general U.S. population is located in the Central and Eastern time zones. The takeaway: Think East Coast time.
Day of the Week
According to Dan Zarrella’s How to Get More Clicks on Twitter, you are more likely to get clicks on your Twitter links toward the end of the week and weekends. From my personal experience, I have been successful with Sunday evenings. In terms of followers clicking on your Twitter links, followers are more likely to do so on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The takeaway: Don’t forget about the weekends.
Tools
Optimizing you or your brand’s daily tweeting habits is important in making sure you reach your followers. I found 13 tools that can help you figure out and maximize the timing of your tweets.
1. WhenToTweet. This tool will help you figure out when most of your followers are online.
2. TweetWhen. This free tool shows you the best times to tweet based on your past 1,000 tweets.
3. Tweriod. This free tool looks at you and your Twitter followers’ tweets to provide times on when you should tweet.
4. TweetStats. This free tool will show you detailed analysis of your best tweeting time.
5. Timely. This free tool analyzes your past 199 tweets and figures out the best time slots for you to tweet.
6. Tweue. This free tool is basically a Twitter queue that will evenly space up to 10 tweet from 15 minutes to eight hours apart.
7. TweetReports. This free tool gathers the stats from your top 25 influential followers and analyzes the times where keywords are talked about the most, and when you may want to participate in these conversations.
8. Lookacross. This paid tool (30-day free trial) to find the best time to reach people.
9. 14Blocks. A paid tool ($5-$49/month) that analyzes your followers’ activities to find out the best times to tweet each day of the week.
10. Socialflow. A paid tool ($1 for first month) publishes your content when it will resonate the most with your Twitter followers.
11. Hootsuite. A free web-based social media dashboard that allows you to queue up and post updates in a timely fashion.
12. Buffer. This free app allows you to add articles, photos and videos to it anytime of the day and then it automatically shares them throughout the day
13. TweetDeck. This free tool allows you to schedule tweets and can help you manage your social media platforms.
Conclusion: Success Lies in Frequency Not Timing
In the end, success on Twitter does not rely on when you tweet but how frequently you tweet. Not too much but not too little. If you post at least 5 times a day, spaced throughout the day, you will mostly likely achieve the maximum impact of your tweets.
7 ways social media is changing PR
Social media is a game changer for public relations. It is bringing new challenges and opportunities to the profession and to savvy pros. I have outlined seven ways that social media is changing PR.
- Two-way conversation. PR pros can no longer blast out information about their brand or client and expect to succeed. Consumers and journalists have come to expect that they won’t be “spammed” and will be answered quickly and in a personal manner. Timely, two-way communication is the “new normal.” Listening, engagement and thought leadership are now three areas that PR pros manage.
- Digital communication. PR pros need to know the latest digital tools, including social media monitoring tools, Twitter, Google Analytics. They need to understand blogging and the tools that come with that. We need to understand the nuance of communication for different online communities. (ie. between communicating on Twitter and/or Facebook.)
- Research. The social networks offer a wealth of information to PR pros on target markets, customer service, and media they want to pitch. They can now create new opportunities that may not have been available before without social media.
- Journalism is changing. Traditional media is no longer the “go to” source for information. The news can “break” from anywhere and the general public has become citizen journalists. For example, look at the U.S. Airways crash into the Hudson River or Michael Jackson’s death. The consumer no longer relies on big news organizations to be on the scene for news. Companies are, in essence, becoming media companies and their PR pros are becoming publishers. Be sure to read How is Social Media NOT Journalism?
- Faster and more visible communications. In our 24/7 customer-centric world, social media has increased the potential for complaints and the visibility of this negative outcry. Since we live in a social network, crises happen faster, and response time must be as well. It is important for PR pros to develop their organization or client online presence BEFORE a crisis happens. Because technology is always changing, the crisis plan needs to become a “living” document that helps give an immediate and well-informed response to the latest information.
- Analytics. PR pros need to understand and use math everyday. Social media can better help track the return on investment, including direct costs of staff time spent using the tools, and measurement of the traffic it drives to a company’s website.
- Organizational hierarchy change. Internal and external communications have been democratized thanks to social media taking out the extra layers such as a direct line to the CEO if you are an internal or external stakeholder.
What would you add to this list? How do you think social media has changed PR?
This post originally appeared on the blog Spin Sucks.
Top 10 viral YouTube videos of all time
Image via CrunchBase
We all love video. So I thought it would be fitting to create a post on the 10 best viral YouTube videos of all time.
In doing research for this post, I saw many other top viral video lists varied based a number of variables and criteria. Basically, the list depends on how you slice and dice it. In other words, these types of posts are very subjective. So what really makes up a viral YouTube video for this list?
Here’s my criteria:
- The video needed to reach a large age range
- Be a part of pop culture
- You can watch it on YouTube
- Ranked by number of YouTube views
To help create this post, I referenced the YouTube Chart of all-time most viewed videos.
Here’s my list:
10. Lazy Sunday – Saturday Night Live
Views: 5 million +++ (taken down by NBC from YouTube so not sure final count)
9. Evian Babies
Views: 14 million +
8. Old Spice – The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Views: 30 million +
7. Will it Blend? iPad version
Views: 10 million + (note: many different versions of “Will It Blend” so I ranked this higher)
6. Numa Numa
Views: 41 million +
5. Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question
Views: 49 million +
Views: 60 million +
3. D&*K in the Box – Saturday Night Live
Views: 24 million + (owned by NBC so numbers are off – most likely tons more than listed on YouTube)
Views: 85 million +
Views: 168 million +
What video(s) would you add to this list?
7 ways to avoid common PR campaign pitfalls
Managing a PR campaign takes a lot of hard work and effort. To ensure success of your PR campaigns, you should avoid these seven common pitfalls or mistakes.
No integration. A campaign is more than a news release. Most successful campaigns know how to take advantage of a multi-channel campaign that uses online and offline PR tactics, including developing a media kit, writing a blog post, producing a video and/or podcast, organizing a Tweetup or event for key stakeholders. If all the components of the campaign don’t integrate, the campaign has a lower chance of being successful.
Lack of alignment and availability. Think about the key stakeholders in your organization and how they are going to be affected by this PR campaign. Is your key spokespeople who works in another department available to talk at moment’s notice on a blog, to traditional media, answer Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn questions?
Lack of proper positioning. There is nothing worse than not understanding how a PR campaign fits into your overall marketing strategy. Marketing positioning is very important for a product, brand or organization. What is your company’s identity and how will this campaign reinforce an image that has been branded into the minds of your target audience? How will this campaign help with Search Engine Optimization? In other words, does the PR campaign highlight all the keywords that your audience may type into a search?
Too self-centered. Make sure that you solve your customer(s) problem(s) with the PR campaign. Make sure you think about how this will help your target audience. A journalist is more likely to write about something if the PR campaign can help its audience.
No newsworthy components. As a PR pro, you need to put on your journalist hat and think like the media. Why should anybody care? Or what is in it for me? Be sure to read: What Makes a Story Newsworthy? It is very important that you read, listen and/or watch the media outlets you are pitching for the PR campaign.
Not sustainable. Often times, a PR campaign is great at creating initial buzz but is forgotten months later. You should create what is called the PR longtail on the Internet. Making sure that the content you write today can still be applicable in some way tomorrow is important for long-term success of the campaign. Also, make sure the concept of the campaign is created in a way that it can be adapted to many different audiences.
Don’t know target audience. Who is the audience for your PR campaign? Make sure that you not only know what target audience you are trying to reach with the campaign but what media outlets or online influencers would most likely be interested. Make sure you do your homework.
What would you add to this list?
Image courtsey of DoktorSpinn.
10 tips to become a more successful PR pro
In today’s ultra-competitive PR world you need to find ways to stand out. Following are 10 things that continue to help me become a more successful PR pro. I hope they help you, too.
- Do your homework. A mass pitch never amasses a lot of coverage. Before you pitch a journalist or blogger, know what they cover. Research their past stories and fine tune your pitch to appeal to their audience.
- Learn something new. Take a training course. Sign up for a conference. Go back to school. Take an online certification like HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification. You may find out you know more than you think.
- Become a better writer. Practice being a “headline communicator” by learning how to hook your audience with your first five words. Find creative ways to flex your writing muscle. Become a contributing author to an industry publication. Start your own blog or write for your company’s blog.
- Develop deeper relationships. Remember how powerful and memorable handwritten thank you notes are in today’s online world. Look for new and creative ways to keep yourself top of mind in the eyes of your stakeholders. Don’t forget that relationships are best built face-to-face than over the phone or on a computer.
- Learn how to better manage the yes. This is a twist on managing the no. Learn how to better manage the expectations of others. Make sure that you set the scope of work and discuss desirable outcomes. Make sure you always under-promise and over-deliver.
- Prioritize. When you feel overwhelmed by multiple large projects, step back and remember what’s most important to accomplish today. Create a to-do list at the end of every day, so when you come into work the next morning you know what you need to do first.
- Be more resourceful. If you can’t reach a journalist or blogger over the phone or by email, search for them on Twitter and send them a message. Find creative ways to pitch beyond the standard press release. Seek out the stories journalists are working on by using services like HARO and NewsBasis.
- Take advantage of social media. More journalists are using social media to find story ideas and sources. Use sites like Muck Rack, MediaOnTwitter, and Journalist Tweets to find out who’s online and how to contact them.
- Network, Network, Network. Join professional PR associations like PRSA or IABC or Ragan. Become a member of your local Social Media Club. Participate in Twitter chats. You never know when a relationship may help you with your current job or finding a future one.
- Use free PR tools. Read Jeremy Porter’s 13 PR resources you may have overlooked post. There are many tools out there that can help you deliver tremendous value to your brand or client – without spending a dime.
What tips would you add to this list?
This post originally appeared on the blog Spin Sucks.
7 ways to win friends and influence others on Facebook
One of my favorite books is “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. It recently occurred to me that a lot of what he writes in the book applies to interactions on Facebook.
Facebook is having a tremendous impact on many of the top brands in the the world. For example, Starbucks is one of the top brands on Facebook because it recognizes and rewards its consumers.
Here are seven ways you can help your brand or client win friends and influence others on Facebook.
1. Arouse in the other person an eager want.
Figure out what the customer really wants from your Facebook page. Why are they coming to your Facebook page and why do they ‘like’ it? Is it because of conversation? Engagement with fans of similar interests? Discounts? Special offers? To benchmark other top brands for ideas, check out the Facebook page leaderboard on the PageData section of InsideFacebook.com. According to the site, Texas Hold’em Poker is number one. It is interesting to note that since Facebook changed its language from ‘fan’ to ‘like’, the entertainment brands have seen an increase, according to ClickZ.
2. Become genuinely interested in other people.
Contribute relevant content on your wall (and if you have a discussion tab) to stimulate conversation. Make sure that each person who ‘likes’ your Facebook page knows that the brand cares about them in a genuine way. Your Facebook page should be generating conversation among your loyal fans not spamming them with marketing messages that are irrelevant to them.
3. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Update content consistently and ask a lot of questions. Asking questions is a sure way of getting them to talk about themselves. But it is important to make sure that when you ask these questions that you listen so that you can ask better questions the next time. While the number of people who ‘like’ your Facebook page is important, those who actively engage with you is even more important for your brand. To learn more about how to engage your fans, check out these two great Mashable articles: four ways to increase Facebook fan engagement and five inspiring case studies for Facebook fan pages.
4. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
Why do people want to become a fan of your page? Why do they like your content? Learn what interests your target audience has beyond just the interactions with your brand. Conducting research is important to really getting to know all of the interests of your brand advocates. Throughout all of your social media platforms, you can get a bigger picture of what really interests your audience.
5. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
It is important that you generate new fans and keep your current fans happy. To keep them happy, recognize the people who create or share the most information about your brand. For example, create a loyalty rewards card where your fan collect points or badges or stars. Something where you encourage your fans to keep coming back for more and more. Highlight on your Facebook page, stories that represent your “ideal fan.” Perhaps develop a “fan of the day” or “fan of the week” on your page where you continually make your fans feel like they are an important part of everything you do as a brand. For more information, check out: how to recognize and reward your brand’s top fans.
6. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
In social media, it is important that you give sincere appreciation. A simple “thank you” needs to go deeper. You need to give them something of value such as free ticket, a coupon, exclusive access, gift certificate or a momento. Something creative to show them that you really appreciate them and are thankful that they are a brand advocate.
7. Throw down a challenge.
Create a contest. Be creative. For example, you can create a user-generated content contest about why they are your biggest fan. Or you can create a contest where they take a video or photo about using your product or service. Or create a contest with a large prize such as a trip, cash or meeting your brand celebrity. Check out these posts: leveraging social media for contest promotion and five tips for creating a successful social media contest.
For more information on how to win friends and influence others on Facebook, check out these other five resources.
#FollowFriday: Justin Brunner
Justin Brunner, a corporate communications manager at Standard Parking, and I met over Twitter. So it seemed fitting to find out more about him in 140 characters or less. Justin is responsible for the construction of their intranet, creation of their publications, development of their corporate messaging and managing their social media platforms.
In honor of Twitter’s #FollowFriday, here is a quick Q&A with him on everything digital media. I encourage you to follow him on Twitter (@justinspage) and subscribe to his blog, The Justinarim. Happy Friday!
Q: Tell me about yourself.
A: Recent Chicago transplant with a 7-year communications & marketing background; Texas native; Navy vet; lover of tennis, travel and fashion.
Q: Tell me about your experience as Standard Parking as the lead communicator.
A: My primary role is to oversee the delivery of information. My goals for year one: 1) assess 2) create strategy 3) implement and 4) measure.
Q: What has been your experience between understanding social media and implementing it?
A: Understanding what works best for your specific needs is hard. Constantly creating new content is tough. Implementation is the easy part.
Q: How do you define social media?
A: A direct, 2-way conversation across an online platform, primarily utilized for information sharing and creation of ideas.
Q: Who “owns” social media at Standard Parking?
A: Corporate communication oversees the company account & monitors overall company activity. Field marketing handles location-specific accounts.
Q: What is the purpose of social media?
A: It opens a direct dialog with your stakeholders (customers, clients, potential clients or competitors) and creates corporate transparency.
Q: How do you measure success in social media?
A: Success is the $40M question! I think it depends on the goals & objectives. Ask what can you get out of it then see if you’re measuring up.
Q: What social media metrics make the most impact on the C-suite?
A: I like things like influence and retweets. Twitalyzer and HootSuite are great for this.
Q: What social media tools/sites are you most comfortable with?
A: We currently utilize Facebook and Twitter. We’re still relatively new at this on the C-level.
Q: What is the biggest mistake that people make in social media?
A: I think there are two: Placing a dollar figure (ROI, etc) on engagement and whoever has the most friends/followers wins. It’s about quality.
Q: What social media tips would you give my readers?
A: Have a plan and be consistent. If you don’t know where you’re going then why go at all. And, if you go silent, no one will hear you.
Q: What are you favorite social media blogs?
A: Brian Solis, Copyblogger, Olivier Blanchard, Online PR, Scott Meis, Seth Godin, Strategic Public Relations, Todd Defren – PR Squared
Q: Who influences you the most on Twitter?
A: People that take the time to respond to your comments or provide a solution when you need it.
Q: What would you tell a “newbie” about the value of Twitter?
A: You only get out of it what you put in. Post relevant items that you feel are valuable to your audience. Try, try, try and you’ll get there.
Q: Your Twitter profile says you are an opinionated problem solver. What problem caused you to be the most opinionated?
A: When people told me to, “Stop asking ‘why’!”
