#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’!”

Show your constituents some love

By Matt Lindsay

We’ve been featuring Alumni Valentines in our GW Colonial Cable alumni e-newsletter for three years running. I typically have some trouble finding couples to profile, but this year was different.

We leveraged social networks and asked couples whose relationship began at GW to share their stories. I posted a message to our GW Alumni LinkedIn Group and on Twitter (@GWAlumni) and watched the messages rolled in.

We received 25+ stories, more than enough for our e-newsletter, and enough to spill over into a “More Alumni Valentines” story next month. The story received two to three times as many click-throughs as our traditional feature story in our e-newsletter.

On this Valentine’s Day I encourage you to show your constituents some love by engaging them across your social networks to help you tell more interesting stories.

Know Your Audience

We try to segment our social media outlets and target our messages accordingly. Here is how we focus our communications on each of the GW Alumni social networks (recognizing there is some audience overlap):

LinkedIn– Build awareness of career services, opportunities, and news, encourage peer connections, find story ideas, and open conversation through “discussions”

Twitter – Quick hits to build prestige around the university and its alumni (top news and prominent alumni), support relationships, and find story ideas

Facebook – Promote events, share regional-specific information, encourage peer connections

YouTube – Share highlights from alumni and university events, build awareness of leadership in the university and alumni association

Flickr – Repository for event photos, maintain engagement

Social media is by its nature not about simply pushing information out, but learning about your constituents needs and engaging them in dialogue. GW graduate and social media consultant Steve Goldner recommends bringing an “LCR mentality” to your social media outreach – Listen, Conversation, Relationships.

One powerful way to encourage conversations and build relationships is by soliciting advice and feedback from your audience on story ideas. In this case, the quality of our engagement through social media is just as important as the quantity.

Recognize Your Reach…and Limitations

For most organizations, social media provides another platform to reach a certain segment of your audience. Our largest GW Alumni social network – LinkedIn, with 10,430 members – only represents about 5% of our alumni population.

According to research by Forrester (see Josh Bernoff’s post on Social Technographics) 17 percent of U.S. online adults are “inactive” on social networks and the largest percentage group are simply “spectators” who read, listen and watch, but do not take an active role in a conversation.

It is important to use a variety of communication platforms in your outreach. For our Alumni Valentines feature I solicited names of couples during in-person conversations, through e-mails, and on social networks. The story was e-mailed out through our e-newsletter, featured on our website, and posted on our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages. The piece included a call to action for others to share their Alumni Valentine stories, which allows us to build off the original story.

Create Winning Content Through Collaboration

Some people are more interesting in 140 characters than others. Some videos on YouTube become viral hits and others flounder. Some individuals on LinkedIn spark thought-provoking discussions, while others come off as completely self-promotional. And some stories in your e-newsletter receive more click-throughs than others.

Creating content that resonates remains crucial. Develop content with input from your constituents on a variety of social networks and share that content across several different platforms. You will engage more individuals, hear more ideas, and produce a better end product.

How have you seen success by engaging your social networks in developing content?

This post is courtesy of guest blogger Matt Lindsay (@lindsam8). Matt is the director of alumni communications at The George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C.

10 ways to grow your Twitter influence

How do you grow your influence and measure it on Twitter?

That is the question that many companies, organizations and individuals are trying to answer, now more than ever.

Edelman has created a popular tool that measures an individual’s importance on Twitter called TweetLevel. This tool can help you understand and quantify the importance levels of Tweeters and their usage of Twitter. However, judging a person’s true level of ‘influence’ is tough to define, even though many people have provided a great start.

While doing research for this blog post, I came across several great articles, blog posts and resources to share. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote a great piece about 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers. Social media expert Brian Solis has a post about Make tweet love – Top tips for building Twitter relationships and prevential.com has an excellent resource titles How to attract and influence people on Twitter.

With all this information on this topic, I brainstormed my own list of tips for my readers to share ways to boost your ranking on this social media platform. Below you’ll find my top 10 ways to grow your Twitter influence.

1. Think like a reporter or a copy editor. With only 140 characters, every word, space and punctuation counts. Make sure each tweet is so compelling that your followers will stop to read what you have to say in the crowded and noisy Twitter universe. Today, it is all about telling a story and telling it well.

2. Content is King. Make sure you have content that is worth posting and that engages your followers and prospective followers. The Internet Activity Index released by the Online Publishers Association provides a unique way of looking at consumer engagement online.

3. Be generous. Engage with other tweeters by re-tweeting content that you find interesting. Think of your tweets as your online journal that you can reference on your public timeline. It is easy to RT tweets that you like of others — and the added bonus is that you’ll have those tweets in your stream for future reference. Not only are you helping yourself, you are spreading the word for others. People you RT will be more likely to follow you back and spread the word about you.

4. Be a resource for others. Add value with each tweet or retweet. Make sure that when you are tweeting, you treat each one like an email. Sending too many emails decreases your credibility. Make sure that when you have something to say, your followers think it’s worthwhile.

5. Take Twitter offline. Arrange for a phone call or coffee meeting with interesting tweeps that you follow. Or attend or create a Tweet-up in your area. Check out Twtvite, an event manager tool that helps you create and learn about TweetUps.

6. Listen. Try to read of your followers Tweets and follow the most popular hashtags like #SocialMedia and #FollowFriday and industry hashtags that affect your job or interests like #PR or #Marketing. I would also suggest checking out the #hashtags Web site that tracks the most popular hashtags on Twitter and provides details about those hashtags.

7. Be relevant. Try as much as possible to link to articles or post something that is new and newsworthy. For example, I recently tweeted an article from TMZ that claimed the Tiger Woods injuries in the car accident were caused by his wife, not his collision. It was one of my most popular tweets.

8. Quality over Quantity. There is a big temptation to get as many followers as possible. The key is to have a quality following over a large quantity of followers. As Twitter becomes more popular, more and more spammers (and the porn industry) will want to become your friend. Check out How to get more followers: Some methods that work for some more information.

9. Patience is a virtue. A large following doesn’t occur overnight. It takes a while to build a loyal following. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your following. Be persistent and continue to invest time in growing your network on Twitter.

10. Treat others as THEY want to be treated. It is a twist on the golden rule. Find out how your followers like to interact with others and engage with them in a similar fashion.

What do you think? What are some others ways you can grow your influence on Twitter?

Living in the social media age

More than 56% of marketers plan to incorporate social media into their businesses next year, according to a recent survey by the Center for Media Research.

With so many social media channel options to choose from, which one do you use for your marketing communications strategy?

In July 2009, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law study of national business leaders highlighted that the most popular social media channels were the following:

1. Facebook (80%)
2. Twitter (66%)
3. YouTube (55%)
4. LinkedIn (49%)
5. Blogs (43%)

In my first blog post, my audience confirmed that Facebook and Twitter were the most popular social media platforms. So, as a marketer, should I use the most popular social media channel or a combination of both? Well, the short answer is that it depends. Since each tool works in a different way and with the social media landscape changing everyday, the key is to find out what your targeted audience likes to use.

The bottom line is that you need to be a part of the conversation because these conversations are happening, whether you are in the social media game or not.