To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?
November 28, 2009
Some small businesses are hesitant to embrace social media. Blogging seems time consuming, Facebook scary or unknown. At the same time, old marketing strategies don’t seem to work any more.
Business owners may not always realize that they need to re-visit their marketing plan to create and adopt a marketing system to get results. The same principle can be applied to Social Media – do your research, learn from others and create a well thought-out Social Media Marketing Plan to implement your Social Media Marketing System and benefit from social networking.
During last couple of months I have been helping my clients research social networking opportunities for their organizations. They have been using Twitter and Facebook to listen and learn before they plan and create their own Social Media Marketing Systems. This is what we’ve learned:
- Make Twitter a part of your marketing strategy – Social Media Marketing System. Do your research and determine whether your business could use free social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook for market research, customer service and/or for reaching your target market.
- Improve your professional skills, products and services by paying attention to what your competitors, potential clients and current customers are raving or complaining about.
- Learn how to educate and inform your target audience, share information about the articles, products and opportunities that your followers/fans may find useful.
- Person handling tweets/posts/fan pages for your organization should be familiar with the web and web-based tools.
- Make it your goal to become an “informer” who has the potential to be a “trust agent” – someone who is an expert and has an ability to influence other people.
- You only have 140 characters for one tweet, use them wisely.
- Avoid words and phrases that may attract unwanted followers/fans.
- 100 loyal followers/fans/subscribers who look forward to reading your tweets/posts may be worth more than 1,000 random followers.
- Learn to use Twitter/Facebook/Blogs as your company’s online reputation management tool.
- Don’t waste your time if you don’t have a social networking strategy.
How to Become a Good Leader – Should You Learn Acting First?
November 17, 2009
It takes Warren Bennis 480 pages to describe leadership, compare it to acting, and tie together the three pathways to becoming a great leader. Bennis, a UCLA management professor, has many stories to tell.
He points out that leaders have the ability to draw together a fragmented public, be it on the radio, television or in person.
Bennis quotes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as he says, “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” He cautions the reader not to assume these three paths get equal traffic.
Most leaders, he says, achieve greatness when a role requiring it is thrust upon them. Bennis compares leadership with show business again when he says actors and directors may feel a role is too big for them. It is a feeling many leaders are familiar with. But the leader’s leap into the unknown and accepting the risk of failure, is the first step in becoming great.
Like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part. He says leadership may be “the greatest performing art of all, the only one that creates institutions of lasting value that can endure long after the stars who envisioned them have left the theater.”
The Essential Bennis by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ware Biederman, Jossey-Bass, 480 pages, April 2009.
