One of the great things in being a corporate educator is that I get to immerse myself in a number of courses on a variety of topics, social
media being one of them.
Whatever course I take and or review, I always focus on answering these three questions.
- What is one idea I’m already doing?
- What is one idea I can immediate apply to what I’m doing?
- What is one idea that if I took the time to think about, research, learn more or even take the time to apply that idea, how would it change my current results?
In March 2011 I took MarketingProf University’s new course called Social Media Marketing Fast Track *** The course offers 17 online classes, instructed by 22 well know people in their particular area of interest. The one advantage to this course is that the classes are archived for continuous viewing until March 2012 so I get a chance to review them for an entire year. That is a good thing since I was away when the live presentations were scheduled.
Here are 4 ideas from 4 presenters that you will most likely recognize that I would like to share with you. Note: I chose these four not because of the presenter but because I’m currently working on these four topics.
- Idea: People trust experts who propagate new ideas and meaningfully engage with others in their industry or field.
What to do: Build an expert hub; train your internal subject matter experts to be “situationally aware” and be a great storyteller. Storytelling is the best way to attract attention and get people into an emotional space to take action.
Steve Rubel – SVP, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
Class Title – 11 Digital Trends to Watch in 2011
- Idea: LinkedIn is a part of your social media strategy not the strategy.
What to do: The focus is to be found; to make that happen it is important that your LinkedIn profile is keyword rich to support your geographic location, industry and profession.
Jason Alba – Founder & CEO, JibberJobber.com
Class Title – Using LinkedIn to Find Customers and Grow Your Business
- Idea: Twitter is like a social networking Swiss Army knife, it’s multi-functional.
What to do: To use Twitter as a prospecting and lead generator, use TwtBizCard.com which enables users to send business contact information via Twitter. Another way to think of Twitter http://twitter.com is as a reputation monitoring tool. Using TweetBeat.com monitors Twitter based on your selected keywords and sends the results via email.
Paul Chancey – The Social Media Handyman
Class Title – 10+ Things You Could Be Doing with Twitter (but Probably Aren’t)
- Idea: Training is needed to engage people who are interested in what you offer
What to do: Implement a comprehensive, high-level training program and build a cross-functional team of savvy individuals to interact with customers online. Establish criteria both for engaging with customers in real time and for moving conversations to traditional CRM channels as quickly as possible
Maggie Fox – Founder, Social Media Group
Class Title – Social Media and Customer Relations
Social Media is a huge topic and it takes time to learn, sometimes you just need to be on the fast track to get started. That is what makes Social Media so interesting; you are always learning, exploring and experimenting. Taking all the courses in the world doesn’t help if you don’t build on what you know, add one to idea to try out and explore other ideas in the process.
Here’s My Question
What is one idea from a book, a course, or other resource that you recently took part in that you were able to immediately apply? What results have you noticed since applying that idea?
Next
Part 2 – August – 4 more ideas from MarketingProf University’s Social Media Marketing Fast Track course
Part 3 – September – Ideas shared from the Social Media Masters presenters held in September | October 2011
*Transparency:
I reviewed this program for a US training magazine called Training Media Review