Understanding Social Media

I have added a new first step to my strategic social media engagement process. It involves educating key senior stakeholders within your organization as to what social media actually consists of. Without this, I am convinced that your journey towards successful use of the digital space will be unnecessarily difficult.

Put simply, you need to ensure that key senior stakeholders as well as everyone involved in the initiative that you’re about to undertake  have at least a high-level understanding of the current digital landscape, including statistics, trends, and implications of both engaging and not engaging.

Listen before you socialize

Why is that we don’t want to listen? In the modern rush for social media presence, organizations are not spending enough time listening. Instead they want to be heard. Even the search trends show it. The relative search volume for “social media marketing” is nearly 8 times larger than “social media monitoring”, and the gap is widening. Granted, true marketers know that the term “marketing” encompasses the environmental scan “listening” component, however let’s face it, most people don’t.

The state of social media in the Canadian federal government

In the spirit of community and social media, I have decided to post up a revised version of my presentation from Podcamp Montreal on SlideShare. It is highly visual in nature and is not really meant to act as a stand alone document, however some of you may find it useful. The topic of this presentation was “Social Media & Canadian Government Usage Examples”. I focused mainly on the Canadian federal government due to limited presentation time and the sheer amount of content to cover. I have embedded it below. Feel free to skip through my intro or browse through it in the 17.6 seconds I always present it in.  Otherwise it looks like a ridiculous self-promotion, which it is not meant to be (it was a personal branding experiment). Enjoy!