You have created a blog. It has hooks to your Twitter account, Flickr page, your videos on YouTube and a Facebook Fan Page.
You are developing a blog network. You’ve taught a group of young, eager professionals how to follow conversations; engaging your blogger of choice. You have provided some tools they can use to follow discussions on Twitter.
The person in charge of the project wants results. You know the network is just off the ground and a series of successes are coming fast. You talked with the boss. He seems to be getting it but there are bands of people in your organization and its extended community who knows little about content management systems and almost zero knowledge about WordPress. They want to understand Twitter and the social networks but even more they want success.
What opportunity you find depends on how much you can look at the situation from their point of view. How basic you need to be is a question mark but you can assume their baseline knowledge is very thin.
Your boss says he wants a breakdown, a “Social Media For Dummies,” exercise that will help people start feeling like they can help with the success of the project.
Now you see a small window for getting people to participate. You know the boss has a lot more influence in the company than you. You can now work together and build the foundation of a community that is working together to do the blog and social network outreach.
Your goal should be really simple. Just help someone catch one fish. It’s that feeling of a nibble that will get some of them really into using social web applications.
Simple truth: You want the boss to help spread the word. You want him to tell people in the community what to do. In the process, your boss will look good, the community will learn a bit more about the social media tools you use and perhaps take a small step toward using the technologies themselves. Even more, it will help get some people to check out all the hard work you have done.
So, here are some basic ways to get started. Remember, keep it simple.
- All you want the boss to do is tell the community to spread the word by sending emails to their friends and colleagues.
- Write a letter for your boss that will go to the community. Tell people exactly how you want them to spread the word
- Include a form email the recipients may send to their friends with all the basic information about how to spread the word
- Provide ways you can see how the campaign did. For instance, shorten the link to your blog using bit.ly. The service will track the link, giving you an idea of how the outreach is working
- Be clear about how you want the boss to tell people about Twitter. The email should ask people if they have a Twitter account. Include a link to the Twitter registration page. The email should state that the recipient’s community should follow Twitter account you provide
- Use a signature when emailing or posting on forums. Most forums and email programs allow you to setup what is called a signature. This is information that is automatically added at the end of every post or message. Here you can add a link to the website you are promoting and maybe a tag line in your signature.
- Follow the same method for your other social networks: YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and anywhere else where you have a presence
Forget the social media jargon. Just ask people to spread the word.
Great post, if you wanted to get a little more technical..
Your boss can tell people to bookmark the posts on social networking sites. If you look at the bottom of each blog posts there are links to add the post to delicious, digg, stumbleupon and facebook. Ask people to create accounts on these sites and start submitting the posts.
When submitting posts make sure to use tags. Topical tags are important for search engine optimization. With tags the more the merrier so long as they are relevant.
Ask people to follow the appropriate Twitter account and become fans of the Facebook page or group, and share posts within these networks as often as possible