Tag Archives: social media

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Managing a Social Presence for the Busy Executive

Social media engagement is one of the most effective ways for you and your agency to get more traffic and generate new leads.

Schedule time for your social media

Agency owners — for both large and small organizations — are the “face” of the organization. An effective social platform marketing strategy should contemplate using the owner’s name and face as part of the marketing program. This means that they need to leverage their personal sites to help build awareness.

A big part of the challenge is finding the time. Comments from company executives will help communicate the organization’s mission and vision to internal staff as well as prospects, clients, and insurance company personnel.

Mastering your Internet presence will help you, and your team, be more visible to the increasingly online consumer. Consumers now use smartphones and tablets to interact with businesses 24/7, from anywhere at home, at work, or on a bus. It is critical that your company define its value proposition through a mobile lens by determining exactly how your target audience wants to engage with your brand on multiple devices.

Following are some thoughts on steps you can take to manage and master your online presence. Taking just a few of these steps will help you and your organization be visible to the online consumer.

Use the Right Tools

Having – and using – the right social platform management tools is essential for keeping up a presence on all the major platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Tools that allow you to automate status updates on various platforms enable you to promote your latest content to all of your social networks with a minimum investment of time and effort. There are many solutions that can automatically improve your website articles, as well as other content, to your social media networks. Following are a few of the most popular:

Buffer App

Buffer is one of the easier to use and less expensive tools to automate postings to your social platforms. This is the tool I am currently using, and I love its clean and easy-to-use interface. It will post updates to your LinkedIn agency page, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ page.

Buffer allows you to create a schedule for when updates will be posted to your social platforms. For instance, on Mondays through Fridays, I post updates three times during the day. On weekends, I post two updates on Saturday and no updates on Sunday. This gives you complete control over when and how often updates post to your various accounts.

You can add updates to your Buffer account using their website, as well as their iPhone app, Android app, and Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browser extensions.

Buffer’s built-in analytics allows you to find the times of day that your post gets the most engagement and the type of topics your audience likes the most. This helps you better understand what kind of content you should include in future updates.

Buffer has a free version that allows you to post up to 10 updates per day, as well as several paid tiers depending on your particular needs.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a very popular service that has similar features to Buffer. In addition to being able to schedule posts to multiple social platforms, Hootsuite excels in allowing you to view the activity on your various social channels. When it comes to social networking support, Hootsuite has a wider coverage than Buffer.

Hootsuite allows you to post automatically to a broad range of platforms. These include: Facebook groups/profiles/business pages, LinkedIn company pages/groups, Google+ pages, Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress sites, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, and Blogger.

Hootsuite also tracks your post analytics so you can determine how people share posts. For example, if someone shared a post on your site using Hootsuite, you’ll be able to track that they used Hootsuite to re-share your post.

Hootsuite also has a free version (that I am currently using) and a Pro version with pricing that starts at $8.99 per month (with discounts for an annual payment).

With the basic account, you’ll have message scheduling and can set up five social networks. The pro version has unlimited social networks, atom feeds, and stats history. It also allows bulk scheduling.

For personal and professional use, this auto-posting tool is worth a try.

How and When to Engage

Once you begin using one of the tools described above you will be able to create activity consistently on your social platforms without feeling like you are spending hours doing it. Here’s my strategy for engaging with people on the social platforms where I am active.

Daily: Interact with your news feed. Install the mobile apps for the various platforms where you are active. Take a few minutes between appointments to open the apps and look at the activity in the news feed. Simply clicking “like” on a comment someone has made or typing out a short comment will significantly increase your engagement with these people.

Weekly: Using one of the above tools, take 30 minutes to an hour to set up a schedule of posts for the following week. This allows you to spend concentrated time to make sure you have posts going out on a regular basis. Then, if anything particularly interesting comes up, feel free to post that one comment on multiple sites.

Monthly: Schedule time monthly to review your profiles on all of your social platforms to make sure they are current. Review and contribute to any comments on groups you are part of such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+. In addition, reach out to any old contacts that you might want to connect with on LinkedIn.

Engaging on social platforms is becoming an essential skill for executives to use to create an engaging brand for their organization. While you may have staff who manages this for the whole organization, it is important for the executives who are the “face” of the organization to also be active.

This type of engagement and activity on your social platforms can bring new visitors to your website and help improve your overall search rankings. However, perhaps more importantly, it will help you and your team to be more visible to the new online consumer.

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Ban Social Media as a Distraction? No, It Boosts Productivity.

Far from diverting employees from their jobs, social media and smartphones actually make staff more productive—and employers should learn to deal with that new reality. Access to social networks via mobile devices gives staff a “virtual co-presence” with direct benefits for the business in which they work, according to a new study.

That core presence enables workers to complete collective tasks more effectively by giving them a greater freedom over when and where they do their jobs, the study of technology companies in the UK, Germany, and Finland found.

“This was an investigatory study, rather than a statistical proving. But it was very obvious that social media allows people to accomplish a lot more,” said Joe Nandhakumar, professor of information systems at Warwick Business School, which conducted the research. “We can feel that in the academic environment. If you take that connectivity away, we are completely unable to work,” he said.

According to Nandhakumar, evidence from the research suggests that knowledge workers who manage their presence successfully and control their responses are better at organizing workflow. He argued that social media is not an entertainment medium with side-benefits for business. “It’s not a by-product. It’s the main thing,” he said.

Nandhakumar pointed out that social media is a central part of the culture of knowledge workers, “It’s not a secondary effect. You can’t avoid it. You can’t ban it, so how do we make this work for the organization?” he said.

“You can’t stop people having this connectivity so we need to find out how we can manage it and how we can make it into something more positive rather than trying to ban it. Anything can be a distraction—a computer can be a distraction—it depends on how you use it.”

Nandhakumar said successful organizations used to focus strongly on processes and then on connecting people. Now social media can provide a layer on top of ERP systems. “We can have the people on top of the processes to get the best of both,” he said.

“What we should do as companies, we should empower employees to deal with social media and how they can spend their time productively. We can’t really control these things. They are there for the knowledge worker.”

The Warwick Business School paper is entitled Exploring social network interactions in enterprise systems: the role of virtual co-presence and was published in the Information Systems Journal.

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Digital Disruption: How Will You Respond?

Many of you may know that I live in the Nashville area. Nashville is known for music and we have many friends in the business. As you might suspect, music piracy is taken very seriously here.

sources of music collections in the US

That’s why I was interested to read a comprehensive study from The American Assembly, a non-partisan public affairs forum affiliated with Columbia University. They conducted the Copy Culture Survey, based on thousands of phone interviews in the United States and Germany. The group released part of the results, which show that people who download music illegally also buy more music than those who don’t.

The research found that in the United States, people who download pirated music have larger music libraries—around 37% larger than those who download only legal songs. “But some of it also comes from significantly higher legal purchases of digital music than their non-P2P using peers—around 30% higher among U.S. P2P users,” Joe Karaganis from American Assembly explained.

He added: “Our data is quite clear on this point and lines up with numerous other studies. The biggest music pirates are also the biggest spenders on recorded music.” Compared to the United States, in Germany the figures stack up even higher, with pirates buying nearly three times as much digital music as the legal downloaders, the study found.

While peer-to-peer sharing of files is the most prevalent form of illegally acquiring music files, in the United States, according to the survey, 29% of those under 30 listen to most all of their music via streaming services. However, only 11% of those have a paid subscription, which would indicate that music streaming services play a similar role to pirated music: try before you buy.

The music industry was perhaps one of the first to experience a digital disruption. Others—like the book publishing business—are not far behind. But the response of the Recording Industry of America was to sue its best customers. It’s a strategy that doesn’t seem to have worked very well.

How will you respond?

What assumptions are you making when planning for your agency’s future? Will you respond like many industries and keep your head in the sand? Or, will you look to the future and try to see what opportunities digital disruption provides?

If something can be done, it will be done. And if you don’t do it, then someone else will. Commit to being an agency that is willing to embrace change and explore how you can take advantage of the opportunities created by disruption.

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Your Agency Doesn’t Need a Social Media Policy

As time goes by, I am more convinced than ever that your agency should not have a separate social media policy.

social media policy f

This isn’t a popular idea. A workgroup for the Agent’s Council for Technology (ACT) spent many hours developing a sample social media policy for agencies to use as a template.

As the use of social platforms increases, concerns arise on how best to monitor and police use within agency organizations. Many seminars exist on how to write such a policy. Law firms can even give you guidance on how to make your existing policy better. You may have people in your own organization who are asking what you are doing about your social media policy.

Because so many organizations have created—and enforced—social media policies, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken notice. Over the last couple of years, they have taken on individual cases to determine which policies are legal, and which are not, and have issued several reports.

NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon recently issued a third report on social media cases, this time focusing exclusively on policies governing the use of social media by employees. In this report, the NLRB made almost everybody’s social media policy illegal. It undercut even the most seemingly reasonable provisions because they had the potential to violate employees’ rights to free association and union organizing.

How did this happen? How could so many smart people be so wrong on this issue?

It’s quite simple: our current labor laws were created in the industrial-era and are outdated. Existing social media policies are crafted in the context of modern technology. They are also written by a new generation of lawyers and HR staff who don’t understand how the government views employee rights and employment issues.

The overall theme in the NLRB report is that the written restrictions on social media speech are typically overreaching and encroach on free speech. This confirms that social media is simply another communications channel. It may be a game-changer channel, but it is still simply a new type of channel.

This is why I have encouraged organizations to have an “Electronic Communications Policy” as part of their existing employee handbook. Handbook templates and manuals are written, by and large, by companies and consultants who understand how the government thinks. They are last-gen and old tech so their rules and restrictions are legal in the government’s eyes. This is also why they are typically so boring to read. But they don’t overreach the way existing social media policies do, and as such, they are the best tool to use in dealing with employee behavior through social media.

Your handbook should have policies about employee handling of confidential information. It should also have policies about gossip, wasting time at work (like surfing Facebook on the job), employee relationships with each other and management, who is authorized to speak for the company, etc.

Opinions on social media tend to fall into two camps: those who use it outside the corporate environment tend to feel that there should be no restrictions at all, while those in high-control management environments (bank-owned agencies?) think no employee should be allowed to use it except to promote the company. The common-sense middle ground for agency owners and managers is to save the money you would spend on buying, writing, and/or enforcing a social media policy and just use your existing handbook.

If you disagree, I invite you to reply to this article with an issue you’ve faced in your workplace. I’ll bet there’s a handbook policy that covers it—and I’ll prove it to you.

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LinkedIn Launches New Thought Leader Service: Taps Insurance Technology Expert Steve Anderson as One of 150 “Influencers”

FRANKLIN, TN – LinkedIn assembled 150 of the biggest names in business, non-profits, and the private sector and gave them a challenge: Share something interesting with 175+ million professionals.

Steve Anderson, LinkedIn Thought Leader

LinkedIn’s Influencer program—announced last week—enables top thought leaders to gain a following among 175+ million professionals worldwide by writing and sharing great content on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn launched their new program with both well-known and lesser known diverse thinkers such as Richard Branson of The Virgin Group, Chef Marcus Samuelsson, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and President Obama. Representatives from medicine, law, real estate, financial institutions, journalism, and the non-profit world are all part of the mix of influencers.

Steve Anderson, LinkedIn Thought LeaderAs one of the 150, insurance technology expert Steve Anderson of The Anderson Network said he was “not only honored to be selected but pleased that LinkedIn included the insurance profession as one of the businesses represented for their initial launch.”

Anderson will be writing frequent posts on LinkedIn about changes taking place in the insurance industry. Anyone with a LinkedIn account will be able to “follow” Anderson and any—or all—of the thought leaders, a new function created as an additional service where account holders don’t have to be “connected” to an individual but can now follow their posts and updates.

Anderson said each article’s focus will be on how technology can help an insurance organization—insurance agencies, insurance companies, as well as insurance vendors—adopt tools to help them increase revenue and/or reduce expenses. Said Anderson, “Successful insurance organizations in the future will be the ones that learn how to innovate quickly, respond to rapidly changing technology, and quickly adapt internal processes to changing consumer expectations.”

Anderson sponsors a number of Web properties that provide information to the insurance industry. These include SteveAnderson.com, TAAReport.com—his monthly subscription newsletter, AgencyUserReviews.com—a rating and review site (like Yelp for Insurance), ClientInformationSecurity.com—a blog on how to protect private client information, and Steve Anderson’s TechTips—a free weekly emailed newsletter.

Anderson is a professional speaker addressing thousands of insurance agents each year at industry events. His speaking portfolio includes presentations on the future of technology in the insurance world, the influence of the social web, and how insurance organizations can establish and maintain their Internet presence. He has authored articles that have appeared in virtually every insurance industry publication. Anderson has over 30 years of experience in the insurance community and holds a master’s degree in Insurance Law.

A full list of LinkedIn Influencers is available by clicking here. Those interested in following any or all of the original 150 thought leaders can do so with a LinkedIn account. www.linkedin.com.

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