The 7 Secrets of Socially Successful Businesses – Conference 15th February 2012

I arrived at Shoreditch High Street station, supposedly Europe’s new Silicon Valley, and having consulted my Iphone AND a sign to Bethnal Green (a giveaway I would have thought as I was heading for Bethnal Green Road) I set off to find the Rich Mix venue. My Iphone started to have a hissy fit so I gave up on electronics and reverted to my printed map (always worth having a back up plan!). It turned out I was going the wrong way so retraced my steps and arrived at the venue with time to spare.

Some good networking took place over coffee. There was a buzz of excitement, energy and exuberance all around. Delegates and their hand-held digital devices were firmly attached and continued to be throughout the day!

The sessions were facilitated by Matt Hodkinson; Rebecca Hollis; Bernie J Mitchell and Warren Knight.

There were many Eureka points during the day, but below in no particular order is a list of the ones that I think are useful to Elevation Learning:

• Bring Social Media back to engaging with people: Social=people; Media=technology. We are in danger of losing the ability to interact with others in a “real” environment.


Be Social, Not Do Social - Benny J Mitchell

• Social Media won’t make a business successful. In fact by putting an unsuccessful business in the spotlight, you will highlight its failings.
• A successful business will know their market; engage with their customers; have a Social Media strategy; remember the pleasantries; collaborate with others; invite action and measure the success of their campaigns (show me the money!)
• When meeting people it is useful to check their Social Media profile – but don’t stalk them!
• 43% of people are accessing Social Media through Smartphones  
• Filter out the noise – or you’ll miss what is useful
• Clarification that Facebook is not the best vehicle for B2B: this was the conclusion we had already come to ourselves (see Does Facebook work for your business? )
• The power of Social Media: example at Virgin Trains where client dissatisfaction was turned around to positive Social Media activity by responding quickly and positively to a complaint.
• The power of Twitter: Twitter generally posts news items approximately half an hour before official public broadcasting.
• The merits of Google +1 – the effect on ranking and SEO. By giving +1 you give something your public stamp of approval.
• Ifttt.com If This Then That – a site that instigates a chain of events i.e. if you change a profile photo it will change profile photos on other platforms according to pre-defined instructions.
• Buffer – works out when your tweets are being read and schedules your tweets to optimum times.

There were many interesting things that I will come back to. Some people were overwhelmed by all that’s on offer so it’s worth keeping in mind that Social Media should not become one’s master and with the vast amount of platforms available, it is better to concentrate on a few things and do them well (See Social Media lets not get obsessional! )

Wyn Marston

Does Facebook work for your business?

We, like many others, set up a Corporate Facebook identity as part of our Social Networking infrastructure.

We were always skeptical as to the value of Facebook for a B2B company and taking into account the time involved in participating in Social Networking we have decided to close our Elevation Learning Facebook account and concentrate on Twitter, LinkedIn and our blog.

Thank you to everyone who followed or subscribed to Elevation Learning on Facebook; we hope you will follow us on one of our other networks above.

We’d like to hear your experiences and will of course re-activate Facebook if we feel it would be beneficial!

Wyn Marston

Our top ten social media tips

On New Year’s Eve we attempted to send our last tweet of the year but were faced with a Twitter overload! You could argue that Twitter should have anticipated peaks but wouldn’t we all like to be in the position to have to increase capacity due to demand?

Here are our top 10 social media tips from 2011. We’d be interested to hear yours.

• Share content that gives value
• Don’t always feel you have to sell
• Be honest; be professional
• Add links on your email footers and marketing materials
• Thank people
• Separate business and pleasure
• Don’t over-tweet
• Don’t re-tweet unless you’ve read it yourself
• Keep blog content to the point
• Recommend others using #followfriday

I thought I’d re-cycle the following picture – I think it’s well worth a second viewing!

Wyn Marston, Elevation Learning

Social Media’s Spaghetti Junction!

Having spent the last few weeks navigating my way through the road map of social media (more like spaghetti junction if you ask me) it feels like I’ve been “over socializing” and greatly in need of a “quiet night in!” Social Media can take over your life – so I think it’s time to show it who is boss and whip it back into it’s rightful place.

For a start, there is a lot out there, but contrary to lots of well meaning advice, you don’t need to be involved in everything – you’re not going to get left out in the playground just because you aren’t registered on all platforms and using one platform well is far better than stretching yourself too thinly.

I am working on a social media presence both personally and corporately. As you may be aware at Elevation Learning my colleague and I have been busy tweeting, blogging, linking and socializing. We feel that if we are going to have a social media presence then it had better be good (We’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on our efforts!)

We’ve whittled it down to about four platforms with interlinking. I like the immediacy of Twitter with most people able to read on the hoof, but it is ephemeral and mercurial. Your window of opportunity for sharing that absolute gem is very small. Twitter should be used discriminately – over-tweeting will devalue your credibility.

Facebook and LinkedIn to my mind have different audiences; Facebook for dual communicating with friends and LinkedIn for professional networking. However, at Elevation Learning we have included Facebook in our initial set up and we will see over the coming months whether it proves to be a good vehicle for our business.

What strikes me when I’m thinking about social media and the way it has become such an integral part of our modern lives, is that with the demise of close communities and the school gate situation, opportunities to engage with others and to share the minutiae of the everyday has been lost. This could go a long way to explaining why we are happy to engage in various social media activities.

LinkedIn at the moment seems to be a good environment for business – we at Elevation Learning advertised our Core Consultancy Skills course on LinkedIn Ads and had a great response. We are experimenting with setting up Groups and our first Group is for people who have attended our Core Consultancy Skills course – search for Elevation Learning Core Consultancy Skills Alumni.

Blogging allows for the more serious article with the ability to search, save and archive articles leaving a “forever” record. This form of “diary” is rather quaint in that you are reading articles in reverse order and getting a current insight into what is going on – you only visit historical articles if the author grabs your attention.

At Elevation Learning we have researched StumbleUpon (automatically rates a site you like with like-minded people), Googleplus (integrates a number of Google products), Tweetdeck and HootSuite (both designed to track your social media channels on one dashboard), Foursquare (allows you to check in and share where you are – appears at first prosaic but for B2C could have a potential for branding loyalty) and along with these and other services we have put them on the back burner for the moment. I believe in time there will be a culling of services on offer and so I am not investing time on these at the moment. Facebook and LinkedIn have served their probation and are likely to be contenders in future services offered.

It is important to be aware of metrics and how we rank among others in this new and interesting world but it is wise to avoid over analysis and not forget why we engaged initially in social media. It would be so very easy to forget that social media is one tool among many and allow it to become an obsession!

And to close – according to a study published by Cisco, one in three college students and young employees would prioritise social media freedom, device flexibility and mobile working over salary in accepting a job offer……

Wyn Marston, Operations Manager, Elevation Learning

Social Media Tools – what works for us

Corporately, we have a Twitter account; a blog page, a Facebook account and as individuals we have LinkedIn accounts with an Elevation Learning Group area. All our associates are linked to the Elevation Learning Group, and we use this to promote our company and our offerings. We have just finished a week long campaign for our Core Consultancy Skills course on 21-23 November – out of 78,000 views we had 44 clicks and 3 direct enquiries. These have not converted into business yet, but as our business has a longer lead time than B2C, we are hopeful that we will see these converted in the weeks to come.

We link all of these platforms together, we have links on our email footers; articles on our website and on our newsletters and we have signed up corporately to Klout – Klout uses data from social networks to measure how much influence you have on other people based on your ability to drive action.

Yesterday, a colleague and I attended a short course on the Social Media Toolkit run by Sinead MacManus of 8fold. It was attended by 13 people (I hope we didn’t have any triskaidekaphobics attending but Sinead made the number up to 14!) from an eclectic mix of businesses.

We were given lots of tips and tools; we will definitely change our corporate Facebook and create a landing page using some of the Apps that Sinead showcased; there are so many option settings on all these platforms that useful ideas came up to help us focus on where we needed to make changes. Sinead did some good recapping on this part of the course; there was limited time to do this in the later stages of the course.

I came away from the course with a plethora of information and after some talk with my colleague I decided that we need to take a step back to decide what WE need – it’s so very easy to jump on board and think we need to do it all.

So what is important to OUR business? Well, we provide training to people who increasingly are social media users and so we need to be there too. We need to grow our network but be selective whom we follow and whom we allow to follow us. We want to give value to our clients – we should publish good articles with real value to those following us; we should follow others in our industry and pass on what we consider to be valuable tips; we shouldn’t “over-tweet” – less is more; we should remember etiquette and credit others where credit is due and we should create our social media presence such that it is a tool for our business; not a master to us.

There is some confusion regarding social media and social networking – at a very basic level, my understanding is that social media is the act of broadcasting information to a broad audience and social networking is engaging in a two way communication. I’d be interested in what you think is the difference.

Lessons I take away from the course

1. Take one step at a time – decide which platform suits your needs and what connects best with your audience
2. Add connections to your email footers, published articles, business cards, website etc.
3. Give value to your clients – they are not interested to know that the 5.26 from Waterloo is running late!
4. Don’t let social networking become your master
5. Enjoy!

Wyn Marston, Operations Manager, Elevation Learning