Benson Hendrix dot Com

Why is a personal brand important for a company in social media? Because consumers don’t want to interact with a “company” or  “brand” they want to interact with the people behind a brand.  That’s why people won’t follow “Dell” because it’s a company, but they will follow Richard at Dell or Lionel at Dell because they give that company the personal interaction with their consumers.  As a result of that, people will want to become connected with your company or organization, look at the iCabal, the Apple fanatics who are incredibly tied in with the Mac brand, because they have probably been influenced by the Mac Evangelist crowd (and/or they are easily led by shiny things. )

(Just kidding, relax y’all.)

Companies can’t interact with people. The people in your company can.

You have to make sure that the right people in your company are interacting with those people.  That’s one of the strengths of PR people working on your social media team, PR people are great at connecting with people – it’s our job, heck it’s in the job title “Public Relations.”  Who in your organization can you trust with the social interactions with your customers?

What are some of the ways people in your organization can get involved in social media? Here are a few of my ideas, what would you like to see your organization do to open up and engage more online?

1. Set guidelines, not restrictions – you want to have guidelines that people blogging/tweeting/etc for your company need to follow (think of them as talking points for your evangelists, why do they rock?) But you don’t want to restrict what they can say too much.
2. You don’t need to vet everything that’s said – your employees, check that, the employees who love your company (and these are the ones who should be representing you) should not have to run everything by the legal department.  You trust your customer service team in India to represent your company without running every statement through the mothership, you should trust your social media employees to do the same.
3. Who in your company is already blogging? – Who’s already doing it?  Can you pay them to be part of the social media team at your company?  Why reinvent the wheel? Take these people on a long weekend retreat to Vegas, or the fun destination of your choice and intersperse some workshops on developing your social media team in between visits to the casino/park/hiking trail/etc.
4. Are there any free agents out there? –Is there anyone in your organization, or someone that one of your employees might know, who is already active in social media and social networking? If so, you might want to consider offering them a job to produce your content. They have an audience already established, and you might be able to attract some of them to your new brand. And at the same time, if you are working on your own personal brand, you can learn quite a bit from your new free agent star.
5. Who should represent the company? – Your new free agent? How about the guys you have on the team already?  What about the CEO?  Is he/she tech savvy and interested in this communications medium?  If not, it would be better for them to give up the reins here and let the people in the know take the lead, then report successes and concerns to the CEO.
6. Experiment, experiment, experiment! There are a lot of kinds of social media out there, what works the best not only for your company, but for your team?  Remember, there are some pieces of social media that work best as entrees, and others as appetizers.  Maybe your video person loves working on video but has a voice that would only be improved by gargling with rusty razor blades.  Then he shouldn’t lead the podcasting.  Your podcast guru has that smooth radio voice but can’t hold a camera steady long enough for a picture, then you don’t need them leading up your Flickr stream.  Different people have different strengths, what tools are out there to augment them and how can you combine them?
7. Training – Cross train your team, turn them into backpack journalists – able to develop news across all kinds of new media.

What other advice would you add for leaders interested in getting their people involved with their customers, competition, and colleagues?

If I’d have to use only two words to explain my review for Adobe Premiere Elements 8 video editing software in the iLife for PC series it would have to be…

RUN AWAY!!!

I purchased this software in the hope of being able to review it for part of this series and hopefully even recommend it.  Not only can I not recommend it, I wish I could send it back to Dell and get not only my money back, but also the time I’ve spent struggling with trying to make this software work.  I won’t go through the two installs it took to try and get this running, or the Nvidia patch I downloaded only to see my machine grind down to piss poor, or the fact that when I finally got it to work and tried to capture video from my camera, Premiere Elements crashed.

Long story short, stay away from this piece of “software” (unless you’re going to use the CD-ROM for skeet shooting practice). I like Photoshop Elements, it’s a decent piece of software and if you need it, then pick it up. I recommend that you stick with Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio for your video editing. It comes as part of the Sony Imagination Studio Suite, or you can get the new Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD software for under $40.

If you are interested in social media, and learning how to get started or engage more in this burgeoning online media-sphere, then you have probably run across quite a few stories/blogpieces/ads pimping how “You Can Get 10,000 Twitter Followers in 30 Days!” or “You Too Can Become a Facebook Gawd!!1!!” and other such nonsense.  To me these are nothing more than just the latest “How To Get Bigger Boobs Through Social Media”-esque BS lures to remove you from your money or time (both of which are important).

A lot of these try to latch onto our need to be recognized, to be acknowledged quickly for our brilliance – and claim to provide a quick, “gimme gimme gimme now” fix to achieving this. Like most things in life and business, working in social media is going to require a lot of patience, time, strategic planning and hard work.

One of the big ideas these “plans” leave out – especially important if you are a business owner or corporate type – is the need for some kind of merging of your strategy between social media and communications. Social media are great tools for building additional communications and increasing your community outreach/developing a community relations platform, but they will never really replace your communications/pr strategy.  They can help augment it, but your social media outlets are really one more avenue to communicate with people, and need their own strategy to . But you need to have a firm strategy in place before you really jump in and drown in all the noise out there.

(as an aside, there will be a Holiday present for those people interested in social media and strategy coming up before Dec. 25.)

At the end of the day you’re not going to land 10,000 followers in a month, nor are you going to achieve deitific bliss on Facebook or – Buddha forgive – MySpace. As with most things in life, you need to work at it and show patience. Engage with your target audiences, look at the strategy you have developed – what do you want to say to them? What goals are you hoping to achieve? Why are you writing or recording?

I love working in social media – blogging, podcasting, video work, social networking and more.  All of them give you ample opportunity to interact with others. Sometime for good, and other times you’ll find you or your organization getting blasted by a blogger, content creator or just a plain old curmudgeon.

While many people in social media, a lot of whom are incredibly knowledgeable, and many communications officers feel that your organization should “rise above” any kind of crossing swords with people online who are attacking you, I wish to disagree. There is a line in the sand where you should be willing to kill any detractors with kindness (always remember to be understanding and offer the honey-laden olive branch as much as possible) but once that line is crossed you should be able to respond factually, forcefully and passionately.

Many social media peeps, especially when looking at business social media, will tell you to keep your statements and content as even-keel as possible. You never want to engage in mud throwing or flame wars. I agree with them on this, but where we might diverge a little bit is my opinion that when your organization is being attacked, possibly unfairly, by online peeps who are unwilling to look at facts, or try to skew facts to match a caricature they created to attack your organization.  Then these are the times when you will need to stand up, use the facts as your sword and shield, and call out your detractors.

This isn’t an open call to start flame wars and a rousing round of “nanny nanny boo boo.” Keep your responses slightly snarky (maybe a little more. Remember that you want to keep a little bit of a bite to them). They need to be classy, but sharp as a razor’s edge. You want to remind your opposition that if they want to misquote you, or tweak facts to match a false claim, that you are going to repeatedly respond by throwing high and inside.

Look at how various political campaigns ran their social media outlets during the 2008 and upcoming 2010 campaigns. They brought in bloggers who already had followers, but more importantly were passionate about their candidate’s stands (or, let’s be honest, became passionate about their positions once they started receiving a check) and were willing to stand up for them. In addition, Barack Obama’s campaign built online tools from scratch to help foster their community of supporters.

Balancing the Playing Field

If your organization is going to have “what it takes” to respond to online attacks this way, you need to have a CEO who has the spine to understand that for a short while, the attacks might intensify as your opposition tries to determine how far you will go before folding.  In order for this to work, you have to be willing to repeatedly defend your position with this idea of “classy passion.” Again, humor is one of your best weapons here.

Look at what the Obama White House is doing right now with FOX News, they are repeatedly responding to FOX News when they believe facts are in error.   For a while the peeps on FOX News were calling it the “War on Fox,” or some such thing.

There used to be a saying that you never go to war with people who buy ink by the barrel or tape by the yard.  Meaning it was never in your best interest to cross swords with people who run the media, because they can come after you day after day for any perceived slight.  That used to be true, but with the advances in social media, social networking (for audience building) and online communications you suddenly have the tools to create your own media outlet to respond, “balancing the playing field” more in your favor.

Being the old rugger I am, I’ll leave you with this analogy. While you want to play cleanly as much as possible, and give people the benefit of the doubt, I’ve found that one of the best ways to stop someone from throwing punches in the ruck is a good, old-fashioned cleat rake every so often.

Is the world of newspapers really as bad off as recently reported? I’ve given this a lot of thought after reading today that Editor and Publisher was going under. In the last few years a lot of newspapers have shrunk, fired staff, closed down, or merged with other news outlets (TV, etc) in response to a diminishing readership and the recent economic crunch.  People have asked if this means that newspapers are on their last leg.

No, it doesn’t. In fact, I’m willing to bet that when the newspaper shakedown is over you are going to see the resurgence of the hometown newspaper. In smaller towns there are very few media outlets, and the newspaper still plays a major role in informing the public.

It’s this focusing of effort that will help save newspapers. They will still have to reduce staff, because some of the staff used in the paper’s expansion will become redundant (as they say in the Isles)

In larger towns and cities, regional papers will probably have to revert back to that hometown model – for instance, the Albuquerque Journal (my local paper) needs to refocus from trying to be “New Mexico’s Biggest Newspaper” to Albuquerque’s newspaper. They have a bureau in Santa Fe for the “Journal North/Santa Fe” section that needs to be shut down. Santa Fe has its own paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican, which is successful in Santa Fe while not competing with the Journal in Albuquerque. The Journal will never be able to successfully overthrow the New Mexican, so why not pack it in, bring some of the staff to fill vacancies that have gone unfilled for over a year, and refocus their efforts on their core market?

Another question involves changing the media consolidation rules, while allowing for much smaller, more targeted media outlets to grown. Is this a threat to the current laws limiting consolidation of media outlets in a certain area? If newspapers can’t merge with TV stations and/or radio stations and end up going out of business – is this really better for the community?