Over the weekend I had the incredible honor and privilege of being the keynote speaker for the Morgan State University Doctoral Leadership Development program.

In front of a crowd of about 90 aspiring Deans, Presidents, and Vice-presidents from the #1 program in the country focused on developing tomorrow’s community college administrators, we held a 75-minute session focused on:

• Personal branding
• Translating “real-world” leadership to the web
• How social media and web 2.0 is impacting the increasingly changing academic systems of today and tomorrow

Embedded above you will find the slide deck from the presentation. The majority of the slide deck is a series of what I call quick and basic ORM (Online Reputation Management) tips and tricks in bullet point form.

Lastly, there were a number of questions from the session that got emailed to us and we made a commitment to answer them on our blog. There were so many that we have decided to weave them into our blogging calendar so if you attended the session please check back often for new answers – you can also subscribe to the blog by pressing the RSS feed button in the top right hand corner of the blog.

We will post the answer to the first question from the session in one of our next posts.

If you are interested in learning more about how Freesource can help your academic institution create value and manage risk in this exciting new space, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Cheers,
Nathan

Founder + CEO
Freesource

Blog posts are like Swiss Army knives.  They can be ever so useful in many situations!

Yet many people overlook the inherent value in re-purposing or re-using valuable blog posts. You’ve already invested the time and money in the content, not how about getting more bang for your buck?  Here are some other ways you can use the content you’ve already created:

LinkedIn Groups — Participating in the Q&A on LinkedIn Groups is a great way to make professional connections. One idea is to use links to previous blog posts to answer related questions. This helps people and also delivers new readers to your blog.

eBook and real books — Collect blog posts and create value-adding eBooks or perhaps even a published book.

Sales Collateral — Why not curate how-to posts as product guides to be used as a selling tool?

Guest posts — An older post can receive new life and reach a whole new group of readers as a guest post on another blog. Also great way to build connections with important industry bloggers!

Reference guide –  Use blog links to add to the comment section on other blogs. As long as it is not too “salesy” people often appreciate the depth a link can add to a discussion.

eNewsletters — Your newsletters should write themselves with the great content available from your blog. Expose a summary of the article and encourage reader to click to visit your blog for the whole story.

Slideshare – Embed blog posts as suggested further reading on Slideshare presentations to drive people to your site.

Internal links — When you write new posts, link readers to relevant content from older articles.

Make posts part of the communication culture – Encourage your sales and marketing people to use links to company blog posts to answer customer questions, in promotional materials and in correspondence.

How do you re-use blog posts? Any ideas to share?

A few weeks ago we featured the amazing story of a young lady on LinkedIn who became a viral sensation by simply asking whether anybody read her status updates. The answer was “yes” to the tune of more than 9,000 comments.

Take a look at the graphic above.  This demonstrates another way LinkedIn clients are beginning to leverage their networking muscle through this important social media platform — 2 MILLION connections? Nearly 16,000 comments?

Of course with 2 million connections this gentleman is a veritable city of networking connections unto himself but you certainly don’t need a tribe that large to make a significant impression on LinkedIn. That’s because LinkedIn now allows people to comment on your status from various places on the platform — even if they are not directly connected to you.

For example, if I now comment on a status of a friend, this is recorded for all of my contacts to see. Any of those contacts can now comment on that update … and if they comment, then their professional connections can comment, and so on and so on.

This is an important and significant change for LinkedIn that provides more “stickiness” to their site but also more opportunities to connect and learn from potential new professional connections.

Think about the fact that with this change, there is no reason you couldn’t promote content, videos and contests to LinkedIn’s audience even if you have a relatively small number of  followers. Going viral on LinkedIn may provide more long-term business benefit than the short-term page view lifts we see with other channels.

We recently read about possible legal trouble when a teacher posted private information about a student on a TV station’s Facebook page.  You can watch a video news account of the story here.

Some of the interesting characteristics of this case are:

• The school district had no formal social media initiative and probably did not think it needed a social media policy.
• The teacher’s activity took place outside school hours, on a forum that had nothing to do with the school.
• The comment was made about a commonly-known event: a student had been suspended.
• The student’s comment was also inflammatory, accusing that a scholarship contest was rigged.

And yet the school, the teacher, and even the student, might be in hot water.  It is a very real example of why every organization needs a social media policy — even when employees are not formally engaged on the social web!

If you don’t have a social media policy, it’s probably time to mitigate risk for you and your employees by creating one.  When we work with our clients on social media policies, we walk them through a custom process that includes:

• How much company time should be spent on the social web?
• Associated security issues
• Expected level of participation
• Appropriate representation of the company or organization
• Consequences of abuse

• Legal
• Ethical
• Proprietary
• Technical and security
• Brand issues
• Internal protocol if problem arises?

And of course there are many considerations specific to a company and industry such as the social media link to business strategy, competitive concerns and regulations. After a policy has been created and approved, it is a best practice to train employees on the policy.

It’s not necessarily an easy task, which is why many of our clients are turning to us for advice. It’s important to protect both employees and employers by having a robust and practical social media policy. If you don’t have one, it probably should be a priority to establish a policy soon.

Everything is better when made from scratch … especially your marketing strategy.

Seems like everybody is offering a “template” for success these days. Templates for social media planning, marketing strategy, even templates for successful blog posts.

But if the key to sustainable business success is a differentiated product or service offering, isn’t templatizing the planning the process kind of against the grain?

Sure there are very useful guidelines and marketing fundamentals that are inescapable, but when your marketing department or ad agency is trying to cut corners by doing “what other people are doing” then you’re probably setting yourself up for failure. We’re seeing this happen especially in the area of social media marketing and planning where so many newcomers simply want to check the right boxes and not fall behind.

The ultimate goal of marketing is to create strategic leverage by finding un-met or under-served customer needs and then dominating that niche — not copying somebody’s else’s tactics and offering a me-too entry in an already crowded niche. That is just going to make everybody miserable.

Throw the templates away. Whisk up a strategic plan with poppin’ fresh customer insights and made-from-scratch ideas. Bake your own biscuits.

Depending on what statistics you believe, somewhere between 75% and 90% of U.S. companies severely limit or altogether exclude employee participation on the social web. And while there should certainly be guidelines in place for any employee activity that occurs during company time, we feel the benefits of unleashing “employee power” far outweigh the risks.

Maybe it’s time to ask your company why it’s not supporting employee engagement and learning through social networks.  Companies using the social web in the right way share three best practices:

Social media policy.  An effective policy should accomplish two things. First, it should mitigate risk and provide clear guidelines for engagement.  But it should also be a document that encourages employees to explore and grow in a responsible manner.

Reasonable security — Corporate security and IT integrity is paramount and cannot be compromised. Still, there are smart ways to manage the firewall for the social web without compromising trade secrets or putting the company at risk.

Training — Instead of having employees fumble around, why not train them to be highly-effective users of social networks?  For example, a systematic approach to workforce branding on LinkedIn can become a competitive weapon for your commercial efforts, but not without a coordinated effort. Similarly, training on how to  handle competitive issues, how to represent the company appropriately, and tips and time-savers all can help your company gain competitive advantage through effectively corralling the social web.

How is your company approaching responsible use of the social web?

Everybody has PowerPoint slides right?  The “PowerPoint Meeting” is almost a standing corporate joke.  Well, have you thought about putting those slide to work for you on the social web?

Try Slideshare, a very simple tool to leverage your internal content externally.

It’s exceedingly easy to upload a presentation in a matter of minutes and apply keywords to help people find you.  For maximum exposure sync your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts with Slideshare.  .

For those who are environmentally-minded, Slideshare makes it easy to distribute and share without feeling guilty over how many trees you just killed at the copier.  And if the content is confidential, then create a group on LinkedIn or Facebook and limit your exposure to just your exclusive audience. There are also password security features within Slideshare.

Although many are familiar with the uploading of presentations or documents in such formats as PowerPoint, Word, and PDF, embedding videos and audio can create a complete shareable webinar.  There are some excellent reasons to embed video in your presentations:

• Great for demonstrating a particular technique when words fall short.
• Compare different styles or ideas such as comparing Oprah’s interviewing style to Ellen DeGeneres’s or comparing a Ford television ad to a BMW one.  Get the picture?
• Incorporate interviews or clips of videos related to your topic downloaded from YouTube.
• Draw attention and captivate to maintain momentum in a presentation.

Slideshare is designed to PUSH your presentation or documents out to the world,  whereas posting them on your website, viewers have to be driven to your site. Slideshare also has social features like “favorite-ing” and commenting. You also have the option to allow viewer to download or embed your presentation.

In one recent case study, an analyst report received 85 percent of its downloads from the Slideshare posting, an indication of a growing acceptance of the site as a corporate communications channel.

Slideshare is getting noticed in larger companies, too, even those with regulatory constraints that might otherwise shy away from social media.  Using this platform organizations are able to share information, such as annual reports and press annoucements.  Pfizer recently launched its own Slideshare channel.

With the growing popularity of this site, it’s likely that these presentations will feature more and more in search engine results too.  So put those slides to work folks!  Give Slideshare a try.

I was catching up on some reading and had an epiphany about the important role Twitter is playing as a competitive advantage for my company. While looking through an in-depth “special report” on social media marketing in an international journal, I found that I was already aware of 95% of the information in the article.

It was not that the magazine had done a poor job on the piece — it was actually quite thorough.  My insight was that  the reason I was on top of the news was — Twitter.

By surrounding myself on Twitter with a meaningful group of people who are thought leaders in business, sales and marketing, I’m constantly seeing links to the greatest sources of business insight on the planet.  I’m being educated slowly but surely each and every day.

For companies, there is an important implication for this constant stream of free information.

What role can Twitter play within the structure of a corporate training department? More than 75% of Fortune 500 companies have some sort of filter in place to keep employees from languishing in Farmville for hours at a time but they’re also missing out on the most powerful training opportunity on Earth –  The University of Twitter.

Let’s say I was working at a company who encouraged me to tune in to the social web every day. How would this create competitive advantage over a competitor who filtered this from employees?

1. I would probably be much be better informed than my competitor
2. I would know the market and industry information I need to excel in my job faster than my competition
3. My training and development would be taking place every day instead of in some quarterly meeting
4. The content coming at me would be extremely targeted to fill my information needs at this precise point in time.
5. The cost of my daily “training” would be near-zero compared to formal classroom experiences
6. I can engage in continuous learning during normal down times like waiting for a meeting to begin or even being in a queue at the airport. My training has become ubiquitous and mobile!

So what aren’t more companies taking advantage of this critical opportunity?

The first reason is a lack of understanding of what the social web is all about. Unless company executives are really immersed to the point of epiphany they’ll continue to view Twitter as something trivial and irrelevant. Undoubtedly, competitive advantage can come through understanding!

The second reason is fear. There are a lot of temptations on the social web, to be sure. But there are also a lot of temptations to abuse expense accounts, travel privileges and customer entertainment. How do companies safeguard against those opportunities to abuse? Company policies.

A well-written social media policy should explain both the benefits of engagement and the consequences for abuse.

The extraordinary benefits of learning from the social web is just too great to be ignored.  At the speed of business today, every company should be taking advantage of the truly meaningful lessons of daily “training” through Twitter University.

We’ve had an opportunity to work with a number of non-profit organizations and it’s always energizing to see their enthusiasm for social media. A new study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research may show why. Non-profits are adopting the use of social media much more rapidly than their corporate counterparts.

The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008 and 2009 by the 200 largest charities in the United States. And for the third consecutive year, the research shows that non-profits are deploying social tools more rapidly and more broadly than Fortune 500 giants, small companies, and even universities.

According to the latest study, a remarkable 97% of the non-profits report using some social media tool. Social networking sites like Facebook (96%) and Twitter (90%) are now the most common tools used.

There is big news in blogging. While the Fortune 500, the Inc. 500, US colleges and universities and charities have all increased their adoption of blogging between 2007 and 2009, charities are “out-blogging” them all for the third year in a row. The Fortune 500 had the least amount of blogs at 22% adoption, the Inc. 500 with 45%, colleges and universities blogging at 51% and charities now reporting 65% with blogs.

And of those charities without blogs, 56% said they planned to add one in the future.

Podcasting was another big-gainer, up 10% to 36%.  Curiously, the use of video blogging, which was the fastest-growing social media tool between 2007 and 2008, took a substantial dive in usage, from nearly 80% top about 50%. Quite surprising given the popularity of video and YouTube right now.

Charities also report a higher presence on Facebook (93%) and MySpace (30%) than other sectors.

It is clear that not-for-profits are now communicating in new ways and they’re listening too. Sixty-six percent of respondents in 2007 and 75% in 2008 reported they monitor the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their organization. A remarkable 93% now report regular monitoring. Most of these organizations realize the importance of knowing what conversation might occur around their cause, their name, their location or constituents.

We wanted to show off a little fun Patrick Baynes had creating a new profile photo with the help of our intern Katelyn Davis.

In the span of literally 10 minutes, Patrick took a couple of random shot of himself and let Katelyn experiment with Photoshop.  The results are pretty impressive.

With content blasting at us from all directions, you need to look for every edge you can. We recently wrote about the need to approach your Linked-in profile as more of an opportunity to tell your story instead of a glorified resume.  Even your photo, as we show here, can be used to express personality and help cut through the clutter of most social media platforms.