Results After Training: The Social Media Effect -

Results After Training: The Social Media Effect

8 March 2013

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Building your social media competency & reaping its value is a little like starting a fitness plan & working out: At first, all of that equipment & figuring out how to use it seems daunting & the biggest effect you notice is how tired you are: You go home after each session & flop on the bed, played out.

But, in a few weeks, you notice you aren’t as tired anymore. In 6 weeks, you notice new curves & you are stronger; at 12 weeks, you exude competence & act like a pro, you’re invigorated by workouts & can enjoy new muscle development & your new contours. There’s a definite payoff in energy, strength, physique, the number of calories you burn, and generally in how you present to others, how they respond to you & in how you look and feel.

This was the overall general impression we got from several of our clients—4 enterprise level, 2 SMEs—who responded to a survey, to help us understand how they were doing, post-training, & help us understand how they were utilizing all of that new-found social media knowledge & understanding.

The majority have been using social media in their businesses for more than 2 years, but none are at the ‘6 weeks’ mark, yet, in terms of fitness & working out! One even lamented that social “networking” had become something more akin to social “not-working” & wished their people would spend more time on business planning & building leads! We believe this is a pervasive “issue” & will address the matter in several later posts.

Especially telling was that all were facing the same problems, expressed similar thinking, & demonstrated getting stuck in the same spots over the same issues, despite the fact that some were national enterprises, often considered automatic experts by virtue of their size, alone (sort of the ole ‘bigger brain, more intelligent’ thinking!).

Although the results of this survey are not a scientifically representative sample (much too small & not random), we believe it gives us some sense of what clients might be facing as they incorporate social media tools & platforms into their business communications channels & processes AND what they are facing, after being ‘trained’!

So, what we propose to do, in the next series of posts, is provide post-training training, to help hone the thinking that will build the social media muscle that strengthens & brings vitality to your business. It is an organic process that includes an infrastructure & dynamics. We will address both. In fact, forming the infrastructure requires consideration & thought, but, well formed, will almost automatically channel the dynamics we want: A healthy, thriving business!

The main point is that you have to THINK about your business & what you’re trying to do. We can’t perform the miracles: You do! We can train you about what to look for. We can train you on how to implement it. But, at this stage, if social media is not working for you, then you need to re-think, re-analyze what you’re trying to accomplish & how you’re employing it to achieve your goals.

To get you started in the right direction, we share this most excellent post on KPIs (key performance indicators) by Google’s co-founding marketing guru, Avinash Kaushik, who goes into (sometimes comic) detail about how we should think about what we should be measuring & forces our minds to observe what we’re really seeing when we look at ‘typical’ dashboard measures & statistics.

Next, How Do You Measure Social Media’s Effect on Your Bottom Line?