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Social media contacts. Who owns them?

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It’s been an interesting week. I’ve just finished with a project that involved creating a website that is fully integrated with all the social media touchstones – Linkedin Company Page, Facebook Business Page, Twitter etc. – and I’m about to roll out a company wide integration of individual social media accounts.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The client is asking employees to either sign over “ownership” of their existing Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts along with all the contacts contained within, or create new profiles for each of the networks and not use their existing social media contacts for business purposes.

This client is a fairly large player in the Canadian recruiting industry and the position they have is that social media contacts have the same value as the Rolodex of yesteryear. So it only stands to reason that when somebody leaves the firm, they don’t get to take all the business with them.

So who really owns the contacts you make at work? Is it even possible to successfully segregate your previous contacts? Is this just an issue with the recruiting industry? Surely, the same arguments can be made for sales reps in any industry. What about media? If a journalist with a substantial social media following leaves a newspaper or television network, do they have to hand over those followers?

Let’s say you are a new employee and you have been busily working LinkedIn for a number of years prior to coming on board. Is it proper to a)require you to turn over  potential leads to your new employer without compensation and b) can you work effectively starting from scratch on LinkedIn, knowing the contacts you’re making are most likely temporary and non-transferable?

If you choose not to transfer clients from your old account, what do you do when an opportunity comes up and you think you may have a good fit – but contacting that person means you won’t ever be able to contact them again if you were to change jobs? What if it’s your brother in law?

And when you leave the company – and eventually most of us do –  those Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin company accounts don’t come with you, leaving a big hole in your digital footprint – by stripping a valuable chunk of the work connections we now take for granted.

Using LinkedIn to conduct business and find leads is changing the way companies in all industries operate. As more and more of them become aware of the power of Linkedin, this issue is sure to get a bit more play.

Automate your social media marketing

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One of the biggest time wasters for small business is social media marketing. Not that social media marketing is a time waster. But constantly feeding the beast can consume an awful lot of your time without ever showing much benefit.

Many small businesses attend seminars or read articles on the power of social media. You have to be on Linkedin. You have to be on Twitter. You have to be on Facebook. You have to make videos. You have to have a blog.

Yes, you do have to have most of these things to market yourself effectively online.

But what happens is that folks walk out of individual seminars or click away from a marketing article and create accounts for each social media site. They then start a blog and post a few articles.

Awesome.

Two weeks later, they discover that they are spending all their time writing content and posting it separately to all these accounts.

And nothing is happening.

The missing element is that you need to get all these different worlds working together. And the best way to do that is to automate a lot of the process, so the only real effort is creating your compelling content.

So how do you automate the process? Well creative use of RSS feeds is one way.

A few weeks back I wrote about the “Not-so-secret Google tool you should use” in regards to Feedburner.

Well each of the social media big three (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) can use your feeds to automatically update your status.

How much time would that save you?

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

For the purpose of this article, I’ll assume you already have an Facebook Business page – similar to this one from one Linkedin sales trainer, Kurt Shaver.

What we used to connect Kurt’s blog, Twitter and YouTube accounts to auto-update his Facebook page was an app called RSS Graffiti.

So now Kurt only has to concern himself with creating videos, writing new blog posts and keeping up with his tweeting – things he would be doing anyway.

And what happens is anyone who has “Liked” his page, will then see these updates on their Facebook newsfeed the next time they log in.

We also set Feedburner to auto update Twitter, which also auto updates his  Linkedin status.

RSS Updates and LinkedIn

To update your personal LinkedIn profile with your latest blog posting you can install one of these two apps Wordress or Blog Link. Both do the same job. They take the RSS feed from your posts and connect them to your LinkedIn profile.

From your Linkedin company page you can also add your Feedburner feed to display and distribute your blog posts to folks who are following you.

So, if there is a lesson to be learned for everyone when it comes to setting up your social media, it’s that using the free tools all around you will save you time and move your business into the social media arena, without causing you to burn through hours of your day updating everything manually.

Quick Tweets from the CAPS Conference

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This past weekend I was at the annual CAPS Conference (Canadian Association of Professional Speakers). This year it was in Toronto – which would be awesome if I didn’t live in Toronto.

I love travelling to NSA and CAPS events. And when I have to go home at the end of the day, I know I’m missing a huge part of the experience.

As an exhibitor, it was a great opportunity to put faces to names and meet some really interesting characters.

But there was also a lot of time, when I was left at my booth for hours at a time.

My options were to see how many levels of Angry Birds I could conquer or engage with folks as they participated in sessions.

I chose the latter. And I did so with a series of tweets that I sent out over two days. Some of these I’ve talked about before. But some of them are new.

So without any further delay, here are some useful tips, doled out 164 characters at a time:

  • Turn your book into an ebook for iPad & kindle. Check out Smashwords.com #caps11
  • Try using feedburner.com to push out your blog to the world. #caps11
  • Get your book distributed internationally as POD. Look into lightningsource.com #caps11
  • Grow your Facebook fan page by exporting your contacts from LinkedIn. #caps11
  • Don’t be afraid to outsource your web development. Look into scriptlance.com #caps11
  • Connect your YouTube account to automatically update your Facebook fan page. #caps11
  • My mom doesn’t care how good of a speaker you are so I’m not going to Like your site. The most important share button for business is LinkedIn. #caps11
  • Google+ might be a pain in the ass, but it actually counts for SEO. Just build the business page and complain like the rest of us #caps11
  • If you’re using a personal Facebook page for business, you’re missing a lot of opportunities to connect with clients. Move them to a business page. #caps11
  • How does your site measure up? Get a quick and dirty snapshot @ websitegrader.com #caps11
  • Sign up for a Google Webmasters account and submit your site map. #caps11
  • Chop up all those videos you’ve got in a box beside your desk and create a YouTube channel.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

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Everything is connected.

The tools are out there to have all your social media update like a fine tuned machine.

With very little effort you can set yourself up so that each time you update your blog or post a new video to YouTube, it automatically goes to Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook or any of the other half dozen social media hubs we’re all encouraged to join each week.

But just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to.

That’s right. You don’t have to connect everything.

A few years back when all this was very new, I had a guy I barely remember from high school “friend” me on Facebook.

Within minutes I was getting information about his catering business. Needless to say, he didn’t last very long on my feed.

At the time it got me thinking about why I’m on Facebook and what the expectation of my friends are.

While I’m sure at the time they were bored silly of pictures of my newborn baby, even that was probably less irritating than the business-related tweets and Linkedin updates that were also going to my Facebook account.

So a decision was made. I severed my Facebook account from Twitter and Linkedin. I then tweaked the security settings so that only real friends were welcome in my digitally walled garden.

This allows me to separate the personal from professional.

Now when I get a Facebook friend request from a potential business contact, I politely refer them to my Linkedin and Twitter accounts.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use Facebook for business. You just have to be smart about it and create a Facebook business page, so that folks who are interested in you as a professional, continue to get what they need, while your friends and family aren’t turned off by your latest blog posting on “Leadership.”

Pages

The internet is global. Is your business?

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The internet is changing the way the world does business.

As a marketing consultant, headquartered in North America, I see sites from all over the world.

And I’m always surprised to see how poorly a lot of businesses manage their online presence.

If you want more business from the US and EU, keep reading.

It doesn’t take much to transform your site into a lead generator. All you have to do is make sure it looks professional, and can match up against your competitors in North America or Europe.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in oil or sales. You can make your site into a lead generating tool.

Here’s how:

  • Create a Facebook Fan page, LinkedIn business page and Twitter account
  • Use an RSS feed to update all these social media sites (products, services, blogs)
  • Create compelling online tools that are good reasons for visitors to stick around
  • Add some forms to capture email addresses.
  • Use all the Google tools (Analytics, Feedburner, Webmasters) to make your site more search engine friendly
  • Add social media share buttons so visitors can easily share your content with friends and colleagues

Take a look at thesalesfoundry.com as an example of how it’s done right.

Before you go any further, submit your site using the form on the right column, and I’ll have a look at it for free.

When I’m finished, we can set up a Skype chat to go over the results. If you want me to implement the changes, great. If you have someone on your team to do them, that’s okay too.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Aidan Crawford
President
Short Circuit Media