3 Social Networking Channels Managers Must Master

By Bill Rosenthal, CEO, Communispond Inc.

Successful managers use every opportunity to communicate with everyone who helps them meet their goals—up and down the organization chart and across the supply chain. Whenever possible, they leave the comfort of the office to interact with people face-to-face. But when it isn’t, they rely heavily on “virtual communication” tools such as the phone and, more recently, Internet-based tools such as Skype, Web conferencing, and others. The use of social networking has grown extensively in the last year. In today’s digital and geographically disperse business environment, a manager can’t be successful without it.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking social networking is all about telling the world what you had for breakfast. Or only an obsession of geeks. Just the opposite: Social networking has reached a tipping point. It’s transforming the way managers gather information, inform, negotiate, motivate, inspire, instruct, empower, forecast, and sell. It lets managers be here, there, and everywhere, with individuals or groups, 24/7, and at little or no cost.

Social networking now accounts for 22 percent of all the time Americans spend on the Internet. Four out of five desktop users socialize online—and 9 out of 20 mobile users do. During the 2.7 hours per day users spend on the mobile Web, 45 percent are posting comments on networking sites, 43 percent are connecting with others, and 40 percent are sharing content. One-fourth of all Internet page views take place at a networking site.

Facebook now has 600 million active users and 135 million unique U.S. visitors monthly. Half the users spend at least one hour daily on the site. It’s been estimated that 42 percent of the U.S. population has a Facebook account. (In Canada the figure is close to 75 percent). The fastest-growing demographic among the users is people over 40. Among the active users are company leaders such as Sam Palmisano of IBM, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Steve Balmer of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs of Apple.

Twitter—launched only in July 2006—now has 200 million users, or 8 percent of adult Internet users, and they tweet about 40 million times a day. Some 100 million people are registered with LinkedIn, which has 21 million monthly users in the U.S. and 48 million globally. Bill George, professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, calls social networking the most significant business development of 2010, more important than even the resurgence of the U.S. automobile industry. Social media’s growth contributed to an 8 percent decline in cell phone use last year, according to Internet market research firm comScore.

This article describes the three social networking channels today’s managers must master and some others that are likely to become essential in the future. It then lists 14 principles for using these technologies to maximum advantage.

Channels You Must Master

Facebook: Facebook allows you to make a profile that serves as a richly detailed capabilities statement and official biography, and choose who can see which parts of it. You can list your connections, or “friends”; exchange instant messages with them, privately or publicly; and get automatic notifications when they update their profiles. You can upload photos and album albums, in unlimited numbers. You also can join common interest groups, organized by workplace or other subdivisions. Many new smartphones offer access to Facebook services through their Web browsers or apps.

Most people think primarily of Facebook as a tool for keeping in touch with personal friends and notating details of your personal life, with business uses playing a far secondary role. While this is true for many users, there is no reason Facebook can’t play a much larger role in your business life. You needn’t share all the personal details of your life. Instead, you can create a profile that focuses on your professional connections, interactions, accomplishments, etc., and share them with others in your professional network.

Keep looking for new capabilities because Facebook is continually reinventing itself. To quote Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr, the video and image hosting Website, “Facebook keeps becoming something new. Twitter gets popular, so Facebook becomes more like Twitter. People get obsessed with checking in on Foursquare, so Facebook adds Places,” which identifies users’ locations in real-time. Because the security of user accounts has been compromised several times, however, there is some concern among users about safety.

A competing platform, MySpace, offers fewer customization opportunities and, unlike Facebook, allows users to mask their identity. For these reasons and others, Facebook rapidly is gaining favor over MySpace.

Bottom line, Facebook is getting “big” very quickly and, like it or not, you probably are going to be using it in some part of your business life sooner or later. That being the case, now it the time to start exploring and developing competency with Facebook.

Blogging and Microblogging: A blogis an online diary that’s maintained by a person or organization and is updated continually, usually with the most recent post appearing on top. Readers can leave comments and message each other. The blog can contain text, images, and links to other blogs and Webpages. Unless readers are using an RSS feed, they won’t be aware of new posts without checking the blog manually. Bloggers usually aren’t aware of who’s reading their posts.

Approximately 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate blog. Starbucks, GE, and Patagonia blogs are among those that have a wide following and are models worth emulating for their creativity and high level of reader involvement. It’s said that Bill Marriott of Marriott actually writes his own blog.

A microblogsuch as Twitter allows no more than 140 characters per “tweet.” You choose your Twitter audience members, or followers, and they can invite you to be theirs. Microblogging has become a valuable tool for collaborative work within organizations. The downside: Employees can quickly and easily spread confidential information.

Microblog authors can send and receive tweets via the Twitter Website or on a single device via SMS or use external applications. You can install Twitter clients on your mobile phone and add Twitter apps to your Facebook profile. Because Twitter makes its code available to outside developers, hundreds of tools have become available. Examples: TweetDeck allows you to sort tweets into direct messages, topics, and keywords. With CoTweet, people from the same company can communicate through a single account. HootSuite lets you track and measure the effectiveness of your tweets, schedule tweets, and switch back and forth between accounts.

Services such as Lifestream and Profilactic aggregate microblogs from multiple social networks into a single list. Others such as Ping.fm send out microblogs to multiple networks. Facebook and LinkedIn also have their microblogging features.

Again, you can use a personal blog/micro-blog to talk about your most recent vacation or share your opinion of a recent movie. From a business perspective, though, you’ll do better sharing with others in your social network how your product or service recently solved a customer problem or details of a new product or service your company’s offering.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the major networking site for businesses. You can feel some level of comfort with the connections you make with it because they’re linked to your other connections and to those connections’ connections. You can invite anyone to be a connection, whether they’re a LinkedIn site user or not.

Need an introduction to a prospective customer? Someone you want to recruit? A company you can create an alliance with? An information source? A prospective employer? Find those persons on LinkedIn; get background on them, including their photos, from their profiles; and ask someone you’re both connected with to introduce you. You continually can expand your list of connections by checking out the Website’s “people you may know“ feature.

The LinkedIn Answers feature allows you to ask questions, the way you might at Yahoo! Answers. The difference here is the topics are business-oriented and the identities of the people who ask or answer questions are known. The searchable LinkedinGroups feature allows you to join alumni, professional, or other groups.

LinkedIn has become an indispensable job-search tool—and not only for its job listings. You can keep up on the doings of prospective employers and learn such things as their ratio of male to female employees, the percentage of the most common job titles, and names of present or former employees.

LinkedIn’s chief competitors are Viadeo, with 35 million users, and XING, with 10 million.

There’s More

Apart from the three essential channels/technologies, there’s a wide range of additional social networking solutions managers can use. Here are brief descriptions of some of them:

Deliciousis a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing, and finding Web bookmarks. Its owner, Yahoo!, is seeking buyers for it but will maintain the service in the meantime. Diggallows you to find and share Internet content and submit questions to experts. Stumbleuponis an Internet community for finding and rating Webpages. Wikisoftware lets you to run a Website where users collaboratively create and edit Webpages using a Web browser. Wikipedia,widely known as an online encyclopedia, is actually a social medium because it can allow a manager who is knowledgeable about an issue to reframe it by editing its entry. YouTube,the free video sharing Website, can let you post employee training modules, product demonstrations, customer testimonials, etc., which you then can promote with other networking media.

14 Principles for Effective Networking

1. Be clear about your goals: Who do you want to communicate with and what do you want to happen? Perhaps you want to get in closer contact with your staff members. Or help sell your product. Or be recognized as an authority. Or reposition your reputation. Or take the pulse of your market. Or find a new job. Or participate in a community of people who share your interests. You can’t do these things all at the same time. So don’t be prolific; be strategic, focusing on your key concerns. Don’t be promiscuous about making connections either; concentrate on the most appropriate people instead.
2. Choose a business handle: Use a handle that’s as close as possible to your real name. Avoid cutesy handles that have to do with your hobby, sports team, pet, or what you order at the bar. Make your avatar professional, as well. Don’t rely on a cell phone picture; go to a professional portrait photographer.
3. Keep Thinking SEO: Give lots of attention to developing links to your Website’s or blog’s internal pages because those with deep links will outrank those with only homepage links. You want top search engine rankings for your keyword phrases, but there is such a thing as over-optimizing. If you use the same anchor text everywhere, you might alert the search engines that you’re trying to game their rankings. You can’t outfox the algorithm.
4. Provide value: There’s only one reason businesspeople will want to interact with you: Because they’ll get a payoff from the relationship. The payoff can include useful ideas, information, help in solving problems, finding new resources, or making new connections. Don’t count on your spellbinding personality to keep your readers engaged. Offer them value with, for example, links to domains that aren’t your own. Unless you provide value, you’ll lose them. You won’t even know it’s happening because they might be tuning out on you without going through the less friendly act of unfollowing you.
5. Make it a two-way conversation: Users of social media want to participatein the experience. Let your connections understand that you’ll give as much attention to hearing their thoughts as you are to expressing yours. Encourage interaction by asking a question at the end of your post. When you get an invitation to connect from someone you value, or a post from them, respond right away to show your interest, ideally with a personalized message.
6. Get active with the groups: Whatever your area of interest, you’ll find good company in the social network groups. Reach out to them—and think about demonstrating your leadership by creating a group.
7. Go beyond your network: Work your network consistently, of course, but look to keep making new contacts who can help you meet your goals. As you build your connections, don’t link only with people who have a lot of their own connections. Look for others with whom you can have a meaningful relationship. When getting in touch with a new contact, explain how you got connected. If you find yourself hearing the same thoughts expressed repeatedly, you may be locking yourself into a too-specialized corner. Go where you’ll also hear opinions you don’t agree with.
8. Brevity is the soul of effective networking: Don’t make your readers slog through lots of verbiage to get at what you’re saying. Make it clean and crisp. A tweet’s well-chosen 140 characters can bring across a lot, even an explanation of your personal motivations. Eric Schmidt described why he stepped aside as Google’s CEO with a tweet that’s poetic for its brevity: “Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!” You also can give thoughtful business advice concisely. Here’s an example from Communispond, twitter.com/#!/Communispond: “When something goes wrong during your presentation, almost any excuse you make will be a bad one. Just correct the problem and move on.”
9. Express yourself: Make your feelings known. Take a position on issues. Don’t simply confirm life’s platitudes; be an original thinker. Don’t pontificate, pussyfoot, use circumlocutions or jargon; speak out, loud and clear. Be authentic. It’s fine to have separate business and personal Facebook profiles but be consistent in your positioning across all your media platforms.
10. Don’t fall into an online slumber: There’s nothing more off-putting to people looking for you online than to find you haven’t posted anything for months on end. Once you establish a presence at a site, keep active.
11. Don’t trash your enemies: Don’t use social networking to get even. Don’t bury perceived enemies’ posts or news stories or try to get them banned from networking platforms. Don’t pretend to be a dissatisfied customer. Don’t create multiple handles to gang up on an adversary or enlist people to help you do it. Avoid harm to your friends, as well. Don’t post questionable photos or forward confidential messages without getting their approval.
12. Think first, then post: Don’t fire off an angry post; you’ll likely regret it later. Don’t put anything, text or picture, on your profile page that will compromise your professionalism. Social media live forever. You can’t apologize and take it all back.
13. Don’t be a Robo-networker: When people begin to follow you on a network, don’t automatically bombard them with canned messages. If someone’s already networking with you in two or three places, don’t ask them to make an additional connection elsewhere. Don’t automatically link your Website to every post you make. Remember that social networking can be addictive. Don’t let the time you spend on it keep you from your needed face-to-face interactions.
14. Lead by example: If you want your employees to capitalize on the opportunities social networking offers, you have to be an active networker yourself. Make certain your employees are following company policies on using network tools.

Bill Rosenthal is CEO of Communispond Inc., which offers individual communication coaching for professional development or critical public events, communication programs, and comprehensive reinforcement. For more information, visit www.communispond.com.