Social Media

7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub – Day 3: Building Blocks

This is the third part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You?ll be able to find the complete series?here.

Last time we looked at decluttering your social networks, for the simple reason that having too many spreads you too thin. Being spread too thin dulls your impact, and to use social media for your goals (and meet those of your customers) you need to have impact at every touch-point.

Think of it like a flashlight in a power cut. All your current networks are lights, and too many lights blind and confuse, especially if they’re on at the same time.

By cutting the power (culling the dead or less important networks), you naturally switch on the flashlight to guide you to where you can restore power and see clearly again (concentrating on your strongest networks).

So now that you’ve restored power, it’s time to start building your power base. To start collecting your conduits, both incoming and outgoing, and focusing their energy on providing the strongest light beam for you and your customers.

Powering Your Hub

The real benefit of turning your blog into a social media hub is two-fold. You can better manage your social activities, allowing you more time to target and meet your audience. And in return, your audience can find everything they need in one place. They can see your resources; your activities; your skills; your outposts and home-bases. And we all know simple makes for a better user experience.

To start building your hub, you need to decide what results you want from the networks you decided to keep. While they can interconnect, there’s also a lot of nuances on every network. Knowing how to separate them, and then transfer that effectively to your hub, is where the trick is.

So let’s look at some of the main ones from both a home-base and an outpost approach.

Twitter

While it still has its issues regarding security and reliability, Twitter has become one of the best social platforms around for a multitude of purposes. Connections, conversations, research, customer service, promotional tool, crisis communications and much more. For these reasons and more, it should be a key ingredient in most social media hubs.

Home-Base. You want your Twitter home-base to offer a few options. Your visitors need to know where to find you; what you’re talking about; what interests you; why you’re the person to come to for their Twitter business strategy. Twitter itself offers great tools for this. Yet instead of just your feed, provide updates of the markets your customers are interested in; how their business profiles are being viewed; what information they could be missing. If you’re on a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can run your Twitter account inside your dashboard – perfect for building your hub and maximizing your time.
Outposts. While you want your blog to be your social media hub, you still need outposts for people to reach out to you on platforms they’re comfortable with. But can you expand on that? If it’s a company account, do you just have one feed or one for each area? Why not have your HR team on Twitter? Or research? Or digital? Twitter’s not just for customer service and marketing – think how you can really use it, and then interconnect back to your hub again.

Facebook

The most popular social site around at the minute, Facebook is a behemoth. Yet it’s still very much underused by both people and businesses as an area to drive a social media hub on your blog, and back again. Like Twitter, its potentials are yours to explore.

Home-Base. Because Facebook is so popular, there are many ways to really integrate it with your blog and keep your Facebook visitors interacting on your home turf. One of the best is the Wibiya toolbar, which is compatible with all the main blogging platforms and allows Facebook conversations right on your blog. For WordPress users, there’s WPBook, which not only sends your blog content to Facebook but imports any comments made there back to your blog post. If you’re a developer, Facebook Connect is the perfect way to bring Facebook users further into your blog.
Outposts. The most obvious outpost for Facebook is a dedicated Facebook Fan Page. Ideal for personal and business blogging, a Facebook Fan Page allows your community to connect with you on their preferred platform (if they feel more comfortable on Facebook than a velvet rope/closed community). If you can afford a developer, build a Facebook app to make your page interactive and connected back to your blog in unique ways. For instance, Facebook Fan Page members get special downloads or offers, or exclusive access to first run products. Think of how you can make a Facebook Fan Page work better for you, but whatever presence you have on Facebook, make sure it ties back to your blog. Networked Blogs, for example, is a great way to have your blog on Facebook and tie it back to your hub.

Podcasting and Video Blogging

One of the most underrated sides to blogging is podcasting and video blogging. Both offer an interactive extension to “normal blogging” that often can’t be met by text, and they’re perfect for cross-marketing purposes as well. Seeing a face makes a world of difference in trust factors, and a voice can display the emotion of the content or the excitement of a pitch far better than the written word. The key to integrating into a successful hub is (as with the others) your goals.

Home-Base. While there are some great external sites to work from, why not utilize your blog and really offer an all-in-one experience for your videos and podcasts? Look at Gary Vaynerchuk with Wine Library TV as a great video example. On the podcast front, No Agenda is consistently praised for its quality. While both these shows run as independent mediums on their domains, you can recreate the experience as part of your own blog. John Haydon offers an excellent video on how to integrate your podcast into your blog, while there are plenty of coding options available for different platforms. For video blogging, it’s a simple matter of filming yourself with your webcam or something like the Flip Mino HD, and uploading it to a video account, then embedding HTML code into your page or post. Having these mediums as part of your own blog keeps you and your brand in a cohesive space, although you’ll still benefit from external sites.
Outposts. While having your content, networks and mediums collected on your blog as part of your social media hub, there are benefits to having podcasting and video blogging outposts. If you’re on a network like Viddler or BlogTalkRadio, there’s a chance your show(s) could be picked up and syndicated to the rest of the network. You can become part of a topic-specific community and share/be shared. And if your search engine optimization skills aren’t the best, having an outpost can help you get found easier by customers or partners seeking your skill sets. However, the best outposts will allow a feature to have your show on your own blog as well as on their platform, and these are the ones you want to use to help you solidify your approach.

These are just three examples – depending on your needs, you define what networks and platforms you integrate. Obviously there’s LinkedIn (although that’s fairly limited for true interaction). Slideshare is another great network for highlighting your knowledge and allowing your customers to benefit from it.

The previous exercise of decluttering your networks makes sure you’re selecting the strongest building blocks for your hub. There are many resources available that will help you integrate them depending on your needs – Google is most definitely your friend here. Once you have the building blocks, we can look at how they benefit your business, and this will be addressed in the penultimate post in the series.

Takeaway: Write down what you want to achieve with each part of your hub. If it’s Twitter, make a list of uses and Google for examples of businesses using each one. Find examples of the best Facebook pages for both large brands and small businesses, and take ideas from each as to what works and what doesn’t. Whatever the platform, find examples of best practices and adapt. Tomorrow we?ll look at why a self-hosted WordPress blog offers the best platform to build a social media hub, in readiness for the design to a successful hub. To make sure you receive the latest from?7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub, feel free to either?subscribe by RSS feed or?email subscription.

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7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub – Day 2: Decluttering

This is the second part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You?ll be able to find the complete series here.

Yesterday we looked at why you need a social media hub, and why your blog is the ideal platform. There were some great comments left on why a website should be your hub, and the blog just another spoke. While websites are still used and useful I prefer the blog approach, as outlined in my response to Mark W Schaefer’s valid comment:

I guess I view websites as the storefront for the business relationship that?s built from the blog. You still need the emotional call to move from consider to intent, and I feel that a blog is that bridge, or hub. The site is therefore another extension of the blog.

Hopefully as this series continues, the value of a blog as your hub as opposed to a website will become apparent. But if not, then that’s fine as well – like any good tool, you use the platform that’s right for you and your needs. For some, that may be a website.

Today, we’ll look at how you declutter your social outposts so you can start using the strong ones as? building blocks to fill the holes in your social media hub.

Analyzing. Prioritizing. Socializing.

We’ve all done it. A new social network comes along and we create a profile to check it out, just in case we’re missing something valuable. We like to think we’re getting in on the ground floor, and becoming an early adopter that can help define a platform and its use.

The truth is, there are more platforms that are stuttering along than there are platforms with really substantial numbers. Time spent on these networks is simply a time suck that you can’t afford. And the more time you spend on the wrong platform, the less time you spend on the right ones.

The ones where your customers are.

It’s the equivalent of having your best product ready to sell, then taking it to a garage sale across town and offloading it for less than the cost of the gas you used to drive there. So you need to do three things, and each will dovetail into the next:

Analyze. Look at each network you’re on. Look at how often you’re on it; how you use it; why you use it. Most importantly, analyze why you need to be there. Ask yourself what value you’re getting from it, or have had from it. Ask what results you want to see from your outposts in the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months and more. This will help you…
Prioritize. Your social outpost needs and wants will define how you prioritize which ones to focus on and which ones to spend less time on (or even ditch altogether). For instance, my priorities are my blog (home-base), Twitter (connections, conversations and research) and Posterous (sound-bites to test ideas and thoughts). These three priorities guide my blog posts, my strategies and ideas for Maritz Canada, and where I need to spend further time exploring. Which leads nicely to…
Socializing. Look at the words “social media” – 50% relates to media, and the other half is social. It’s this social aspect that’s changing the way we do business with brands and with each other. The conversations; the instant feedback; the thought processes on where we operate and where we’re found by operators. Basically, it’s a key part of social media success, so having less clutter will allow more effective participation in social media. Which, once you have the hub in place, again is the relation to the sale.

The Danger of Over-Subscribed Fatigue

Look at many conversations around social media, and one of the key discussion points is the time factor involved. Hours spent online when you have an offline business to take care of. The response times needed; the nuances of the individual platforms; the confusion of non-filtered conversations.

Confusion leads to disillusion; disillusion leads to apathy; apathy leads to fatigue. As a business person (and even using social media from a personal point of view), you know that fatigue leads to less concentration and mistakes being made. Mistakes being made personally can often be overcome; mistakes made in business maybe not so much (just ask Toyota).

By decluttering your social outposts prior to setting up your social media hub, you’re paving the way to a clearer path on social without all the side distractions of too many networks and noise. This allows you to set your hub to its most effective; both as an incoming and outposting resource.

Be mean; be vicious; take only what you need to go to the next step. It’ll only benefit you in the long run.

Takeaway: Cull your networks. Focus on three or four where you’re really strong. Make a bucket list of what you want to achieve on these networks (customer service, sales, marketing, thought leadership, etc). Demote the rest to secondary. Tomorrow we?ll look at maximizing these choices and connecting them to your hub, and back out to your connections. To make sure you receive the latest from?7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub, feel free to either?subscribe by RSS feed or?email subscription.

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7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub – Day 1: Defining Your Hub

This is the first part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You’ll be able to find the complete series here.

Social media. It’s all the rage. Pepsi is pinning its Super Bowl hopes on it. Ford’s social media strategy, led by Scott Monty, helped regain trust (and profits) after the Detroit Big Three Meltdown last year. Barack Obama used it wisely to help his overall campaign in winning the White House race. Marketers are allocating more of their budgets to social media marketing and advertising in 2010.

So, yeah – social media is a pretty big thing. But it can also be a pretty fractured thing as well.

New platforms spring up, old ones wither and die, some are more beneficial than others and some will just take up valuable time and waste it. And it doesn’t matter if you’re using social media personally or professionally, time is a luxury very few of us can afford to be lenient with.

This is where having a single point social media hub comes into play (or at the very least, a single collection point for all the passengers that are your social outposts).

Instead of being fractured, you concentrate your efforts where they’ll have most impact. You also make it easier for people to connect and interact with you (which, from a business point of view, is the relationship to the sale). And for personal users, these interactions open you up to whatever future possibilities you may already be planning (career, business idea, non-profit support, etc).

And the best place for your social media hub? Your own blog.

The Blog is the Hub

Why your blog? Simple (and I’m talking mainly from a self-hosted option here – free is fine but self-hosted is your complete control) – the only limitations to what your hub contains are your needs and outreach goals.

You define the role your blog will play in your social outreach as well as your social incoming – and that’s the key word here. You.

A lot of people use Facebook as their social media hub, and it’s a great platform for doing this. But it’s a third-party solution, so you’ll always be bound by their terms and conditions. All you’re doing is renting space and abiding by a landlord’s rule. But your blog – especially a self-hosted one – is your rulebook. For this alone, it’s the ideal platform to create a social media hub.

But there’s a lot more to your blog acting as your hub than not giving over control to third parties. By using your blog as your home-base and connecting the dots to your social outposts, you’re essentially making yourself both resource and resource centre.

Yes, Twitter initiates great connections and is ideal for short-burst infomercials. Facebook is perfect for offering a neutral ground on connecting only with those you want to connect with. Viddler and blip.tv are both great platforms for finding and sharing more than just text. LinkedIn is the portal that holds many a key to your business goals.

But every single one is a separate entity from each other. Not all the connections on one will be connected on the others. See the potential time suck for keeping up with every account, while doing your day job too? There is one common denominator though – you. You’re the filling on the sandwich; the bus driver to the destination; the glue that holds everything together.

Turning this glue to your blog makes it – and therefore, you – sticky. The reason kids like connect the dot books is that there’s a defined path, a clear goal and direction. Taking the pain out of finding you, what you do and where you do it is the adult equivalent of connect the dot books. Your blog-led social media hub is the perfect dot connector.

Defining the Hub Spokes

A good hub is only as strong as its spokes. Where it feeds to; how it feeds inward; who the spokes talk to and who speak via the spokes. To make your hub effective, you need to showcase its – your – strengths and build on them. You need to have a clear, defined path, how you’re going to travel it and what’s going to make the journey easier (both for you and fellow travelers).

To define your hub, you need to ask some questions:

Where will my focus be?
What is my goal?
What are my measurement points?
Where can I outsource to outposts and where should I build at home?

These are just some of the questions that will define what kind of hub you have and where the hub leads to (and leads back from). Answering these (and ones that will come organically because of them) will start to define you within your hub. And that’s where the real fun and success begins.

Takeaway: Look at where you currently have a presence online. Social networks; forums; community sites like Ning; video or podcasting sites. Do a mini audit and see which ones are strong and which need work. Ask yourself if the weaker ones are worth continuing or if you can sacrifice them to take the others and use as building blocks to make a solid social media hub with. Tomorrow we’ll look at putting these blocks in the holes. To make sure you receive the latest from?7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub, feel free to either?subscribe by RSS feed or?email subscription.

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Next Week – 7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub

As the title of this post mentions, next week’s going to be a little different here. Instead of the normal posts, you’ll find 7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub.

The online world’s moving fast. Social media is on everyone’s lips, and questions about how it can impact you and/or your business are being asked every day. How do I use it; how do I measure it; what does it cost; where should I be?

The first three questions are ones that I look at regularly on here, and will continue to do so. The last question, however, is one that I’m being asked more and more.

While there are no simple answers, there is one overriding one – be where your home-base is and build outposts from there. And there’s no better home-base than a blog.

So, starting on Monday and continuing all week, I’ll be sharing some of the most effective ways for you to turn your blog into a social media hub. Some of the things I’ll be covering are:

Why a blog is the ideal home-base.
Why simple things like design can determine how successful a hub you have.
How to integrate all your current social media outposts and those of your connections.
The importance of percentages when allocating time to your blog and social media outposts.
How to life-stream simply and effectively.
Why WordPress is the best platform for a social media hub.

These are just some of the areas that will be up for discussion. As always, your input is welcome on each post, and be sure to let me know what examples you have that I don’t cover. And if there’s anything you’d like covered, leave your suggestions in the comments below and I’ll see if they can be fitted in.

I hope you can join me over the next seven days. I won’t promise to have all the answers, but I will hopefully give you a useful starting point for your own approach.

To make sure you receive the latest from 7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub, feel free to either subscribe by RSS feed or email subscription. See you next week!

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