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Many people ask me, “How can you build a Personal Brand and do a full time job?” It’s difficult, which is why I’m sitting here at 07:00 AM writing this.
Guess I’m lucky that one of my work objective is to support the organisation in terms of Social Selling as well as be a though leader to the external world. Often my Social activity is misunderstood as “not working”.
Are Tweeting or Working?
When I’m working on Social Media, I make no secret of the fact I work at Oracle, I decided early on to split my Twitter accounts and use @OracleTim for work activity. But really what happens is that @OracleTim tends to be used for more Technical interest, like Cloud, Big Data and Oracle events that I think people would be interested in. So while @Timothy_Hughes is an “Oracle free zone” the subjects it promotes, such as Marketing, Cloud, Customer Experience, Social Selling etc all have market creation potential for Oracle.
Good friend of mine @JackKosakowski works for a Marketing Automation company but he doesn’t tweet all day about Marketing Automation. Jack is a Social Selling Evangelist and he blogs about Social Selling. He and I agree that to implement Social Selling as a strategy, Sales people should look at automation to undertake some of the “heavy lifting” allowing you to get out the office and be in front of customers.
But here’s the trick!
We may not explicitly talk about our employers, their products and services, but if you implement Social Selling, our respective companies do sell tools as tactics in the strategy.
All you do is Tweet and Blog all Day!
Place this in the context of my Blog. I have to admit I’m a Buffer user. In my Blog, while I don’t recommend mass automation, some automation does free you up to do other things. A day’s work for example.
Typical Day
My day begins at 05:00, after feeding Tiger the cat (he won’t let me start anything until he’s fed). I’ll have breakfast and fill my “Buffer” up, this allows me to Tweet all day and do a day’s work. When I get in the evening, I also fill Buffer up to allow me to reach followers in the US and Far East.
Also allow myself two posts on LinkedIn a day, one that I will post during this session eating my breakfast and the second post, again to reach the US and Far East Followers.
If I’m travelling into London to meet with customers, will also use Flipboard or other content curation tools to keep up-to-date with the latest articles and will share anything I feel is interesting.
Typically, during lunchtime I check the news and my inbox to see if there any interesting articles and Tweet or post on LinkedIn or Facebook.
But I Thought you said Social Media is About Engagement
It is! I ALWAYS find time to “do my Twitter” as I call it. This is where I go through all of the daily comments, DMs, retweets, conversations and answer them personally. If you are a brand, my view is you need to respond within the hour. The fact I’m not responding for sometimes eight hours seems to work for me and my community.
As a rule of thumb, using automation to deliver content that you’ve hand picked has value. All you’re doing is using automation to spread it out over the day. Using automation to deliver messages that haven’t had some of that “hand picked love” doesn’t have value.
My friend, Ted Rubin was over in London this week, when I met up with him, I checked this out and he did something similar. He refuses to use any automation, but like me, he can sit there for an hour (some days) in the morning and evening, answering comments.
Social – Back to Basics
If you think Social is about banging out corporate content then I’m sorry you are just as much as a dinosaur that people who don’t “get it”.
Social IS about engagement, everybody knows I work at Oracle, but I don’t have to stand there with a sign saying “Buy Oracle”. In fact, you will find that buyers will actually avoid you. Think of it as “Sellers Karma”, every day I post, every day I engage and interact. Somebody will get a good feeling about those “guys at Oracle”. It might not get us on every short list, but, maybe, just maybe, it gets us on one more than we had last week. Now that would be a great place to be!
The same for the company you represent. While I may not have heard about your company, follow me, engage and interact, and like a long list of my friends, I will then soon have.
Final Words from Ted Rubin
When we were out, Ted told me the story about Gary Vaynerchuk ( @Garyvee ) when asked,; “How do you find time for Social”. Gary answered, “Sleep Less”. Ted went on to say “I like to say it’s about choices …. Everyone can fit it in, all about priorities, multi-tasking, and making the time… Less TV, a little less sleep, skip the nap on your commute, etc. Like Working Out…. If it’s important to you, then you make it part of who you are.”