So you want to start implementing social media in your company? Okay that’s cool! But do you know why you want that? What’s the advantage for your company? What do you think you’ll get out of social media? It’s wise to ask yourself those questions first. When you know what you want from social media you can get a strategy together more easily.

This post won’t explain how to create that strategy for your company. That’s maybe something for a future post. It does explain what explicitly NOT to do.

Don’t just be the salesman

Just like the heading above states, don’t be a salesman. As much as you like to sell your products in large quantities, it’s not desirable to express that on social media. Remember, you’re communicating with people. Those people will treat you like any other person so it isn’t wise to flood your streams with posts like: “Now Product X is on sale, buy it now” or “Get our new product updates for only €29,-”. (more…)

Photo credit - http://www.rgbstock.com/user/Gramps

This is a question which I’m coping with right now. We don’t live forever, eventually we’ll die. But what does this mean for your online presence? Good question.

Who wants to live forever?

Everyone wants to live forever of course and when looking at social media you’d expect to have an online presence forever, your brand never dies. After death the posts, comments and blogs will continue to exist on public places like tech blogs in my case. (more…)

Although it got published in 2009 and a second edition came along in 201, the book has some “old” stuff in it. The social media environment changes drastically every year. New players are storming the web and old pals retire.I’m currently attending the course ASOM (Advise a Social Media Strategy) @ HAN University. We need to read some chapters from time to time and write a blog post about it. Well, this is the first one of those!

What’s Social Media

In chapter 1 you’ll get explained what Social Media is. Research points out that most people don’t know exactly what social media is, but they all know that it’s going to be important for their companies. This is (derived from the book of course) my interpretation of social media.

“Social media are media (blog, twitter etc.) that people can use to socialise with others”

Pretty simple isn’t it? People are socialising for years….probably since the beginning of mankind, but that’s something I can’t check. Look around for yourself though, on a terrace people are talking and socialising with each other too. (more…)

Photo by lusi (http://www.rgbstock.com/user/lusi)

I’m as always pretty late to the game but it’s a hot and steaming topic right now, Google+’s real name policy….or to state it officially their “common name” policy. This means you are supposed to use a name on your profile which people know you by in daily life….okay, that sounds pretty much like a real name .

At first I didn’t want to discuss the subject at all, too much trolling and complaining without the use of proper arguments. A lot of the chatter is still the same, but a few posts contained some legit discussions. Those posts made me understand the matter a whole lot better and I just want to put that in black and white here on my blog. (more…)

I don’t consider myself to be a social media power user. A power user is connected in almost all available networks of some significance. I only use 4 social networks at most. Well, it’s not exactly using them, it’s more being there and searchable for others.Of course it’s possible to use different social networks at the same time, especially with apps like Seesmic and Tweetdeck. However I’m leaning more and more to using one network at the time and when looking back at my social media usage, that’s always been the way I used it. (more…)