The Brainzooming Group

We’ve talked before about The Brainzooming™ Group strategy for producing live event social media content. Rather than relying exclusively on content being generated by attendees, The Brainzooming Group strategy focuses on producing social media content through a team covering a conference or industry event across social media channels. In essence, the team we organize is a small news operation reporting on conference events via video, images, audio, and the written word.

At the recent 2010 Business Marketing Association Engage conference, our social media team numbered more than fifteen. It included a mix of business marketers, marketing communications professionals, and social media specialists. With that much talent assembled, we struck a balance between ensuring the event’s coverage from a news perspective (through preparing an extensive live social media reporting primer and editorial schedule), while providing freedom for the social media journalists to interact with attendees and presenters in creating spontaneous content onsite.

Beyond the event’s planned content, the BMA social media team’s creativity produced other great videos. Here are three that emerged from their onsite creativity.

The first video is a recap of the Business Marketing Association Engage conference social team’s efforts during the three day event. It was produced by Tim Dreyer of Zebra Technologies and features team members describing their conference social media roles.

The next video extended our brief post-presentation video interviews by featuring a longer, day-before discussion with author Chris Brogan. It includes a great behind-the-scenes look at how Chris adapted his topic and delivery specifically for the BMA Engage audience. The video was done by multi-dimensional social media team members Nate Riggs and Becky Johns (both future social media luminaries on par with Chris Brogan, btw).

Given the relationship Nate and Becky have with Chris, they also shot this funny video spoof about Help a Reporter Out (HARO) creator Peter Shankman, with Chris Brogan doing a send-up of Shankman’s manic style.

This video has already turned into a skydiving dare between the two social media rock stars, with someone’s favorite charity due for a $1000 gift because of it.

All part of the fun coupled with the real business benefits of bringing together great talent, providing some structure and letting them create rich social media content for and about an event. If you’d like to explore how The Brainzooming Group can do the same thing for your conference, contact us. – - Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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A recent post highlighted strategies for creating an informal social media team within your organization to help carry out social media strategy.

Debra Feldman was nice enough to tweet a link but gave it the frown emoticon for not being applicable to solopreneurs. I promised to create a comparable list for individuals in business for themselves. Hopefully, these twenty strategies, based on experience with Brainzooming, will help those building their small businesses (or personal brands) more effectively manage social media.

Managing Your Presence

• Select several social media platforms supporting your business strategy and objectives; concentrate your presence on these alone. You might have one location for content (i.e., a blog or micro-blog), a second for networking (maybe Twitter or LinkedIn), and a third for community interaction (Facebook or LinkedIn).
• Divide social media time into 3 roughly equal parts – reading and monitoring social media in your topic area, commenting and participating on other peoples’ sites, and creating content for your own site. From this framework, decide how much time weekly you can invest on social media. Really work to stick to your time expectations.
• Before blogging, determine how many times monthly you expect to blog. Pre-write that many posts to see if the frequency is viable and to build a month-long content cushion for when time is limited.
• Choose creating and consistently delivering less content over wild swings in activity. Faithfully writing one blog post weekly and three tweets daily is better than three posts your first week with lots of Twitter activity then going silent for weeks.

Generating Content

• Exploit your best communications talents aggressively in your social media effort. These might include article writing, headline writing, shooting video, illustrations, photos, etc.  Design a content strategy allowing you to use these talents to be as efficient in creating content as possible.
• Write down at least two potential blog topic ideas daily where they’ll be available later as idea starters.
• Cut your writing time and keep it short. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) write thousand word blog posts. Stick to one idea in a couple of hundred words.
• Save tweets and comments you make on other blogs to use as the basis for blog posts.
• Solicit material from your audience, providing a brief description of what type of content, topics, and format you’re seeking.
• At a minimum, set up Google Alerts on relevant topics to create readily available content for sharing online.
• Find an intern from a local university to assist your business in its social media strategy.

Promoting Your Presence

• Use common hashtags and keywords to increase visibility and pass along mentions.
• Place social media buttons on your blog to make it easy for readers to share your content within their own social networks.
• Sync your various social media sites so one item feeds multiple platforms (i.e., send your tweet about a blog post to LinkedIn and Facebook automatically).
• Offer simple, fun give-aways to your audience to incent participation in commenting, retweeting, social bookmarking, etc.
• Take time to write a brief bio and company overview for use on every social media site. Use a service such as KnowEm.com to secure your identity on many platforms, with links back to your main sites.
• Create an informal network of friends (onine and IRL) with relevant networks and agree to tweet about each others’ work.

Continuous Improvement

• Attend in-person or webinar training on effectively and efficiently using social media applications to build business.
• Identify someone within your network who is more knowledgeable or efficient at social media than you. After figuring out how to use your best talents to help them, offer to trade for regular help (i.e., tips) on your social media effort.
• Do at least an informal ROI assessment – is your social media effort generating the type and volume of business results that make your time investment worthwhile?

There are certainly many other ideas and technical approaches you can use to be more efficient in your social media implementation. What things have you tried that are working for you?  – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can develop an integrated social media strategy for your brand.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Several times a month, Brainzooming innovation articles appear on Braden Kelley’s Blogging Innovation website – a compendium of work by top innovation writers.  Additionally, there’s a monthly focus topic where a number of writers address the same innovation subject.

The April topic was how social media and social networking applications can benefit innovation strategy. I submitted an innovation article on “30 Ideas for Using Social Networks to Help You Be More Innovative.” It was picked up by a popular email newsletter, which led to lots of page views for the piece, getting in touch with a former business acquaintance, and several speaking opportunities!

Rather than let the innovation strategy and social media ideas stop at thirty, here are ten additional possibilities for using social networks to catalyze your innovation strategy:

Tapping New Expertise

• Use social media to create innovation teams and networks across organizational boundaries with your suppliers and customers.
• Encourage employees to interact and learn from experts outside the company who are active on social networks.

Gathering Different Inputs and Information

• Use comment-oriented social networking applications to solicit broad input on successes and challenges with your products and services.
• Build a network of customers willing to respond to questions and brief surveys delivered via social media.
• Post potential innovation ideas and allow them to be voted up or down based on internal / external audience perspectives.

Enabling Innovative Collaboration

• Eliminate conference calls and use Skype for video conferencing since the visual cues communicated through a video conference will add visual information to help fuel brainstorming and innovation.
• Share professional background information across the company to match up people with complementary skills, talents, and interests.
• Use the professional background information to match up diverse people with very different skills, talents, and interests to instigate debate and contrasting views.
• Require an innovation team to only interact through social media channels during a project. Capture the beneficial and negative learnings to incorporate into future team efforts.
• Use social networking tools to increase information interaction among geographically separated team members.

What other ideas would you suggest for how social media can catalyze your innovation strategy? – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Introducing a coordinated, vibrant social media effort into an organization depends on more than an “official” group creating content. Ideally multiple and varied people throughout an organization are functioning almost as beat reporters and sharing their individual perspectives on topics relevant to targeted audiences.

How do you get do-it-yourself (DIY) social media support from people already contending with more than full job responsibilities?

Here are 15 tactics you can use to pave the way for success in implementing your social media strategy:

• Develop a role description for what a social media team member does in your company.
• Provide realistic estimates of how much or how little time a team member will have to use to participate on the team.
• Develop and share a social media policy for your company.
• Create an internship and recruit a university student to participate in the effort.
• Ask people what their talents and areas of interest in social media are and give them appropriate assignments.
• Provide step-by-step instructions or basic guidelines to encourage new social media participants.
• Have more experienced social media practitioners mentor those just getting started.
• Develop your own wiki, blog, or social network community to post reference materials, FAQs, and other relevant information for the team.
• Offer some type of simple, fun give-away to team members to incent active participation.
• Provide a team list with contact information, areas of expertise and focus for each member, and who to call to report on successes and challenges.
• Offer in-person or webinar training on effectively using social media applications and your brand standards.
• Provide a thorough list of articles on how to excel at various aspects of social media.
• Share links to free webinars focused on social media how to’s.
• Brainstorm and share a list of suggested blog topics.
• Use an approach that allows participants to smoothly rotate on and off the social media team at reasonable intervals.

What innovative strategies have worked for you to generate broader participation in social media within your business or organization?  - Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s always interesting to learn about what you do through someone else’s eyes. When there’s an opportunity for candid feedback, use it to refine your business strategy and look more innovatively at your performance.

The Brainzooming™ Group had a wonderful opportunity to get reactions to our strategic planning process last week from Nate Riggs. Nate started Social Business Strategies to help mid-sized & large organizations develop social media strategies and build internalized Human Business Teams.

Last Tuesday, The Brainzooming Group facilitated a large (35 person) social media strategic planning session for a four-year university. Nate Riggs was invaluable for his experience in working with other higher educational institutions on social media approaches.

We modified several Brainzooming strategy-building exercises to facilitate the large group and came away with great learnings. Nate’s first-time reactions to how we efficiently and effectively manage strategic conversations were also helpful in continuing to refine our process. You can get a quick sense of Nate’s views in this video and in his follow-up blog post on the strategic planning session.

Take a look, and let us know any questions you have on the approach, either for large groups or for developing social media strategy. – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The Free State Social took place in Lawrence, KS, April 27-28, 2010. The program featured a great line-up of social media luminaries from both the national and regional scene. Based on a prior client commitment developing its social media strategy (the topic for tomorrow’s post), it wasn’t practical to be able to attend the Free State Social. Based on all the great tweets and video coming from the conference, however, it was clearly a innovative environment at the new Oread Hotel in Lawrence.

Tara Saylor Litzenberger was one of the attendees, and from the enthusiasm of her tweets, I asked her to recap her take-aways for Brainzooming readers. Tara describes herself as an “easily-amused web nerd who writes about farm equipment for a living.” She readily cops to shameless addictions to coffee, Twizzlers, and Lolcats. And although Tara says she seldom leaves comments on blogs (something she plans to remedy), I’m glad she decided to guest post and share her highlights from the Free State Social:

I love, love, LOVED the Free State Social. I freely admit I’m the biggest nerd in my department, possibly the entire office, so it was a real treat to spend time with like-minded nerds to talk about the state of the social internet– and its future.

Archives of the presentations will be online soon- watch @FreeStateSocial for updates- and there are tons of great tweets summarizing the event.

Some of my big take-aways:

• It’s just another channel - Chris Brogan started the day by refusing to even talk about Twitter, and Jeremiah Owyang closed by reminding everyone not to fall in love with the tools you use. It was refreshing to hear because social media is the shiny new buzzword in corporate America, but the principles of using it effectively are the same marketing principles as we’ve been using for years.
• Have a strategy before you start - Jeremiah went so far as to say that if your company doesn’t have support systems in place, don’t even engage. Again, it sounds perfectly logical, but it gets lost in all the “you gotta get a twitter account” hype.
• Real time is not fast enough – Companies need to have a plan to deal with ugly situations before they happen. Letting something sit overnight- or worse, for an entire weekend- simply isn’t an option.

There were a few other topics that came up that really got me thinking, too:

Bloggers as Journalists

There was a lot of discussion around bloggers as journalists, which makes a lot of sense considering the event was sponsored by a news organization and the whole Gizmodo iPhone case was a current event in the online community.

But do all bloggers need to be counted as journalists? I blog, but I tend to post funny stories about daily life, not news. I don’t worry about citing my sources because my source is almost always me.

Then again, there are some basic tenets to content creation I’m following. I’m using my own pictures. I don’t try to pass off someone else’s work as mine. I give credit (and links) where credit is due. They’re the same rules I’ve been following in my professional life as a copywriter, but they’re also ingrained into journalism.

Vocal Critics

The second area I’d have like to talk about more was vocal minorities and backlash. There was a brief discussion around the Motrin Mom debacle, but it was largely around response times. We all know that there are passionate influencers out there, and as marketers, we try to reach them.

But is there a point when a vocal minority starts taking a brand hostage, along the lines of Green Peace and Nestle? Does an angry YouTube video become the digital equivalent of rappelling into a shareholders meeting?

We’ve come to accept that there are audiences that will never be happy with your company, no matter what it does, but where are the lines? Especially if you work for a company that people love to hate, like Monsanto?

The best part of an event like the Free State Social? Thanks to all the tools we use (Twitter, Facebook, even email and Google Buzz), the conversation isn’t going to stop just because the event is over.  - Tara Saylor Litzenberger

Guest Author

The Brainzooming blog has a wonderful group of guest authors who regularly contribute their perspectives on strategy, creativity, and innovation. You can view guest author posts by clicking on the link below.

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As the Tuesday post highlighted, we participated in the Freelance Exchange of Kansas City Portfolio Showcase yesterday. It was an experiment with some clear positives and a lot of “we’ll sees” based on recapping our strategy and implementation during the drive home.

One of the “interesting” items in our Plus-Minus-Interesting-Recommendation review was the number of people familiar with Brainzooming through Twitter. For a brand that was a part-time effort until late last year, it’s evidence of the impact social media channels can have in building awareness and creating a perception of what a brand stands for in its initial stages. It certainly helps get an in person conversation started when someone has a sense that Brainzooming is focused on helping organizations be more successful through more innovative approaches to their strategy and its implementation.

This opportunity to create familiarity through social media underscores the importance of thinking about what you tweet or post, and its consistency with your brand – be it a personal or business one. Ample reason to ask before you hit enter, “What might a current or potential client read into or think about my brand based on this message?”

And while you’re at it, if you’re representing yourself directly in social media, ask the same question relative to your mother, spouse, children, current employer, future employer, and anyone else who’ll make a decision about you in the future.

Yes, it’s social media. Yes, it can be fun. But be sure you’re strategically tweeting, blogging, and sharing out there! People ARE listening. – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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