Live Blog! Leveraging Social Media with Beth Kanter

Thoughts from the group on Twitter: Usually when you follow someone, they follow you back. If you start on being engaging and getting to know your people, they will tell other people to follow you. Promote to audiences that you can be followed on Twitter. Target your messages.

Listening for Organizations: Monitor, Compile, Distribute, Reflect

What is being said that positive? Negative? Neutral? How does what they say change?

Find the tools that work for your company best that can help you find out what people are saying. Free tools like Google Alerts, Social Mention, or Twitter (or any RSS reader). For pay tools like Radian6 will save time, but costs money. If you are still in the walk/crawl stage then don't use the pay tools, start with the free ones.

Six Steps for Listening:

1. Get your organization ready

2. Use your RSS reader like a rock star (Make it a daily habit)

3. Brainstorming Key words

4. Set up a listening Dashboard

5. Make listening and engaging an ongoing process

6. Build time for reflection

If you find people talking about you, figure out if it's a problem or not a problem. If it's not a problem, find ways to engage those people. If it's a problem, figure out if it's a big problem or a little problem and act swiftly. If you are not present for the conversation, the conversation is happening without you...and this will effect your organization in the physical world. Add value to the conversation, don't be afraid to disagree, keep to the point of the topic, point to the relevant sources if you have more information, watch the conversion develop, humor works, and avoid big brother.

Unbelievably, and yet believably, the Air Force has an incredible blog assessment strategy. Here is one of the versions: http://www.prwatch.org/node/8104

So, interested in the listening experiment: http://artssocialmedia.wikispaces.com/Twitter+Experiment