by Caroline Leach | Mar 11, 2018 | Learning, Social Media
The best part of a day of service? It usually turns into a day of learning and inspiration.
Students from Southern California high schools got an introduction to the power of personal branding at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism this weekend.
It was part of a broader USC Alumni Day of SCervice. Members of the Trojan family around the world came together to make a difference in their local communities.
At Annenberg, students and alums came together for mini professional development and mentoring sessions with students. The focus was on helping them build their personal brands.
What inspired me the most as an alum was the number of students who have already started their own businesses. They shared savvy social media tips for how they market their businesses.
An Instagram influencer with a large following shared what she learned from working with various brands and how to maintain her authenticity with her followers.
A provider of babysitting services talked about marketing her business on Facebook, because that’s where her mother’s friends, her potential clients, are on social media.
A maker of children’s toys talked about his plans to scale his business more broadly, and how he’s reached people through social media.
Annenberg’s Leticia Lozoya and Jaime Carias designed the delightful day, bringing together 40 alums and 40 students from partner high schools throughout the Los Angeles area.
Al Naipo on Personal & Professional Branding
Veteran news reporter Al Naipo kicked off the morning’s speakers. After many years with FOX 11 news, he launched his own business and he led communications for County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. He’s now the Chief Administrative Officer at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission.
Al focused on sharing how to maintain professionalism with your personal brand when you’re in the spotlight – whether it’s politics, business, education or any arena of life.
He started by sharing a newsroom phenomenon – a large display listing reporters’ social media followings, and how everyone ranks compared with their colleagues as well as competitor newsrooms. A social media presence is critical for journalists to be effective today. By extension, the same could be said for all professionals.
Al told several compelling stories, including how career opportunities had come to him based on the power of his LinkedIn profile. Here are a few of Al’s nuggets of wisdom:
- Your social media presence could be a make-or-break reason to get a job
- Everything you do has to do with branding and how you’re seen by others
- People view your work life and your personal life as all one thing
- Stick with your brand, because people associate it with you
- Social media is a powerful way to connect directly with almost anyone
Ashley Tesoriero on the Power of Your Personal Story
A national marketing specialist at IMT, Ashley Tesoriero told the group the secrets to sharing your personal story, even if you see yourself as a more private person. She emphasized the importance of tying your personal and professional life together make one.
According to Ashley, your personal brand is, “your online and in-person resume you present to the world.”
She encouraged everyone to figure out what their story is, and what medium(s) best capture it. For her, it’s Instagram, LinkedIn and her WordPress website.
How do you get to your story? It starts with reflection on your mission, vision and values. Ashley led the students through an exercise to begin thinking about these big-picture questions of what they want their lives to be about.
The group outlined their personal experiences – complete with challenges, opportunities and who they are in their communities – in order to establish their personal brands.
Emma Forbes on the Power of a Personal Brand
Students got to practice their “one-minute me” pitches during the lively closing session with Emma Forbes. She’s a radio and television presenter from the United Kingdom, and the parent of a current Annenberg student.
Emma told compelling stories of her own career journey to help students shape and package their personal stories to launch their personal brands and be a positive influence in a social media world.
When pitching a “one-minute me,” Emma said not to read a list of qualifications. Instead, she advised, “talk about where you come from, where you’re going, and what you’d like to do.”
She called these the defining moments that happen in a face-to-face setting a pivotal moments in everyone’s careers. “You need to be the face of your brand,” she said. “No one can sell it better than you. Be you and speak your view.”
What do you do when nerves get the best of you?
- Start with deep breathing
- Make eye contact
- Pause instead of saying “um”
- Clasp your hands front of you
“You need nerves,” according to Emma.
Then the emotional, electrifying moment arrived.
She asked what would have happened, “if I wasn’t nervous about meeting you today?”
If someone so accomplished, so authentic and so poised felt nervous about speaking to students and alums, then there is hope for all of us.
Bring on the nerves!
by Caroline Leach | Feb 11, 2018 | Learning, Marketing & Analytics, Social Media
Coming up on nearly a year of posting a weekly LinkedIn article, what have I learned? What can you learn?
What articles are getting the most engagement?
Are there patterns among those top articles?
And how can this help you on your journey to build your career through social media?
It’s time to turn to another trusty spreadsheet, similar to my experiment on posting to LinkedIn every weekday for a month.
What’s in it?
- 35 articles, from May 2017 to January 2018
- Posting date and day of the week
- Engagement measures of clicks, likes, comments and shares
- Headline scores, characters, words, sentiment and type (thanks to CoSchedule, the content calendar company)
- Network reached, e.g., first- or second-degree network
After creating and populating my spreadsheet, I identified the best performing articles. What determined those? I looked at a general measure of engagement, a combination of the highest number of clicks to an article, along with likes, comments and shares. Then I sorted the data in a variety of ways and began looking for trends and patterns.
WHAT DIDN’T MATTER TO ENGAGEMENT?
A number of variables could be ruled out right away. They didn’t seem to matter to engagement.
Day of the week. About 70% of my articles were posted on a Wednesday, because I strive for consistency. What about the 30% posted on other weekdays? How did they do? The data says the day of the week doesn’t really matter. Articles on other days of the week didn’t do noticeably better or worse than others.
My conclusion? Continue the consistency with Wednesdays, experimenting with other days of the week on occasion.
Headline score. Could better headlines attract more engagement? I experimented with headline analyzers from CoSchedule and the Advanced Marketing Institute and wrote about the experience in a few of my blog posts.
Looking at my top 10 LinkedIn articles, half had “strong” headline scores of 70+, about half had “average” scores between 55 and 69, and one had a “poor” score below 54.
My conclusion? While I believe there’s value in writing the most compelling headline possible, it’s not necessary to find or use the highest-scoring headline. I do believe using headline analyzers has improved the quality of my headlines over time, however, which has helped enhance my articles.
Headline sentiment. Would headlines with stronger sentiment, either positive or negative, perform better? The analysis of my own articles didn’t really bear that out. Of the top 10 headlines, 2 were positive and 8 were neutral.
My conclusion? It’s not necessary to focus on headline sentiment and making them more positive.
Headline type. In the top 10 articles, 4 headlines were generic, 2 were questions, 2 were lists, 1 was how to, and 1 was time based, using categories from CoSchedule. Again, no real pattern.
My conclusion? Variety and appropriateness to the particular topic are more important than finding a single most resonant type of headline.
WHAT WERE THE BIGGEST SURPRISES?
For each article I discovered I can click into a list of who has shared the article. What I can’t fully identify is whether this is a newly available feature, or if somehow I missed it before.
Previously, I was aware of shares if the sharer @mentioned me, or if it was included in a summary email from LinkedIn.
But clicking into these shares opened up a whole new perspective for me. With each new article I post, I’ll now check the shares daily. That way I can like and comment on those shares, along with any comments they’ve received. This may even highlight people I’d like to add to my LinkedIn network.
One of my articles, A Top 2018 PR Trend: Growth in Employee Advocacy, was shared by people beyond my network in Denmark, Italy and Mexico.
The shares in Denmark each had accompanying messages. But I don’t speak Danish. What to do? Enter Google Translate.
With this I had to take a leap of faith. I assumed the translation of “burn” had an alternate meaning of “promote” or “build.”
I discovered that 7 people in Denmark were promoting a workshop on employee advocacy and strategic branding through social media. It appeared that my article helped in underscoring the importance of employee advocacy programs.
So I keyed my own response into Google Translate from English to Danish and posted a reply to the first sharer, Gert Juhl. What fun to hear back a day later!
WHAT DID MATTER TO ENGAGEMENT?
To understand what really did matter to engagement, I identified my top performing articles, by a combination of clicks, likes, comments and shares.
Here they are:
1. What Happens When You Post to LinkedIn Every Day for a Month? (911 clicks, 75 likes, 17 comments, 22 shares, 77 strong headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
2. 2018 Trends to Build Your Career through Social Media (895 clicks, 49 likes, 5 comments, 80 shares, 66 average headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
3. 12 Ways to a Great LinkedIn Photo (500 clicks, 44 likes, 14 comments, 4 shares, 66 average headline score, positive headline sentiment)
4. How to Boost Engagement with LinkedIn Articles (301 clicks, 70 likes, 13 comments, 2 shares, 76 strong headline score, neutral headline sentiment)
5. Be Bold in Your LinkedIn Profile (292 clicks, 41 likes, 3 comments, 9 shares, 67 average headline score, positive headline sentiment)
My hypotheses as to why these articles got the highest engagement?
First, they answered important questions for people. What are the social media trends that could affect how to build a career? How to take a great LinkedIn photo? How to create a great profile? How to encourage engagement with articles? What happens by experimenting with daily content?
Second, they combined personal knowledge and experience and existing knowledge in unique ways. They shared my personal experiences (those that are non-confidential) with the intent of helping people in my network and beyond. They are unique, with my own perspective and insights. They are things only I could write. What are things only you could write about?
Third, it helps to have a post boosted by an employee advocacy program (note: opinions expressed in this article are my own.) The 2018 trends article was featured in my employer’s program, thanks to Nolan Carleton and Claire Mitzner. That’s the likely reason there were 80 shares, when shares for other articles were much lower. If your employee advocacy program has a feature where you can submit your articles for consideration, do it!
WHAT OTHER DATA WOULD HELP?
As I thought more about why certain articles performed better than others, I realized I need to add some new data fields to my spreadsheet for future analysis.
First, I’m now noting how people mentioned in an article relate to article engagement. I strive to mention and link to people in every article and @mention people in every post. That rounds out my perspective and boosts people in my network. When I promote articles, I mention them in LinkedIn and Twitter, and sometimes send them a DM, direct message, with a link to the article.
Second, I’m starting to measure the effectiveness of the LinkedIn posts and the tweets that promote the article. How much engagement are these getting? What can be learned from the highest-performing posts and tweets?
Because the functionality doesn’t seem to allow an @mention of people in the LinkedIn post that initially shares the article, I’ll start doing a separate LinkedIn post where I @mention people. Then I can compare how the two types of posts perform. Why is an @mention important? Because the person receives a notification that they were mentioned.
Third, I’ll note the impact (positive or negative change) in the week following the article being posted of my profile views, connection requests and new followers. This gives a sense of how my influence is changing as a result of publishing an article every week, along with the effectiveness of the particular article.
WHY IS DATA SO IMPORTANT?
After a recent week of observing bad behavior on LinkedIn, like new connections who immediately spammed me with a sales pitch, I decided I’d write a post about 10 things NOT to do in LinkedIn.
I jotted down my own pet peeves. Then I bounced them against a Google search of other similar articles. Not surprisingly, my list didn’t add anything new. So why write and post it?
That’s what prompted the realization it was time to return to my own data. What is it telling me about my weekly posting of articles? This is a unique and different story that only I can tell.
And that is what social media content creation is all about … sharing something new and different that can help your network … and that they aren’t going to find anywhere else.
There may be nothing new under the sun. But just as we each have unique fingerprints and unique DNA, we each have unique experiences in our careers. These are the powerful and valuable perspectives we can share with others.
by Caroline Leach | Dec 31, 2017 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
Happy New Year!
Did you make any resolutions? Or set any goals?
A theme for the year can help you achieve them. What’s a theme? It’s a single word you pick to characterize the kind of year you want to have.
As you think about how you’ll build your career through social media in the coming year, the focus of this blog, a theme can help you in four ways.
Motivation. A theme is a personal rallying cry you can apply to everything you do, in social media and in real life. It can help motivate you to take small steps towards your goals, day after day.
Focus. A theme tells you what’s important. And what’s not. It helps you decide in an instant if you’re spending your time in the most important ways to you.
Integration. A theme brings everything in your life together, both professional and personal. Your actions support and build on each other in an integrated way.
Meaning. A theme gives meaning and purpose to every action you take. Your reason for choosing your theme gives you the “why” of your goals and actions.
2018 is year eight for me of having an annual theme. My latest theme came to me while participating in Seth Godin‘s online marketing seminar over the summer.
Seth is a bestselling author and entrepreneur, with an incredible blog on marketing, respect, and the way ideas spread. Everything in Seth’s course focused on his view that “marketing is about creating change.”
Toward the end of the class, a book arrived in the mail. It was called Footprints on the Moon, with a cover photo of Neil Armstrong. One of the sections was called “Buzzer Management.”
Parts of it went as follows:
“I started the quiz team at my high school. Alas, I didn’t do so well at the tryouts, so I ended up as the coach, but we still made it to the finals.
It took me 30 years to figure out the secret of getting in ahead of the others who also knew the answer (because the right answer is no good if someone else gets the buzz):
You need to press the buzzer before you know the answer.
As soon as you realize that you might be able to identify the answer by the time you’re asked, buzz.
Between the time you buzz and the time you’re supposed to speak, the answer will come to you. And if it doesn’t, the penalty for being wrong is small compared to the opportunity to get it right.
What separates this approach from mere recklessness is the experience of discovering (in the right situation) that buzzing makes your work better, that buzzing helps you dig deeper, that buzzing inspires you.
The act of buzzing leads to leaping, and leaping leads to great work.”
As soon as I read it, I knew my next theme had to be BUZZING. I have a habit of holding back, of waiting for perfection. And in that waiting, the world rushes by. Faster and faster, with each passing day.
It’s not comfortable, buzzing in before I’ve completely formulated my thought. But it’s exactly the reminder I need to weigh in and share my point of view. Sooner rather than later. And even if it’s not perfect.
Not in a reckless way. But in a faster way. In social media for career building, the topic of this blog, it’s still important to to keep it “light, bright and polite” in the words of Josh Ochs.
My theme gives me the extra nudge to keep learning and experimenting, while continuing to be positive and constructive in my approach to social media.
Other years’ themes have come in different ways.
Last December our family went to Disneyland over the holidays. It was crowded. Wait times were long. Our family of four ended up making it on only four rides. Yes, I calculated the per-ride cost, but I’ll spare you the painful details.
Because there was a big upside. One of the rides inspired my theme. We ended up in the front row of Soarin’ Around the World. We had a bird’s-eye view of some of the most beautiful scenes on the planet.
And there was my theme – SOARING. All of the definitions worked: to fly or glide at a great height, to rise or ascend to a height, and to rise or aspire to a higher or more exalted level.
I’m happy to say that my theme inspired and focused my efforts. It helped me to achieve several personal and professional goals during the year.
What first prompted me to choose a theme word was a particularly intense work project in 2010. I poured significant energy into designing and delivering a first-ever, week-long leadership development program for my employer. I put my heart and soul into it, giving it the energy and attention it needed to be successful.
But in the process, I seriously neglected myself. My life had become to full. It was like an overstuffed closet. As a result, I made several changes to my life in 2011.
It began by thinning my calendar of commitments, letting the clock run out on too many community activities. Next I brought thinning to my stuff, clearing out clutter and saying farewell to things I no longer needed. Then I applied thinning to myself, focusing on better nutrition and exercise, ultimately becoming a lifetime member of Weight Watchers.
My theme word was THINNING. Often we need to let go of the old to create space for the new. That’s what my theme word did for me that year. It opened up the space I needed to achieve new goals. The next year my theme word naturally evolved to BUILDING.
It wasn’t until after I stumbled upon the idea of a theme word on my own that I realized others promote this practice too.
Best-selling author Gretchen Rubin wrote A Fun Way to Shape the New Year: Pick a One-Word Theme. And nutrition professional Melinda Johnson says to Try a New Year’s Theme Instead of a Resolution.
As you build your career through social media in the coming year, a theme can focus and inspire your efforts. Beyond that, it can be a rallying cry for everything you do.
I’m excited to see what the act of buzzing will bring. As a start, it will free me from always thinking I already have to have the answer. In today’s world, we’re all seekers, looking for the answer amidst constant change. That makes experimenting, testing and iterating more important than ever before.
What’s your theme for 2018?
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