” If you’re amongst the many people that are totally overwhelmed by Social Media, who may love and use Facebook for your personal networking or connecting with school friends but haven’t seen or understood the value of using this tool for business; if you think Twitter is for people who have too much time on their hands and can’t even begin to fathom how something like a 140 character conversation  can add value; or whether Linkedin is a tool you’ve signed up for, but aren’t quite sure what to do with the connections you’ve made – Join the club, I was there as well! This bootcamp helped me understand it all!” – Vicky Coats, TomorrowToday

Some of the topics that we covered are:

• What is Social Media or Social Networking?
• An introduction  to the various networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, as well as blogging. How they work and whats makes then so effective when used together.
• Advertising online
• Marketing strategy; Inbound marketing; building your own strategy, and managing and measuring your strategy.

Workshop Dates

• Cape Town – 28th March 2012
• 
Johannesburg – 19th April 2012
• 
Durban – 24th May 2012
• Johannesburg – 15th August 2012
• Johannesburg – 8th November 2012

According to a study by TNS Surveys, Social Media has become the main reason that people access the internet. 80% of South Africans online have a Facebook account and on average they visit it twice a day. Over a million South Africans are on Twitter and YouTube ranks among the top 5 most visited websites in South Africa.

Social media has become the communication vehicle of choice for many South Africans. Quite simply, social media has bought about a new way of communicating. People now communicate to the world by tweeting and updating their status, uploading photo’s and writing on people wall.

Event Details

• Presenter: Mike Saunders
• Event Type: Social Media Bootcamps
• Date: Wednesday, March 28th 2012
• Time: 9:00am
• City: Mike Saunders in Cape Town
• Venue: Cape Town
• Country: South Africa
• Admission: R 1200
• Buy tickets
• Notes: Social Media Bootcamp hosted in Cape Town. This event is open to anyone in Cape Town who would like to know more about Social Media and how it cam help your business.
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

The Green Apron Book is a booklet that Starbucks gives its baristas.  It outlines Starbucks mission: “To provide an uplifting experience that enriches people’s daily lives,” along with 5 Principles for doing exactly that:

1. Be Welcoming: Offer everyone a sense of belonging.
2. Be Genuine: Connect, discover, respond.
3. Be Knowledgeable: Love what you do. Share it with others.
4. Be Considerate: Take care of yourself, each other, and the environment.
5. Be Involved: In the store, in the company, and in the community.

The principles promote that good business and great customer experiences come out of a personal connection between people. Social media relies on this principle as fundamental to your social media strategy. Without being personal and considerate you will struggle to build community.

Community is the centerpiece of your social media strategy, everything said and done by people inside your community will shape and define how your community evolves. By applying principles like the one’s outline here you can be sure that your community online and offline will grow and evolve into a very valuable business proposition.

Yes, this does mean that you need to allocate resources (mainly people) to manage the social media engagement for you business. Automation will just create a flat community with no energy and even less business interest.

So for the purpose of this exercise I thought I would share with you my top iPad apps that I use to consume and respond to the social media channels in my life. This list is not in order of preference.

Social Media iPad Apps

Facebook – all things Facebook related
Twitter – all things twitter related
Hootsuite – I mainly use this app to schedule updates to my social channels
Showyou – a great interface to all video/YouTube content shared by your social community
WordPress – manages post updates and comments moderation for my WordPress blogs
Analytics Pro – a great tool I use to dive deeply into google analytics
Yammer – a fantastic internal social network tool that I use to keep my colleagues up to date on my work and actions as a colleague of theirs
Skype – the iPad is the best Skype tool in my personal opinion. Especially with a pair of headphones with a built in mic.
Flipboard – a great interface that I link to my google reader account to keep in touch with all my reading content everyday. I like this because of its Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,Read it later and email sharing tools. Just makes sharing content very easy.

Social media campaigns normally find their place inside the marketing budget and can be conceptualised, executed and measured relatively quickly. A social business reinvention take time to conceptualise, it needs to become a part of strategic direction and the overall business plan. In most cases these reinventions take considerable time and investment to navigate successfully.

When looking at a social reinvention I would suggest navigating your business in the following manner.

People connection

Start with how the reinvention will impact the people in your team. Think about what benefits your employees and customers will experience from the reinvention. Find the ‘value point’ that makes the need for reinvention apparent. Social reinvention is all about adapting business to meet and connect with people better. This takes places internally and externally in marketing, knowledge management, recruitment, and many more aspects of business.

Technology integration

Once the ‘value point’ to people has been established we can now take the brief to the technology. The reason we don’t start with the technology is because the technology should not dictate the strategic direction. Just because something is possible with technology does not mean that it is a strategic fit with your business goals.

At this point it is important to allow your technology experts freedom to explore the possibilities. They may be able to find ways to enhance you idea. Just be sure to always ensure that you ‘value points’ are not compromised and suffocated in a sea of technical gadgets.

Enable your people

Once the technology has been built to deliver the ‘value points’ to the customer or employee you need to be focus on your communication strategy in rolling the new project out. They way you educate, communicate and guide your customer or employee is imperative to see the successful integration of your project into their lives. It’s true, the value is there but they need to see it, understand it and how it will fit into their life.

Social media is about the people, well at least it should be. Approaching social media strategy with a “platform mentality” is like focusing our attention on the which bike we need to ride when we should be concentrating on our fitness levels to win the race.

Fitness in social media is the ability to understand our consumers. Social media allows us to engage, communicate, question and observe our customers.  This should give us a wealth of information to better understand our customers and better meet their needs. Regardless of the platform, their communication over these platforms should give us insight into their lives, their vales and their needs. Social media opens the door to understanding the new consumer, consumer 2.0. This is what a social media strategy should create, better customer understanding in order to win sales and loyalty.

The path to purchase is too complicated to suggest that social media can be an isolated sales channel on its own. What people see in social media circles often impacts their purchase decisions in a point of sale environment. Consumer opinion online can overpower your offline branding objectives and a physical experience of bad customer service will always impact sales negatively, whether experienced online or offline.

Social media cannot be strategised in isolation to other marketing channels and product design should not take place without researching customer opinion in social media channels. The complexity of social media as an industry is growing to the point that it’s starting to replicate the complexity of a human being. We use forums for formal discussion, search engines and wikipedias for research, micro-blogs for short everyday conversations and we even see business networks realising real return on investment for its users.

People are not social online because of Facebook, Facebook is social because of people.

The new consumer uses the Internet in their own way, the way that makes sense to them, that makes life easier for them. The new consumer does not use all of the Internet, only the parts that makes sense.

So our role as social media strategists is to leverage social media platforms to build communities of people online, in order to listen to, and engage with our ‘fans’. We should encourage those interested towards loyalty and listen to the entire community to learn what interests them. We should stop trying to connect with everyone, and start creating communities of value rather than size. We should start the conversation so that we show our openness to connect and we should be equipped with the ability make a real impact in our customers lives.

Date:    6 – 8 March 2012

Venue: Emperors Palace, Kempton Park, Johannesburg

The past, present and future (Web3.0). From only reading web sites on the net to being able to write and contribute to the net in a matter of a few years, the next step is upon us. Web2.0 and its benefits and challenges for your business, the good the bad and the ugly of Web2.0, Social Media Marketing, Facebook vs. Google plus and more will be addresses and what we are all waiting for on Web3.0.

What is Web3.0? What can we expect from Web3.0? Web2.0 vs Web3.0, technologies that will drive Web3.0 and more will be the highlight of the conference with a few live presentations included. Registrations now open but seats are limited. REGISTER NOW!

Get up early

About 10 years, my grandmother gave me a great piece of advice as I was telling her how I am a night person and how I do most of my work at night. Her advice was “successful people wake up early.” This contradicted everything I had known till that point. I am a night person and not a morning person. My brain does not function in the morning.

Well after a few years I decided to give it a try. I started going to bed earlier and getting up early to get my work done. Something changed. I found that I worked quicker in the morning and with more focus. The only way I can explain this is that at night you deadline is “tomorrow morning” which is hours away and so a slower work pace is usually adopted. Frequent coffee trips to stay awake and the occasional break at 2am.

After a decent rest, everyone is able to get up early to work. So the getting to bed early was key to this succeeding. I found that because the deadlines were closer I worked with a clearer purpose and was not distracted by the internet and other shiny things. I found that I needed less time to get my work done and this in turn meant that I got more rest, and rest always means you work with a clearer mind and make better decisions.

Hire the best people you can and treat them as well as you can

Great people always make your life easier. They work better, produce great work and alleviate stress in your life. Treat them as well as you possibly can and they will stay with you longer.

“Un-great” people cost you money, create stress by not doing the work properly and don’t contribute to a better service or product at the end of the day.

On a side note, great people don’t always get everything right but they usually respond to correction well. You will do them a service by correcting them and helping them do the job better. It will help both of you work better together.

When hiring people don’t look at what they cost you. Rather look at the value they bring to the team, then pay them what they are worth. Remember they are people, not assets and not expenses!

Don’t do everything

If you are hiring great people you will start to find that certain aspects of the work you do is actually better left to people who work with you. Delegate your work to those who do it better than you. Then spend time focusing on what you are good at. The more you and the people in your team focus on what you’re good at the better the final result in your business gets.

Remember that this is not an invitation to delegate your responsibility. Rather it is a suggestion do better quality work more of the time.

1. Making yourself heard

2. Connecting with potential business partners

3. Using Twitter to book meetings

4. Using Facebook to recruit your cheerleading team

5. Using e-mail to connect with potential clients

6. Talk about success

7. Use blogging to force your learning curve

Hope you enjoy the series!

The Global Leadership Summit (GLS) is one of those conferences that I have been attending for the past three years. The conference is primarily a Christian Leadership conference but has been very good at finding speakers outside the Christian circles. Seth Godin, Jack Welsch and a host of other leadership and business “greats” have all spoken at the GLS.

The Christian aspect of the conference is also refreshing as I have always held a personal belief that the Bible is the best source of wisdom in how we should live, lead and treat each other in this world. I thought it would be a great idea to share with you three key learnings that I got out of the conference. I hope these pearls of wisdom help you in your leadership journey.

Bill Hybels: What is your current challenge level

1. Dangerously over challenged: too much going on
2. Appropriate: there is a sense of finality and completion
3. Under challenged

Bill suggests, as do many others, that our best work is done when we are challenged just over our “over challenged” mark. In other words we are slightly out of our depth which excites us and challenges us to meet our day to day demands. The danger zones are under challenged and dangerously over challenged. These are the area’s where we do not work to our full potential. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a near nervous breakdown due to high stress levels. This was not because I was too busy, it was because I was under challenged. The advice from my doctor was to eat right, sleep right, exercise and find a more challenging environment to work in.

This past year has been absolutely enthralling to work in. Owning my own businesses has been a great experience. I constantly feel challenged but over the last two months I have been feeling over challenged. I made a big decision to move a large part of my business over to the proven responsibility of a co-worker in my business. This has been a very successful venture so far. The co-worker is enjoying the additional responsibility and I have been freed up to ensure the important business growth aspects are all in place. I feel stronger and back in the game, whereas a few weeks ago I was nearly staying alive.

Len Schlesinger: Believe in the future by creating it first

This idea of believing in the future by creating it first really struck a chord with me. When I started my first business I was tempted to do things the way they were done in the previous business I worked for. It was too easy to just carry on doing things the same way.

The crazy thing was that the previous business was unprofitable and didn’t have a great business model. I found that I needed to picture my successful business of the future before I could achieve it. The business was very different and held ideals about building into people, looking after clients no matter what and keeping a profitable bottom end that could sustain all the previous ideals. The dream was a big one, but only after seeing it was I able to believe in it and start creating it.

I had to buy, sell, produce, talk and live in such a way that the dream was alive in order to start creating it. Today I believe the dream is alive and doing well, I believe we did it through great team of people who believed in the dream. We did it because we saw something, believed in it and began to create it.

It has been invigorating to see this take place!

John Dickson: The most believable person is the one that has your best interest at heart

John spoke about humble leadership. The type of leadership that involves holding your power in the service of others. Yes you may be powerful, you may be rich, but true leadership holds off that power and wealth and uses it for a greater purpose than to get what we want. This type of leadership puts the client first, the employee first, the vision first and the business first. So often, it is selfish gain that destroys companies. I have not heard a case study of a failed business where strong humble leadership was the root of the problem. John gives five reasons for humility. I will share three here but if you want the rest you should probably buy his book [Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership.]

1) Humility is common sense

• No one is an expert in everything
• Expertise in one area counts for very little in another
• How much you know should remind you about how much you don’t know

2) Humility is beautiful

• We like great leaders who are humble but we don’t like those who are great and they know it
• Humble leadership shows the character of the person
• Humility means looking to help others, and everyone likes someone who has their best interests at heart

3) Humility is generative

• It generates new knowledge because we are not afraid to ask
• The proud person leaves a learning engagement with less that the humble person who actively wants to learn through the engagement.
• The humble place is the place of growth