Tag: communications

Slaying dragons in social media fantasyland

Takeaways from #RaganDisney

Mickey slayin'

The social media industry can be a lot like New Fantasyland at Disney World: there’s a ton of information, flashing lights, advice, experts and characters out there. And like Mickey, we social media managers need to be able to blast through the nightmares and hype, to slay the dragons (e.g. social media pitfalls, haters, crises, stale content) and find our own way to the top of the mountain.

The best route is to set a strategy, jump in the fire and grow from there. After over three years of corporate social media management, I’m always looking for new ideas, fresh perspectives and ways to elevate my craft.

With that goal in mind, I attended the Ragan’s 6th Annual Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications Conference at Walt Disney World to get inspired, network with other social media pros and come up with some new ideas to try out at work.

Here are the key lessons I took away from the conference and I hope they help you slay whatever social media dragons you’re battling.

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Five pillars of a quality meeting (and Twitter chat)

Meeting in the Office

Working as the social media guy for a pretty big company, I spend a good chunk of my day on Twitter, responding to customers, promoting programs, spreading the good corporate word; and also personally for professional development, networking and information gathering (among others).

I see lots of good stuff in my feeds, and some tweets that aren’t so good.

Since meetings (and PowerPoints) are often staples of the business process, I also see a fair share of conference rooms, appointment notifications and recurring gatherings.

And just like tweets, some meetings are useful, and some meetings are – well, you get the idea.

This week I participated in the #pr20chat – a weekly Twitter discussion about PR and social media organized by Justin Goldsborough and Heather Whaling – and found a lot of value from the professional discussion, social media analysis and varied perspectives.

In jotting down my notes from the Twitter chat, the similarities crystallized between a quality Twitter chat and an effective meeting.

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How to avoid snoozefest PowerPoint presentations (and Facebook posts)

Digital Hollywood Conference

With three years under my belt in the corporate world, I’ve been spending a ton of time listening to, and creating my own, PowerPoint presentations.

Seriously. Cog-folk love us some PowerPoint.

And as a social media professional, I also spend most of my life on Facebook, either managing my company’s page or trolling reading the latest from my friends and subscription lists.

Given my intense exposure to both of these modern marvels of communication, I’ve developed a nose for the good and the bad, and can sniff out both pretty quickly.

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WTF inappropriate?

My “Tri for Les” triathlon training has taken over most of my free time these days and unfortunately my blogging time has been pushed aside for early morning bike rides, evening swim and run practices, and late-night fundraising brainstorming sessions. Excuses, I know, but it’s all for a good cause, in honor of a great woman (my Aunt Leslie) and I don’t feel too bad for prioritizing.

I’ve also been getting a creative fix from a side project, called Letters to Letters. It’s a fun commitment and good for keeping the creative juices flowing.

That being said, I am still working in social media full-time during business hours and wanted to share a bit about a recent experience I had with the term “WTF.”

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Why is Twitter on trial for Mendenhall #OBL tweets?

We’ll all remember where we were the night of May 1, 2011, when President Barrack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been captured and killed.

I was eating dinner at home with my girlfriend. We sat, glued to the TV, and talked about how that moment felt like one of those scenes in a movie where an entire nation, and many parts of the world, was united, hanging on every word of a news broadcast.

But the TV screen wasn’t the only source of news and commentary for us. That night, like so many other nights in the past few years, laptops and mobile phones were positioned on dining room tables so we could see the latest from our Facebook friends, refresh our Twitter searches and send text and instant messages as the events unfolded.

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