EyeSee

I presented at the OCRI, Zone5ive event today and I focused on must have social media tools to engage your customers.  As I was preparing for this presentation I needed to figure out a starting point as customer engagement is as vague as being “green”. So I took a look at the websites of companies that typically attended these events to find a starting point.

To explain where I came from I used the analogy of social media being the invitation to the house party and the house being the company website. I went further to stress that if the house either did not exist nor was structurally strong then the party would fail.

So my starting point was reinforcing the house and creating the invitations.

Details are in the following presentation.

My goal was to let the people in the room leave with information that they could use to implement these basic social media tools into their websites and social media marketing mix.

The room was fairly silent with not a lot of questions however I did notice a fair bit of note taking. I guess it’s a very different dynamic from the interactive workshops that I am used to giving.

So if you were at the presentation today and have had time to digest this do you have any further questions? If you do, then drop me a line via this post and we can take it from there. Remember there is not such thing as a stupid question. Also there are other people out there that have the same questions in mind.

Several weeks ago I was invited to create a 3 minute video about the use of social media to engage employees. I did create the video however it’s guaranteed to give someone a seizure, my video editing skills need much improvement. It’s on my to do list to edit and improve so I don’t have a video for you to see, however I do have a detailed presentation in regards to this.

When I started to work on this project I knew that there was a number of people that did not like their jobs however I was very surprised to find out the actual numbers.

Only 29% of employees are engaged, 54% are not engaged and 17% are actively disengaged!!! I can’t remember where I found these numbers but they seem to be somewhat consistent across the board wherever you look.

The reasons are many but the one point that I focused on what shortening the gap between the leaders of the organization and the employees. It’s a known fact that business owners, CEOs etc. are very passionate about their company and if you are part of a small organization it’s very easy to feel that energy, know what the vision is and share in that vision. When you are a large organization it becomes hard to have that connection with the owners so to speak as there are many layers between you and the leaders of the organization. There are many ways to shorten the gap and one is by regular meetings/updates with these leaders. However these are few and far in between but what about on a more regular basis? Social media, if used effectively, can enable this gap to be shortened thus driving employee engagement up.

The presentation goes through the various tools available today, how to use them and the benefits to the organization. So take a look and ponder. I have not presented any case studies here however you are only limited by your imagination. So to all the leaders out there, try something new.

It’s 2009 and I find it very frustrating that websites are still behind the times.  There are some websites of various groups that provide updated content for their events, notices etc..  The only way to know this is by visiting the website it’s very time consuming to do this and very frustrating for the user.

The solution to this is very simple,  RSS feed.  This has been explained in detail before so I won’t go into details of what this is.  Suffice to say, if you do fall into this category, just install an RSS feed.  This way your readers can be updated automatically via their RSS readers.

Now that you know what RSS is all about, here’s a little information on RSS readers/aggregators. RSS readers are very similar to email clients. They are free so if you don’t like the functionality of one you can quickly and easily move to another.

Some?of the RSS readers are?

• google reader
• bloglines
• newsgator
• my yahoo
• feedburner

They all work on the basic principle of

• creating an account
• logging in
• adding the URL of the site you want to follow

The alternate way to follow a site is to look for one of the icons above, this will automatically open the reader of your choice.

So try it out and see which reader you like.

Here is a RSS in Plain English?still confused how about RSS the Oprah way.

Have you bookmarked your favourite websites and check them on a regular basis? If you find this rather time consuming and frustrating when the website you look at has the same information from a couple of months ago then?RSS is for you. ?

RSS aka Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication?is a format for delivering regularly changing web content like headlines, update notices, blogs, wikis etc…?directly to you.?It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quiclky, after it was published.

Another analogy is a magazine subscription, only in this case it’s delivered to your RSS reader everytime there is an update?

For you geeks out there, RSS is an XML-based format for content distrubution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines?and descriptions of specific information.

A lot of websites these days offer RSS feeds. It’s easy to see if a website has an RSS feed, it will have the orange button in the link window.

RSS is a free and easy way to promote your website without the need for complicated contant sharing partnerships.