Social Media Training - Gotta start somewhere
I have been hosting some Social Media training for our employees at ImageSource. The feedback and adoption has been pretty good, but there is the common initial pushback – “I don’t have time for this” or “I can’t read this twitter stuff” and there are privacy concerns about having work bleed into personal. While I understand the initial pushback, I am working hard to dispel some of the uncertainty about the tools. We are using Wordpress for blogs, twitter for micro-blogging and we have a couple of Fan sites on Facebook

Curtis Silver posted a great blog September 2009 on the subject of FUD and Social Media
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/09/social-media-fighting-the-fear
I am starting to get through with some of the basic concepts and upside that Web2.0 tools provide. Especially with the Sales staff who I am working to convince that their personal BRAND as a Professional and our Corporate BRAND is something to be proud of and to share without the limitations of time, geography or traditional marketing costs and boundaries.
› We will use it to build relationships
› We are creating brand awareness
› We are positioning ourselves as experts in the industry
› We can more easily network with other industry professionals
› We build trust with our customer partners
› We can have multiple, quick, conversations and corporate updates
We have been using the following graphic as a way to articulate how the pieces fit together. Websites and metadata / tagging driving search engine optimization with the help of our blogs and tweets. Also publishing video using YouTube and Ustream. We are using URL shorteners / shrinkers to save space in blogs and twitter messages.
If you’re a company that is interested to get a similar movement started but don’t know where to begin please feel free to contact me via http://twitter.com/shadrachwhite and follow the twitter list http://twitter.com/#/list/shadrachwhite/imagesource see how we progress in our efforts. The more activity you see the more successful we have been in getting people on board.

