How to Use Social Media for Professional Gain

The panelists of the CompTIA webinar “How to Use Social Media for Professional Gain” have used social media to launch businesses, build personal and corporate brands, forge new partnerships and, for one, land a life coach for free.

The key strategy that emerged from the Sept. 18 webinar sponsored by CompTIA’s Advancing Women in IT (AWIT) community is to identify your objectives, know the capabilities of different social media tools, and use the social media platforms that your target audiences prefer.

Gloria Bell, chief digital strategist of the consulting company Bell Digital Strategies, always first asks clients, “What are you trying to achieve?”

“Is it a professional persona that you want to display?” Bell queried. “Are you representing yourself as a brand? Are you representing a company as a brand? Are you job hunting? Or is this just your social outlet personally and professionally?”

The next step is to research and understand the various social media platforms, which are growing exponentially in number. The most popular include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WordPress and Foursquare. “There’s value in every social media site," said webinar host Michelle Ragusa, customer and partner experience manager for Cisco Systems.

“There are about 30 different (social media) communication vehicles out there today,” said Jay McBain, co-founder of ChannelEyes, a social network for IT vendors and their channel partners. “Everyone has different preferences on how they prefer to get that information.”

But your social media preferences may not be the same as your target audiences, he noted. If a person primarily prefers email, doesn’t have a Facebook account, doesn’t understand Twitter and only sporadically logs into LinkedIn, McBain said, “you might be missing 50 percent of your audience, and perhaps those (people) could be future employers, future business deals or future personal relationships.”

Conversation and Collaboration

Social media “is really a platform, regardless of which channel we’re using, for dialogs that are already happening,” said panelist Mary Ellen Grom, vice president of U.S. Marketing for SYNNEX Corporation.” Both Grom and Bell use Twitter to gather knowledge and build connections with thought leaders in their industries.

“These are the folks who are out ahead of the technology curve,” Grom said of the people she follows on Twitter. She added that social media allows her to “be ahead of that curve along with them by following them and listening to what they have to say.”

Twitter’s hashtags also help Grom follow industry events via the tweets of attendees and speakers. SYNNEX has successfully used Twitter to field audience questions during live events, she said. “If you play your cards right, Twitter is an awesome platform for, real time, what’s going through the minds of your attendees,” said Grom. “It can turn your team into a rock star by simply getting questions from people who care about your business, your products and solutions.”

It was Grom who gained a life coach by answering—while listening to a conference call— an Australian man’s tweet seeking four clients for his new life coaching business in exchange for testimonials. “After six months of working with this life coach (via Skype), he has really helped me define my mission, my life purpose,” reports Grom, “It all happened through a simple 140 character tweet on Twitter.”

Social For Business

The panelists emphasized how social media can help establish and strengthen business relationships. “People buy from people,” Grom said. “It’s important to connect on that emotional level first, before you do business with someone.”

For example, LinkedIn research helped Grom discover new business prospects at vendor conference in Las Vegas. Weeks before the event, she searched LinkedIn profiles for the vendor name and the words "US channel marketing" and discovered nearly 50 contacts, none of whom she knew.

After reading through their profiles, Grom individually emailed 32 of the 50, asking for “15 to 20 minutes to sit down to talk about what you do for this company and how my company might be able to help you.”

She eventually secured in 12 face-to-face meetings at the conference. “To this day, I still do business with half dozen of those,” said Grom, “and we’ve produced some really solid marketing plans and programs that are helping each one of us for mutual success."

Social Media Policies

Once you figure out what social media is and what you want to try to achieve with it, and where that audience is going to be, “then putting together your personal social media policy becomes a lot easier,” said Bell.

Each social media platform needs to be used differently. “Have a policy for each platform—what content you will post, who you are or are not going to follow, or who you allow to follow you,” said Bell.

Both Bell and Grom recommend that social media newcomers start in their comfort zone. “Don’t force yourself onto a (social media) platform that you are completely uncomfortable on because then it becomes very stilted and very tense and very fake,” said Bell.

However, she added, “You may have to learn to be comfortable on a platform because that’s where the people you are trying to reach are.”

When You Are the Brand

Social media platforms offer incredible benefits to individuals starting their own companies, McBain and Bell testified.

By using social media tools to establish relationships with industry “connectors” and “superconnectors” (people who “can act as facilitators to introduce you and even implicitly endorse you into their communities”), McBain said, “I basically started from nowhere and within six months had thousands and thousands of different social media connections and really built a personal and professional brand from ground zero using social media.”

As sole proprietor of Bell Digital Strategies and also adjunct professor of social media strategy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Bell said, “I actually am my brand…I use social media to not only promote my knowledge and my expertise but also to promote myself as a human being.”

Via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+, Bell said, “I am very active, very open and make a very conscious effort to put a very human face around the brand Gloria Bell.”

Tact and Good Sense Needed

No matter what your objectives for social media, make sure your personal and professional filters are in place, panelists urged.

Don’t post anything amid a personal or professional meltdown, warned McBain. “If you have a weak moment, and start posting something that is in anyway hurtful or involving personal emotions, that’s going to be the most visible across all different networks.”

Bell also recommends being very cautious about posting information about family members, children, colleagues, clients, vendors or partners. “Be considerate of the people in your life, personally and professionally.”

Once Up and Running

Participating in social media requires attention—to monitor activity and respond to queries, problems and opportunities.

When monitoring her social media channels, Grom watches the words that people use in social media to describe her or the corporate SYNNEX brand. “Is it favorable? Or is it unfavorable?” she queries, adding that any unfavorable sentiment gets quick attention. “I want to make sure I am responding real time to anybody who has a negative reaction to our brand.”

You know social media is paying off when you are building connections that help you achieve whatever objectives you have set, said Bell. “It’s not necessarily about numbers; it’s more about ‘Are you getting out of it what you need to get out of it?’ ”