This site is a companion to one-day boot camps on working with social media in a professional setting and how to establish professional and personal brands using social tools.

Advanced Social Media and Getting Started with Social Media are taught by me, Robin J. Phillips, web and social media manager for the City of Glendale, Arizona, and sponsored by the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. 

This site is full of resources, tools, ideas, blog posts and more. 

 BLOGGERS: To the right, you'll see links to blogs that are regularly full of tips about using social media.  

 Following good social media and interactive marketing bloggers is a great way to keep on top of the rapidly changing social media tools and tactics.

 GOOGLE IT: And below, you'll find some tutorials that help make sense for someone trying to understand more about the value of using social media. 

 Posts near the top are aimed at more advanced social media ideas. Earlier posts are there to help beginners. If you have a question about using or tracking the impact of social media, Google it.  I'm sure someone has tackled the subject.  

 Enjoy. 



Social media for journalism teachers


Social Media for Teachers 2014 from Robin J Phillips


One thing to keep in mind is that social media for journalists is journalism.
Don't forget the basics. 

Inc., Forbes and Entrepreneur: Turn to business magazines for social media tips



Entrepreneur, Inc. and Forbes are all pretty good resources for timely columns about social media and business strategies.

Entrepreneur, mixes tips with business stories about social media companies.

Forbes uses freelancers, often business owners or managers, two write about current issues. Here's a good recent piece:  Do you need a social media manager?  6 questions to ask yourself.

And Inc. pulls them all together on this page:
Social Media:  These social media tips guarantee a profitable boost to the bottom line. 



Social Media Examiner: Another great resource


Debra Eckerling, an editor at Social Media Examiner, has lots of great posts about social media strategy, ROI, aligning your social goals with your business goals.

How to Measure Social Media ROI tackles why your should measure your social media ROI and how to get started.  

And here are a whole lot more:  Debra Eckerling archives.



Professional is often personal

In addition to social media strategies, I often teach about personal branding.

Personal branding is an important thing for people to think about no matter what industry they are in. How we present ourselves online can be key to how we are perceived both personally and professionally.

Networking is no longer something we do at a meet-and-greet on Thursday nights. Online tools enable us to network constantly.. for better or worse.

If you think you aren't branding yourself, you're fooling yourself. So you might as well take the wheel and drive, do it deliberately.

A lot of the concepts and ideas that make sense for personal branding also make sense for the social media strategy of a business or organization. I put these slides together for a talk in Nashville in September 2014.

 

Social, sales, marketing: What's the difference?


Customer Experience Trends 2013

This scorecard includes key takeaways from the 2013 Convergys research into customer experience trends.  Bottom line: Customers want things easy and their loyalty is very slippery.

There's a strong message at the bottom. If you're not on mobile, what are you waiting for?




Zen and the @garyvee keynote



Excuse his profanity, but this is a good keynote from Gary Vaynerchuk on the importance of marketing in the time we live. I suppose it's a little ZEN. Be here now.. and here now... and, well, you know. And by marketing, we know a lot of that is social media.  

Are you more focused than a goldfish?



This entertaining and powerful video is by Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business.

 This is the fifth version of the most watched video series on Social Media.

And, to answer the question, if you watch this for more than 7 seconds, you are doing better than a goldfish.

Social media is about relationships: That's forever

It sure is hard to tell how old something is on the web sometimes.

This Quickstarter Social Media tutorial from Constant Contact looks like a great place to dip into when you have questions about social media use for business.

Tools change. Facebook frequently updates how it works. Twitter often comes up with new ways users interact. So some social media information becomes dated quickly.

But tips about how social media (and the Internet as a whole) is all about conversations and is about the relationships we establish and grow there will be valuable always.

I discovered this Quickstarter Social Media looking for ways to coach you on what to say.  This looks like a good place to dig in to it.  What Should You Say?  |  And here's the beginning of the tutorial:  Why Social Media Marketing?  

Twitter. Facebook. Signed up, now what?!

It's true that social media sites aren't necessarily the best places to learn about how to use those very sites.  Once you sign up and log on, you've got to figure it out.

Asking friends, family and colleagues for help is a great start.  But, honestly, if you dig around, there are a lot of people out there talking about best practices and social conventions on social media tools.  Don't be afraid to ask.


Here are a few good starting places.

I asked Mark S. Luckie, manager of journalism and news at Twitter, where to send you for basics on his favorite social site.  He says the various resources on Support/Twitter are very helpful.  I also find the official Twitter Blog interesting.

Facebook used to have an official blog, but they now direct us to their Facebook Newsroom.  Facebook's Help Center  can give you directions for specific problems -- resetting a password or adding a profile photo.  Try it.

But sometimes the best way to learn a web tool (and all these social media sites are tools), is to practice, try things out.  Figure out what works for you and what doesn't.  Maybe you'll pave a new path.






Cracking the code of teens online

Where social media has been a formative influence on the lives of many adults, that is not true for many teens.   
Author Dana Boyd, who has just written a book titled "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens," found that children today are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place offline. They roam online in part because they cannot roam outside anymore. 
Here's an interview with Dana Boyd by Nick Bilton of The New York Times' Bits column after she wrote the book.  And an earlier interview which she was doing her research: Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes. 

Social Media for Teachers

This presentation was part of a session given to high school journalism teachers, part of the ASNE Reynolds Fellowship in Phoenix in the summer 2012. For more presentations from me on social media, personal and professional branding, organizing the clutter and more, check out my Slideshare page: Slideshare.net/RobinJPhillips

Is a tagged Instagram more than just a photo?

Talk to the Hand: Or catching the attention of young TV viewers


The growth of online video and digital tools together means that news organizations and advertisers have a lot of video competition for the attention of today's millennials.

From Adweek:

Videology Breaks Down How Millennials Consume TV 


Pam Dyer Super Blogger!


Pam Dyer is a social media consultant -- her blog is in the Social Media Blogs to Watch list over there.  She is marketing manager for a company called SolutionsIQ.

Her blog - Pamorama - is great.  Very full.  I have no idea when she sleeps, but she sure can string some thoughts together.  Her blog is pretty timely, but it is also searchable and would be helpful if you have a specific problem or issue you are trying to overcome.  

Pam also shares a lot of Twitter (a typical example). You should follow her:


One odd, but endearing, thing she does is collect infographics about social media and marketing and share them on Pinterest. You know those super long infographics with a little bit of data and a lot of colorful graphics? Some are useful. And she's got 'em.
Take a look:  Pinterest: Social Media and Marketing.

All about the Benjamins



For those of you wanting to move beyond reputation, relationship and response, you'll want to start counting how social media converts to dollars.

This report, by AddShoppers, attempts to put a value (real monetary value) on social media.  Their pool of 10,000 plus merchants reported turning 1.2 billion pageviews into 212 million unique shoppers in 2013.

It's a little confusing and lacks a little context, but this 2013 Social Commerce Breakdown is worth a look to get a sense of which social media platforms may be more valuable in turning relationships made on social media into customers.

2013 Social Commerce Breakdown 

comScore white papers


Just because you don't have enough money to pay for high-priced business consultant, doesn't keep you from seeing some of the best insights of digital and social media advisers out there.

Most companies that are looking for new business have their own blogs to promote their work and share their data.

Here's an example of a report you can download from comScore.

Marketing to Millennials: 5 things every marketer should know

comScore will ask you for details about your business, but don't let that frighten you if you don't have a big research budget.  Talk with them. They may have a price for a small or non-profit company that works for you.

And if not, you can always keep reading their comScore Insights blog for free.


Navigating Facebook brand page waters



NextWeb:   Facebook eases up on brand Page promotions by removing third-party app requirement

Facebook's blog post about this issue: Easier to Administer Promotions on Facebook


Horses Mouth - Keep tabs on this Facebook blog for more information about using brands on the social network. This blog is full of great case studies: Facebook for Business | News


5 Social Media Tools That Can Make You Really Efficient



5 Social Media Tools That Can Make You Really Efficient



Tools.  The right tool for the right job.  This idea works in social media as well as home maintenance.  This blog post caught my eye because the author, Ron Sela, talks about tools I've never heard of.

I don't stand by any of them, but it's worth your while to take a look at these web-based sites designed to manage your social media platforms and make your activities more efficient.

Here's the post.

These are the 5 tools:


  1. Swayy
  2. Roojoom
  3. EverPost 
  4. Commun.it 
  5. Twtrland


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