Social Media Marketing Mistakes

I came across an article last week when I was looking around for a managerial topic to bring up in class last week. I felt it would be a good article to post on the blog. It goes along well with our conversations in class and also goes along partly with my paper topic of "How Barack Obama's Social Media Policy Paved The Way To The White House". The topic of social media in business has been a hot topic in class and this article outlines the top 5 social media marketing mistakes. Tow of the key points I felt were interesting were the second point where the author says you should never "down source" your social media jobs to younger staff or interns. Their lack of business knowledge could hurt you in the end. The second point I thought was key was never having and end date. He says that you should never have an end date for your social media campaigns, since your goal is to build customer relationships. Its a a quick 1 page article. Enjoy

On another note, I have no new information on my coworker and her facebook issues. There have been no new posts that would be an issue. I will keep you informed.

Obama and social media

As I continue my research for my paper I have come across a few videos that outline 12 business lessons we can learn from Barack Obama's campaign in 2008. Here is one of the videos for you to see.

Enjoy

It Continues...

So, less than 1 week after my last post in regards to a co-worker and the inappropriate facebook posts another incident occurred. This past Friday I received a call from a co-worker who I am helping to train. He was very upset and asked if i had seen the co-worker I keep talking abouts facebook status. I had not seen the post at this point. He explained that the two of them were supposed to complete a project for our manager together. They had each completed this separately and the manager followed up with an email saying he would like them to get together and produce 1 report by Friday of last week.

When he approached this other employee about getting together to finish the project, her response was i will be tied up in meetings until 4 pM and then I am going down the shore. Then came the FB post at 12:00 PM on Friday afternoon stating she is sitting poolside and will be down the shore in a few hours, hit her up. A few things come out of this. First, its noon on a workday and she is sharing with the world she is sitting at the pool. Now, every salesperson i know takes a few hours on a friday now and again, but the mistake was posting it for the world to see. Secondly she told my other co-worker she would be in meetings all day.

My response to him was to call her out. It is one thing to do what she did, but another thing when you impact someone else. I simply said you can tell our boss that you could not finish the project because of the other co-worker not being available all day due to meetings, except her facebook status eluded to something else.

So, my question to you all where do you draw the line and what would you do? If you were supposed to work with her and this happened to you how would you respond? If you were me, what would you do? Finally, as the manager if this information came to your attention how would you handle it?

Interesting article

I saw an interesting article in the morning call the other day. The article talked about how police are now turning to social network sites to solve crimes. I thought it was interesting and went along nicely with the class. One key stat I found amazing is that facebook has over 400 million users who churn out 70 pieces of information monthly. That is alot of content. Take a look at the article.

I think the article brings up some key information that alot of people may not know.

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-police-social-networking-20100613,0,5850163,full.story

Social Media and the workplace

I came across an interesting situation this past week. I had to attend a regional sales meeting for 2 days. This was a mandatory meeting that involved 2 full days of meetings and an evening with a dinner that involved both my boss and the VP of Sales. The evening dinner fell on the night of Game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals. I personally do not care about hockey and even if i did I would have handled this differently.

It came to my attention that one of my co-workers asked my boss if it was ok to miss dinner since she had tickets for the hockey game. He, of course said no she had to attend the dinner. A few things to note, the meeting's attire was to be business casual and dinner was to be nice jeans and a nice shirt, we ate a very nice restaurant in the Borgata in Atlantic City. After this employee was told she could not attend the hockey game she proceeded to post as her status on facebook how she hated her boss and was very upset about missing the hockey game. After people made comments to that she made multiple responses bashing our boss. Another co-worker brought this to my attention and after these events unfolded I felt it an interesting situation to bring up to the class. The day of the dinner and the hockey game she made another post talking about her stupid boss and a stupid meeting, again way over the line for the whole universe to see on facebook especially with numerous co-workers except for my boss being her friend on facebook.

When we got to dinner that night to make the posts on facebook even worse, she showed up to dinner wearing a flyers jersey, in my opinion very inappropriate considering the VP of Sales was going to be there. My boss was unaware of the facebook posts, and I do not know how he felt about the jersey at dinner but If i was the manager I would have made her take it off after the direction was to wear nicer clothes.

My question for you is how would you handle the situation and have you ever encountered an employee bashing an employer on facebook and what were the ramifications?

Never Give Up

When Dr. Weyant brought up the Department of Labor the other night, it got me thinking of something that happened to me early on in my career that I thought I would share. I graduated college with a Sports Management degree. After college I went to work for the New Jersey Nets basketball team. I worked there for 2 years. After 2 years I decided I wanted to pursue another opportunity. When I gave my two weeks notice I inquired about being paid for my unused vacation days and commission that earned the previous year. I was told that they would pay my vacation days, but the commission would not be paid. This did not sit well with me.

My main function was to work with existing season ticket holders in order to renew/upgrade their tickets for the upcoming season. We were paid on our renewal percentage, which that year we reached 98% renewal of all season ticket holders. I left at the end of October, which meant that it was the beginning of the season and most renewals were done.

At this point I was faced with a decision to either walk away without saying anything or fighting for the money that I knew I was owed. It important to know that I was talking about $9500 that was owed to me. I made the decision to fight for the money. After doing some research I found out the Department of Labor will go after an employer in a situation like this as long as the dollar amount being disputed is under $10,000. I felt that this was the best option since I was 24 years old and did not want to get into a legal battle with the NJ Nets.

After sending my case with all of my supporting documents off to the labor board , I know had to wait. The labor board then contacted the Nets with this information and if they failed to respond we would have went to arbitration. After they received this information, 24 hours later my phone rang and it was the CFO of the Nets calling to settle the dispute. Two weeks later I received a check for the $9500, thanks for the labor boards help.

I think this is important information to know both as employees and as future managers. My questions to the group are were you aware of this service, and have you ever been faced with this kind of situation?

Marketing and Social Media

As my company enters into the world of social media, the timing is very interesting given what we are talking about in this class. Earlier this year my company launched a campaign to market through the use of social media. With over 4 million users on facebook it is a great arena to tell the world what you are all about. What are main objectives are is to use facebook to help advertise our company, our clients and contact lenses in general. We have created a facebook fan page dedicated to our company. This allows people to become fans of our page, which allows them to see whats new in our business and with our products. As we move forward our plan is to help our clients to create their own facebook fan pages so that any fans of our page can see what doctor's might be in there area. Our social media marketing plan is still evolving and in its early stages, and I am excited to see how it turns out.

Just last week I found out that we launched our own channel on YouTube, which will advertise our products and the industry. It features some initial videos with Mark Malkoff and one of our employees. This will be a great tool to have in your bag as a salesperson. Its a great way to educate contact lens patients on topics related to our industry. I personally did not even know that you could create your own channel on YouTube. It seems that the possibilities that are ahead of us will be endless and as technology advances the way that we do business will change. If you would have told the door to door salesman of the past that in the future you would be able to communicate instantly via text message, email, social media sites and create advertising content on YouTube I think that they would have said you were crazy. Personally, I think anything is possible at this point and I am excited to see what the future holds.