social adoption | Digital Attitude: Becoming Eminent

I’m a social butterfly and like most people, I prefer to participate in groups with other people who hold similar interests to me. It gives me a sense of trust when I interact with people and groups with common values and beliefs to my own (Meyers, 2011). I find comfort with ‘like minded’ individuals, and obviously, I am not alone in this feeling since, one of the main motivators for people to use social media in the first place, is their desire for community. Social Media allows us to be a part of community, not dictated by space or location, and it also comes with a sense of family and unity (Mueller, 2010).

This social connectivity, this common ground, can help you build a strong digital reputation. Just as you are attracted to people and communities that you have something in common with, people will be attracted to what you have to say in return. You just need to be genuine and authentic in your digital communications.

According to Dorie Clark, one of my favorite Branding gurus, there are 3 main ways to get noticed by other people when building your reputation online:

through the content you create,
by social proof provided by others, and
by having someone recommend you directly.

Based on the first 2 ways above to get noticed, I have put together 5 suggestions on how you can grow your digital reputation. The third way, having someone recommend you directly, speaks more to your physical network than you virtual one, but if you are getting them to recommend your social presence loudly, at let’s say a cocktail party or business conference, by all means, you should be using that tactic as well.

1. Promote Yourself and Your Ideas on Facebook

Facebook is, hands down, the largest social network being used today. It is not just for your kids and connecting with your high school buddies anymore. Many people have set up professional profiles that highlight their knowledge and expertise. For example, check out Chocolate for Breakfast. This is the business page for Sue Ann Gleason, a culinary nutritionist and marketing strategist. This page has over 19,845 Likes, which translates into fans following it, with outstanding engagement in the Facebook world (over 60% of the fans are talking about the page according to the Social Media Examiner). It uses photos really well, has inspiring posts (particularly the recipes),and is entertaining and educational.

Personally, I have a page on Facebook ( DogDaz ) that I use to connect with my followers that prefer that social network and to promote my PetBlog, dogdaz.com. The goal is to connect with other animal lovers, promote animal rescue and remind my Facebook followers to read today’s blog posts. This has worked great in the last year and I have over 40,000 hits on the blog (which is huge for me).

What you will find is that people will start recommending your content to other people, who will recommend it to other people, and building your reputation. In the Facebook world, the number of people (FANS) that LIKE your page, the higher the rating and stronger your reputation. These ratings act as SOCIAL PROOF that your page (you) has value. If someone agrees (thumbs up) that what you are saying, or selling, or doing, has value, that social proof leads others to see greater value in your stuff. Dorie Clark says that “basically, [social proof] means that people look to others around them to judge the value of something. (If a book has 1,000 five-star Amazon reviews, it must be good.)” Can you see how you might leverage this to help build your reputation?

2. Connect to Other Professionals with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is definitely ‘the place’ to connect to people professionally. Just like with Facebook you set up a profile, but the power of LinkedIn comes through your participation in groups that interest you. This is where you show your smarts. You build a following on LinkedIn by following other people and groups, and commenting on their ideas, or in forums, with your ideas. This gets your name out there. As you comment, you build your credibility as an expert in a particular area, and your reputation increase.

3. Write a Blog

Though blogging is not for everyone, blogs are a great way to let the world know what you are thinking on a particular subject and why you are an expert. It takes time to build an audience, but if your posts are on interesting topics and you take the time to research and write clearly, the benefits to your digital presence is worth it. I use this blog (thedigitalattitude.com) as a way to pull all my thoughts together about digital eminence, personal branding, and social project management, and then I link my posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and IBM Connections, to make sure that those people who are following me on different platforms, know what I am thinking today. (Don’t be overwhelmed by the media connections, you can manage the feeds with tools like HootSuite or feedly – but that is for another blog post.)

4. Comment on Other People’s Posts and in Relevant Communities

Being helpful and answering questions in forums and communities is a great way to get known. This may sound like a tease, but you can give just enough information in your answer and then encourage people to contact you through your email, blog, website or other links, so that you start to build a direct relationship. The more you put yourself out in front, the more digitally social you are, the more will come back to you. Trust me – it works (your reading my blog, aren’t you?).

5. Be a Regular On Your Social Media Sites

If you are going to use any of these suggestions to build your digital reputation, do them consistently. I hate when I come upon communities, groups, forums, and blog sites that are woefully outdated. If you are going to have a presence in social media, you need to post regularly or it does you little good. People will lose interest in your posts if your site, or blog, or Twitter feed is outdated. You don’t need to post everyday, 2 or 3 times a week is fine, but you should be doing it regularly.

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The internet provides the ability to grow your reputation exponentially, And, based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation (or the Small World theory) “millions of people are connected by just a few short steps.” (Lovgren, 2010) So what are you waiting for? How are you leveraging your connections?

Tell me what you are doing to grow your reputation?

Keep up the good attitude. See you next blog.

– Lorian

(All the Social Butterfly’s views are her own)

References

Community Image from Google Images
Why the Human is a Social Animal [Report from the 99% Conference], Courney Boyd Meyers, The Next Web, May 5, 2011
10 Reasons People Love Social Media, Ken Mueller, Inkling Media, January 6, 2010
How to Get Others to See Your Potential, Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review, May 16, 2013
Six Degrees of E-mail Separate Wired World?, Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News, October 2010

Image Courtesy of
FreeDigitalPhotos.net

People are suffering from the Project Manager‘s Social Dilemma. (See Part 1 and Part 2 on Solving the PM’s Social Dilemma in previous posts). This last week I started talking to people, both in and outside IBM, to understand if, and how, they are using Social Project Management and the issues around its adoption on their projects. I was encouraged by the great interest in the topic but I was not surprised by the lack of actual practice going on.

I received solid validation from people for the three shifts that I have been talking about for adoption of a social way of working:

making project processes more transparent, open, and collaborative
leading the shift and challenging traditional work patterns and mind-sets, and
accepting that change takes time.

As I was compiling the feedback I got from PMs, Consultants, Marketeers and Social Evangelists, I started to see 3 clear steps to get teams into more of a social way of working :

Start Small

Consider using social technologies with your team to collaborate on proposals, share agendas, publish meeting minutes, share work products, or share task status. Just pick one or two things that you can move to an open platform like Connections until people are comfortable. Sometimes a limited rollout is the best way to allow others to start to see the benefits and help you strengthen your business case for further adoption. A grassroots attitude can be the main catalyst for adoption and sustained usage (Bughin, J. (2008). The Rise of Enterprise 2.0. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, pages 251-259). (Note: I want to thank Chris Cooper, IBM, for some great thoughts on this.)

Emphasize the Business Value

If you do not have buy-in from the team, it just won’t work. Introducing the use of social media is more about business results than about the use of a new technology. Your people want to understand the business value of the proposition (why should I do this and what is in it for me?). If you want to ensure that the adoption of social media on your project is successful, you need to show the business value to your team. For example, one of the main things that people are telling me about using social media on their projects is that it saves them time. Time is money and saved money is value. The Team needs to understand how these technologies, and the use of collaboration, are going to enhance the ability for them to carry out their daily tasks quicker and with more support.

Because ensuring buy-in may require you to find new ways to speak and show the benefits of social media in the context of each person’s business results, using stories about the benefits that other projects have achieved is an excellent way to get there.

Embrace Collaboration

Traditional project management tools may no longer work in a collaborative environment. You need to be ready to challenge the old way of doing things. Collaboration requires an open and transparent forum with user-generated content. Bill Kirst, of IBM, called it ‘working out loud.’ In this new social team environment every team member is expected to participate and find their digital voice. Each team player becomes more autonomous and more engaged in the conversation of the project. “We develop a sense of “knowing” amongst the project team, and we can focus more of our time on getting the work done, and less time performing work about work.” (The Project Wall, Social Project Management – Narrating the project as it happens.) By embracing project collaboration, you can not only optimize the power of your team, but you can extend it exponentially through the knowledge network of the enterprise.

Tell me your adoption stories? What are you doing to transform the way you work?