Social Media for Consultants

On January 13th, 2010 Andrew Jenkins and I hosted a two person panel n Social Media for Consultants.   It was done for the Strategy Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Toronto Chapter of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC Canada).

I thought the best way to respond to everyone was to blog about the meeting, the questions and the links.

Above the fold (for those who appreciate the metaphor) – I’ll mention our invite to all of you.  We had such a good response to this that Andrew and I have agreed to host two online versions of the follow up sessions.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

Session 1 will be for “beginners” and be true primer on how to get started.

Session 2 will be for intermediate to senior practitioners and focus on how to get above the crowd.

LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS – or anything else here, by leaving a comment!    And please, would you go to this site and fill in a very quick survey?  I promise I’ll send you the results if you do. Click here to take survey

We also recommend to all of you that you may want to keep up with us on our online internet radio show (www.BlogTalkRadio.com/GameChanging) either live or in the podcast version.  That show is every Monday night at 8:00 pm ET.  Now for those who would like the notes from the session, here they are

Our Agenda:

We promised to cover three key points on Social Media:

– What is it?

– Why do you (as a consultant) care?

– How can you use it your practice?

Your questions:

We took an informal survey at the start of the presentation.  I’ve repeated that survey here in SurveyMonkey – a free tool.

We asked the audience what they wanted to find out by coming to this presentation.  You can find these points on the survey that I have prepared using Survey Monkey.  Please take a minute and  take survey.  I promise to share the results.

One question that was asked and answered was – “What work have you gotten through the use of social media?”  Several people in the audience answered this one and gave examples where:

1. Companies had looked at their profile (several)
   
2. One lady, a lawyer, had at least 4 direct assignments associated with searches to her Linked In Profile
3. One mentioned how he used Linked In to get to the decision makers and beyond the gate keepers

Software tools and links mentioned in the presentation included:

• Life, the Universe and Everything – see the bottom of this blog for the list of sites and urls by category provided so kindly by Andrew Jenkins.   Someone else mentioned the Conversation Prism.
• Twitter (www.twitter.com)  – the basic twitter
• Search in twitter with www.search.twitter.com – we also covered the idea that you can put in a keyword (often called a hashtag) by preceeding the word with the # character.  It makes it easy to search for this.  Try searching for my radio show conversations with #gamechanging and see what happens.
• Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) – a dashboard where you can manage all of your twitter sending, reading, searching
• Linked In – (www.linkedin.com) – we talked a lot about how you can consolidate a lot of this information (including your twitter feed) on Linked In.  We discussed the benefits of having your profile at 100% (just do it!).  Andrew went through the benefits of paid membership.  For those who are on Linked In you can find my profile at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/therealjimlove and Andrew Jenkins is at  http://ca.linkedin.com/in/andrewjjenkins
• Linked In Groups – check out Hubba, the “think-tank” that Andrew, Jim and a few other experts launched on Linked in.  Also – have you been to the 2 CMC groups  – CMC-Canada and Certified Management Consultant.  Why are there two?  Hey, I only answer questions on social media, not on the meaning of life.  In my opinion, both are pretty boring and I’d love to work on them, but I’m doing an experiment in another group right now.
• More links and some tips on Social Media Strategy – check out this blog entry called “Love’s Links” which has the links from our show of January 4th where we discussed Social Media Strategy.  You’ll find two or three easy tools for measuring. Tweet level is a cute little measurement tool to check your reputation.   Try it. Don’t do it if you have a fragile ego.  (Ouch!  I just checked it. Apparently, I have lots of work to do)
• Feeling like there’s too much to cope with? I use NutshellMail to give me my own social media digest three times a day.  It goes through all my social media accounts and summarizes activity.
• We mentioned Ning – where you can create your own social media site.   Jim’s is called  Well of Knowledge and it’s an experiment in how perhaps information can be used for social good.

Life, the Universe and Everything –  Andrew Jenkins kindly provided a breakdown of various social media sites by type.  Here it is:

Social Media Examples By Category

Don’t know why the spacing is so weird – that’s the problem when you copy from Word. I’ll clean it up when I get a minute for the sake of pride, but it’s still accurate.

Social Networks
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com        Twitter – http://www.twitter.com
MySpace – http://www.myspace.com        LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com
Ning – http://www.ning.com                       Skype – http://www.skype.com
Blogging Tools
Twitter (microblog) – http://www.twitter.com    Moveable Type – http://www.movabletype.com
WordPress – http://www.wordpress.com             Typepad – http://www.typepad.com
Blogger – http://www.blogger.com                         Tumblr – http://www.tumblr.com
Video/Photo
Flickr – http://www.flickr.com                YouTube – http://www.youtube.com
Vimeo – http://www.vimeo.com             DailyBooth – http://www.dailybooth.com
Viddler – http://www.viddler.com
Presentations
SlideShare – http://www.slideshare.net
Slideboom – http://www.slideboom.com
Content Sharing/Capture
Del.icio.us – del.icio.us                                   Enjoysthin.gs – http://www.enjoysthin.gs
StumbleUpon – http://www.stumbleupon.com    Reddit – http://www.reddit.com
Digg – http://www.digg.com

Podcasts
iTunes – http://www.itunes.ca
BlogTalkRadio – http://www.blogtalkradio.com
Mobile

Twitpic – http://www.twitpic.com              Foursquare – http://www.foursquare.com
WikiTude – http://www.wikitude.com        Audioboo – http://www.audioboo.com

New and noteworthy:

Youtego – http://www.youtego.com

Thassal folks!  Hope it was useful.   Please leave a comment.