Changeworksblog.com

Twitter for online PR

Twitter is a very useful tool for business to business marketing and PR. I am a regular user of the microblogging social media site which now has 21 million US visitors per month.  Like any good networking tool it has brought me technical support, business ideas, business and a wide network of ‘lose connection’ friends.  Twitter is no longer the social platform for friends updating what they are doing in real time, but a crucial tool for brand marketing.

With a phenomenal 1382% year on year increase in unique users it is the fastest growing social marketing tool and, unlike Facebook with its strong teen and early 20s following, is most popular amongst working adults.

Statistics show that 50% of Twitter users are 35 yrs and older, 80% have no kids, a significant proportion are college grads/ post grads and more than half earn $60K plus per year. However the 18-24s are the fastest growing audience currently.  Probably due to their celebrity obsession (eek!)

But how can Twitter help B2B companies with their public relations?  Here are seven ways (by no means an exhaustive list) that Twitter can help:

1. Build relationships – follow and encourage followers with whom you want to build relationships.  Think carefully about your tweets – choose a nice balance of the professional and the personal.  Don’t think ‘what are you doing’ but ‘how can you add value’ or ‘how can you make this followers life better’?  Know your audience and make sure your 140 characters add advice, drama, desire, interest, or entertainment  (‘addie’) to their reading.  If journalists and the media are following you, you will forge stronger relationships if you get this balance right

2. Micro-campaigns for press releases – submit your most valuable or innovative or interesting online releases from your online media centre or your blog (or elsewhere), give readers and followers a big ‘why’ in the tweet. See each tweet as a powerful marketing message.

3. Online research and content tracking – Twilert, Twitter search etc to search for trending topics and social buzz. Track your most important keywords and use retweets, @replies and direct messaging to reply to those that are most important.  Track people who are retweeting or mentioning you in @replies and follow or reward them with thanks (or both)

4. Adding value through choosing who  to follow – follow inspiring, active and expert social networkers who will add value to your own content

5. Gain support – using your followers and the people you follow to help you gain support for your cause.  Ask them for opinions, advice, feedback

6. Crowdsource – if you need contributions for a feature you are writing, or want feedback on users or expert users to interview for a piece you can crowdsource your posts by requesting help or offering links or mentions of your contributors from Twitter

7. Retweet -  those links that are most in line with your own messages and themes – make sure they are high quality and don’t overdo it (a handful per day will do) this will help to expand your social network and add recognised value

It’s not rocket science.  This way you will gain some valuable and rewarding followers on Twitter, and build lasting social relationships. Over time, you will also find that your online PR coverage increases considerably too.

Conversation is two way.  And the best conversations, those that promote mutual learning and collaboration, can happen in the most unexpected situations. I have the most wonderful and enlightening conversations with the cleaner in our offices.  She is very wise and  I have a deep respect for her!

We already know from the previous posts that productive conversation involves the sharing of our thinking through high quality advocacy. And it involves taking responsibility for truly understanding the other person’s thinking through high quality inquiry. 

Inquiring into how other’s think

High quality inquiry involves seeking others’ views, probing at how they arrived at them and, critically yet hardest of all for most of us, encouraging them to challenge your perspective. This may require us to help them share, or even understand, their own thinking. This involves listening and questioning and sometimes gently challenging them. If you are a coach, you have a head start here!

Find out how others see the situation by asking them to give examples of the ‘data’ they have used and selected in their thinking and in reaching their conclusions.  You will need to help them tell you the steps they have used to get to their thinking. The most useful questions here are the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. 

•  ”What information did you use to reach that conclusion?”
•  ”What are you thinking here?”
• “what do you think about this?”
• “I’m really interested, can you tell me how did you get to that conclusion?”

Be open to challenge

Be open to be challenged on your own conclusions, stay open and curious and remain detached from being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ : recognise that two brains are most always better than one and that true colloboration will promote mutual learning and growth. “I notice that we have differing, opinions on this matter, and I”m really interested in finding out what I am missing that you have noticed.”

Openly ask for help in finding out what you may be missing that they are seeing.  Encourage the other person to identify the gaps or errors in your thinking.  If you maintain a state of high curiosity, this will keep your mind open and the dialogue productive even when you are convinced that you are ‘right’ and they are ‘wrong’.

Inquire into the non verbal language or emotion that the other person may be showing, but do this in a non-confrontational way.  “I notice that you frowned when you looked at that data; are you confused at all?”

And a great tip is to ask for help in exploring whether you are unknowingly contributing to the problem.  This will require you to put ego and arrogance well behind you!  “I get a feeling that something I am doing may be blocking this conversation moving forward, is that something you have noticed too?”

 Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Top tips for good conversations
• Sharing your thinking for high quality advocacy

gain insight into collective conversations

Conversation is about promoting mutual learning and the best conversations are happening on social networks these days.  However there is definitely an art to be mastered.

Once you have mastered your own thinking processes and understand your own conclusions and the data on which you have based them.  You are ready to share your thinking with others.

This is about helping others see what you see and how you think about it.  By giving examples of the data you select – telling stories, sharing anecdotes, using reference experiences – you will make your data clear (remember ‘data’ can be comments, information, statistics etc) .  Then you need to clearly state the meaning that you find in these examples, clarifying and explaining the conclusions that you have drawn. As part of this proces you may need to further need to explain the steps in your thinking.

For example in conversation with a Twitter contact the other day I was sharing information about a blogging problem I had come across. The particular ‘data’ I shared included the type of blog, how I was using it, and the particular problem I had noticed (an error on screen).  The meaning that I had drawn from this data was that there was an error on the site – i.e. something that I had done ‘wrong’. However, whilst indeed an error was reported, it was related to something different and the conversation helped clear that up.

A truly productive conversation also means that in sharing your thinking, you are also helping to clarify the other person’s thinking. Describe your understanding of the other person’s reasoning by reflecting back to them what you understand: “The way I understand what you have just said is that you look at the data and see declining market share, is that right?”. 

If, during the course of your conversation, you do disagree with the other person, or perhaps see negative consequences to what they intend doing, you can make this clear in the conversation in a way that does not get the other person’s back up.  If you state or identify what you see these consequences to be, but avoid attributing ‘intent’ to create those consequences to the other person, you stay on neutral ground and maintain the space of productive dialogue. 

For example: “John, I notice that you have not mentioned anything about communicating the plan to the customer at this point. I have noticed in my own customer relationships that early communication helps to gain agreement. If some sort of communication will help smooth over the relationship, do you think it will be worth considering?”  Distinguish between intent and impact so that a more productive outcome is achieved.

And finally, if the conversation gets more heated, and there is more conflict and emotion involved, if you feel that you have to disclose your emotions do so without implying that the other person is responsible for creating your emotional reactions.

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Why productive dialogue is key to accelerating organisational success
• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Productive dialogue is more important now than ever.  With social media and social networks supplementing many of our face to face coversations, learning the ABC of productive conversations can help you leverage your social networks through online media. In this post I continue to look at the components of productive dialogue.

Once you have fully grapsed the idea of the ladder of inference and become a good thinking detective you are ready to leverage the two key tools of productive dialogue; the first one being high quality advocacy.

Advocacy is about sharing your thinking effectively. This could include disclosing how you feel, expressing an opinion, urging a course of action or asking someone to do something. Good ‘thinking detectives’ leverage high quality advocacy so that they are not simply offering opinions or requests. But they actually provide the data on which they based their thinking (rather than interpretations of data) and share how they arrived at their conclusions from the data they used.

Emotional state or ‘frame of mind’ is crucial to this.  Think of the last time when you assumed you were right about something and in dialogue with someone ; perhaps you were having a Twitter conversation or chatting on Facebook. Notice how, in this frame of mind, you are driven to get others to realise what you ‘already know’.   You are trying to influence others to your way of thinking and this feels very one way.  In this type of conversation there is a notable lack of mutual learning. The whole point in having productive conversations is to promote and enforce mutual learning; this is what social networking and social media is brilliant for.  But you have to approach it with the right frame of mind.

Here are some tips about how to maintain the right frame of mind for productive conversations:

1. See every conversation as an opportunity to learn and promote mutual learning
2. Assume you may be missing things others see, and seeing things others miss
3. Stay curious
4. Assume others are acting in ways that make sense to them

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Why productive dialogue is key to accelerating organisational success
• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Productive dialogue will accelerate business performance

Good business dialogue cannot be underestimated: it encourages collaboration and creativity and opens up individual and organisational learning and innovation. Dialogue, by definition, is obviously two-way, in that it is between one person and another, but it is also two way in that there is an inner dialogue that has to happen for the overall output to be effective. 

The human brain does not like ambiguity or conflict.  It naturally moves to make a choice: black and white. But often this leads to less effective ‘single loop’ learning, Chris Argyris in his various models of double loop learning, including ladder of inference and high advocacy/inquiry, encourages an internal challenge (an inner mental dialogue) to encourage us to constantly challenge the unconscious processes generate the conclusions and short cuts that our normal reasoning makes.

For example, you get into the office early to get on with some work and find your boss already there.  You try to make conversation, yet your boss is surly and abrupt.  You draw conclusions (in NLP this is part of the meta model ‘complex equivalent) about the ‘facts’ at hand – i.e. boss is surly=I have done something wrong. So you spend the rest of the day worrying and trying to figure out what it is that you have or haven’t done. Suddenly, through your interpretations and inferences about your boss’s behaviour, you are working on a different set of ‘facts’ altogether. And, in actual fact, the boss just feels poorly because he or she has a cold coming on; it is nothing to do with you at all.

This is a very simple example but shows how, with lightening speed of reasoning, the brain automatically makes these conclusions that end up running our lives.  Making us less effective and giving us less freedom of choice. So we need to train our brains to hold the ‘deep structure’ of meaning without running away with the wrong conclusions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” And he has a point.  It is ‘painful’ for our brains to hold different, possibly opposing, ideas about the same fact without jumping to one ‘right’ conclusion.  But by looking closely at the information on which we have built our ‘house of conclusions’ will help us to be more accurate and structured in our thinking and then our dialogues and conversations will be very powerful.

So this requires some detective work.  Much of our thinking is based on the conclusions we have drawn (as part of this automatic and unconscious process). Chris Argyris in his ‘Ladder of Inference’ recksons it goes like this:

1. We have ‘data’ presented to us – statistics, a reaction, words, expression
2. We select the data to use as part of our thinking – a comment, information etc
3. We interpret this data and add meaning to it
4. We draw conclusions from these interpretations – this helps our brain to put a label on what is happening (and boy, do our brains like labels!!), which helps to explain it and propose action from it

This is a ‘pattern’ that we do subconsciously, with lighting speed.  But if we can learn how to slow this process down, break it up and do some detective work so that we use the right data, make sure we have all the data we need and then draw the most useful conclusions, our lives will be so much better!

The other day I had a client say to me: “We need to do more online PR and focus on improving SEO”.  I took this as a criticism that we weren’t doing enough and the client was unhappy.  However, after a couple of days and another conversation I realised that the client was so delighted with what we are doing that they want more of it; and after reading our blog posts they are keen to move into blogging and other social media to improve their online marketing!

Here’s what to do to be a ‘thinking detective’:

1. Put your ‘critic’s’ head on and retrace your thinking steps.  What data did you select? What caught your attention? What are you considering unimportant here?  Quite often we focus our attention on what is wrong rather than what is going well!
2. Then retrace your thinking: how did you interpret the data you selected? What filters did you put on it (i.e. a negative one?)? What assumptions and presuppositions did you make?  i.e. in the example above I assumed the client was unhappy, and I presupposed that we weren’t doing enough online work.  That clouded the rest of my entire thinking processes.

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession