Today's PICA Workshop recap is by PICA Chairman, Patrick Faherty.
As a Professor of Practice at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans, Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) has created and is teaching an advanced communications class on social media. Her first success was to simply get the course approved, despite some reservations from business school faculty. Now that the course is on the schedule, though, it has been a huge success, with 50 students signed up for class and another 28 on the waiting list to get in.
“We’ve also already had a student hired specifically because they have a background in social media,” said Ashley. “There’s a new generation of customers coming up and this is how they want to communicate, so smart businesses are going to get good at this.”
Although a lot of Ashley’s presentation focused on Twitter, she did recommend that any organization delving into social media first develop an overall strategy and then make sure you integrate all the tools. PICA has taken this advice by cross-referencing links to its blog (http://pica-connect.blogspot.com), Twitter (@PICA_Connect) and LinkedIn Group (PICA – Professional Insurance Communicators of America) pages. Soon, with help from some of our members, we’ll also be launching a new PICA website. We hope to further develop our strategy by using these tools, but the most effective way to get timely PICA updates right now is to follow us on Twitter.
Twitter is known as a “micro blog” because it is limited to 140 characters. However, because you want users to “re-Tweet” your messages, that further confines you to about 125 characters. As with any good communication, content is key when using Twitter. It’s vital to understand your audience and design Tweets that have a call to action and has useful information. Message quality, not quantity, is the goal for which we must strive.
Ashley also shared some tips for how to come up with Twitter topics, which include:
• Answer the question, “What has your attention?”
• Share links to article, videos and websites
• Ask questions to stimulate a discussion
• Tweet about other people’s material that has caught your attention
• Re-Tweet other people’s useful Tweets.
There was a lot of nuance and tons of information to Ashley’s presentation, which was a great reason to attend the workshop! Probably the most important lesson PICA Workshop attendees brought back with them for business purposes, however, is to develop a social media strategy before implementing these tools (i.e., don’t just start a Facebook or Twitter account for your company if you don’t know why you’re doing it). But if you don’t have these pages already saved for your organization, you should probably go ahead and at least reserve company pages on these sites before someone else does it for you.
Thanks to Professor Nelson for the crash course on social media and, especially, how to effectively use Twitter. While it looks like social media will be a continuing topic at PICA Workshops for the foreseeable future, I believe we’ve received some solid tutoring the past few years from Michael Wilder (@michaelwilder) in Las Vegas last year and Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) and Cindy Crescenzo (@creativecomms) this year in New Orleans. We appreciate their insight and guidance as we move forward, both for PICA and the companies for which we work.
As a Professor of Practice at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans, Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) has created and is teaching an advanced communications class on social media. Her first success was to simply get the course approved, despite some reservations from business school faculty. Now that the course is on the schedule, though, it has been a huge success, with 50 students signed up for class and another 28 on the waiting list to get in.
“We’ve also already had a student hired specifically because they have a background in social media,” said Ashley. “There’s a new generation of customers coming up and this is how they want to communicate, so smart businesses are going to get good at this.”
Although a lot of Ashley’s presentation focused on Twitter, she did recommend that any organization delving into social media first develop an overall strategy and then make sure you integrate all the tools. PICA has taken this advice by cross-referencing links to its blog (http://pica-connect.blogspot.com), Twitter (@PICA_Connect) and LinkedIn Group (PICA – Professional Insurance Communicators of America) pages. Soon, with help from some of our members, we’ll also be launching a new PICA website. We hope to further develop our strategy by using these tools, but the most effective way to get timely PICA updates right now is to follow us on Twitter.
Twitter is known as a “micro blog” because it is limited to 140 characters. However, because you want users to “re-Tweet” your messages, that further confines you to about 125 characters. As with any good communication, content is key when using Twitter. It’s vital to understand your audience and design Tweets that have a call to action and has useful information. Message quality, not quantity, is the goal for which we must strive.
Ashley also shared some tips for how to come up with Twitter topics, which include:
• Answer the question, “What has your attention?”
• Share links to article, videos and websites
• Ask questions to stimulate a discussion
• Tweet about other people’s material that has caught your attention
• Re-Tweet other people’s useful Tweets.
There was a lot of nuance and tons of information to Ashley’s presentation, which was a great reason to attend the workshop! Probably the most important lesson PICA Workshop attendees brought back with them for business purposes, however, is to develop a social media strategy before implementing these tools (i.e., don’t just start a Facebook or Twitter account for your company if you don’t know why you’re doing it). But if you don’t have these pages already saved for your organization, you should probably go ahead and at least reserve company pages on these sites before someone else does it for you.
Thanks to Professor Nelson for the crash course on social media and, especially, how to effectively use Twitter. While it looks like social media will be a continuing topic at PICA Workshops for the foreseeable future, I believe we’ve received some solid tutoring the past few years from Michael Wilder (@michaelwilder) in Las Vegas last year and Ashley Nelson (@anelsonnola) and Cindy Crescenzo (@creativecomms) this year in New Orleans. We appreciate their insight and guidance as we move forward, both for PICA and the companies for which we work.
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