When I think of company visibility, I immediately think of executive visibility. It really doesn’t matter if a marketing intern has online visibility. Rather, it’s the high ranking executives that people care about. They want to know if the company can be trusted, and how better to gauge that than if you know the executives?
But there’s an interesting dilemma: executives just don’t have time. This is very true. Most executives don’t have hours a day to network, and they shouldn’t put that much time into it either.
I was recently asked by a client if he could take the first couple lines of a blog post and put that out on all social networking tools. There are two problems here:
First, social networking is not simply about making yourself to as many people as you can. Social networking is like a cocktail party. The goal isn’t to be at every one (unless you’re an actor), but to be at the right one, rubbing elbows with the right people. Same thing with social networking. You need to determine which tools are best for you, and invest in those.
Secondly, social networking is not…let me repeat, NOT just a ‘medium’ for you to talk at other people. Blogs yes, social networking, no. Again, like a cocktail party, you need to engage the conversation taking place. Usually conversation is started by someone asking a question. Then, we engage that question and it becomes a conversation. People who come in to the middle of a conversation and just abruptly change topic are generally avoided at cocktail parties, and in the social universe. So, the point to to let people get to know you and to help them like you.
So what about time management? It doesn’t take long, and you invest, not spend, whatever time you do have. It takes less than 60 seconds to send a tweet, and with one tweet you can update multiple platforms (I personally update 3 with 1…which is kind of low).
