All too often when I mention Twitter to colleagues I get a response something along the lines of: “I have nothing interesting to say” or “why would someone want to know what I’m eating for breakfast”.

Sigh. This kind of cliché encapsulates the thinking of many colleagues. And it presents their version of reality, which in reality says, I ain’t getting involved. When pushed, the reluctance escalates to include fears that vaguely relate to privacy which I can’t ever fully understand. A bit like those people that wouldn’t do online banking for years because hey, I have to enter my account number and sort code and that can’t be safe! (Scratches head), ahem, do you prefer to write cheques? “Yes! I trust the old methods!” And do you tipex out the account number…we’ll any way…you know how it goes….

The point is dear colleagues, you need to tweet to build a profile. There will come a time when your social media profile says more about you than your CV. That means you need to start building your profile now. And that means you need to know what your world-of-work should know about you:

1. What are your Values and Opinions?
2. What subjects do you comment on?
3. What subjects do you tweet about?
4. What subjects are you known to know a bit about? 

If you’re not sure, try this, imagine a new colleague has just joined your team. And the new boy has a Twitter following of 3,500. You check his profile — he’s a subject matter expert — in your field! Feeling a touch uncomfortable you can’t resist taking a look at his LinkedIn profile; he’s got endorsements like you wouldn’t believe. For now you can rest easy — nobody cares about that stuff.

True. For now.

But a tough new world approaches and the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be to become “known for what you do”. So here’s a little guide to get you started.

• Get yourself a Twitter account — WITH YOUR NAME.
• Select some subjects you’re interested in. This assumes you find your job interesting? If you’re in Marketing for example, how about: “Content Marketing”, “Analytics”, “Segmentation”, “Social Engagement”.
• Create a feedly.com account and click the “+ Add Content” link. Search “Content Marketing” (example subject only). 
• Find some cool articles like this one: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/06/great-content-criteria/?utm_source=feedly
• Reverse back the URL to trim that nasty little tracking gizmo, this bit: ?utm_source=feedly (#yuk) so that you’re left with this bit only: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/06/great-content-criteria/. Copy this URL.
• Open a new browser tab and paste this URL to test it. If it resolves to your intended article proceed to the next step.
• Go to Twitter.com. Create a tweet, e.g.: The recipe for great content — http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/06/great-content-criteria/ a #mustRead
• Later you can worry about shortening URLs to enable tracking and to squeeze in more of your own ideas, for now don’t worry.
• Set your view to “Connect”. If someone Retweets you, Thank them. If they comment, reply. If they favourite your Tweet, do something similar in return. Be nice!
• Follow some people. But only if they’re active on Twitter and have strong opinions that you can either agree with or oppose. Then engage them.
• Don’t fear disagreement. It’s a learning opportunity. If someone successfully overturns your ideas, you’ve improved your understanding. Should the opposite happen, they’ve benefitted. Either way, the community watches and reads, they may also learn in the process and everyone builds a picture of you.
• Use who.unfollowed.me. If someone unfollows you, unfollow them. Maintain a reasonable balance of Following to Followers. It’s not necessary to follow more than your number of followers. You have to earn it, and that takes time as well as focussed engagement around a set of topics that a. you know something about and b. interest you.
• Happy building

It makes sense that if my values and opinions don’t offend yours then we won’t get polarised somehow. If my V&O is the same or similar to yours with 1 or 2 amusing differences, we’re likely to be on the same wavelength. We identify with people similar to us. As an friend once said: “Like likes like”.

In a world where online social destinations are the place to see and be seen, V&O is an intrinsic component of social success; a.k.a being popular, liked, trusted and followed.

BrandMe

The web gave everyone the ability to be a publisher. The social web gives everyone the ability to build a personal brand, sometimes referred to as BrandMe. As unique as your finger print, your personal social media brand can be established by simply being you. Or in other words, never trying to be someone or something else. Your personal brand needs to be the real deal.

So important is your personal brand that some now negotiate better pay deals using scoring services such as klout.com.

Finding a new job might mean using a combination of your CV and the value of your personal brand. Ex-colleague @carlmartin (then owner of http://mobsessed.co.uk) did this to great effect and now works at AKQA. That’s personal brand equity at work!

Look at the Twitter profiles of successful twitterati and you’ll note a combination of notes on personal and professional preferences and activities. A snippet of their V&O. I don’t know about you, but I’m drawn to people that present an attractive mixture of the two.

For your V&O to be coherent, you need to be consistent in all online places. And you should associate accounts to achieve this. Create links between your blog, linkedIn, flickr, twitter, foursquare, youtube, facebook and maybe even ebay accounts. For your brand to be strong there needs to be one you, one version of the truth, one set of Values and Opinions that friends recognise with little persuasion. Your V&O is your social signature.

Brands

This can be real short: all the above applies to brands. Brands must coherently express their V&O. And this is achieved through continuous social interaction, not by means of a corporate website.

Background reading:

The nature and origins of mass opinion By John Zaller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MqYE2UuN24

Organisations of all types and sizes are currently engaged in social media experiments. Very limited, very cautious experiments. A little measurement here, a bit of coy chat there, you know how it is, we’re currently in that in-between stage — curious but fearful of leaving known comforts for the brave new world. Where are you and your organisation in this spectrum:

1. Conservative — traditional marketing and pr + some social media monitoring
2. Progressive — senior managers blog, some tweets broadcast. Marketing orchestrate and tightly control all that’s said
3. Enlightened — blogs and tweets flow, communication rules have been replaced with principles that protect personal, organisational and client interests. *Everyone* knows the values and opinions of the organisation. Conversations across porous boundaries are natural, human, honest, accountable

Level 2 organisations are giving social media a trial run but their understanding is still entombed in old-marketing paradigms. They have fears. Nightmares actually. 

Speaking openly about my own characteristics, I’m an odd mixture: a techy with EQ. I like facts not waffle, I love straight-forward honesty. Here’s the worrying bit…even if being honest is going to cost me somehow, I will say it any way. Can’t see the point in not!. All this means I can be seen as a maverick. Yet it’s my belief that people want transparency and honesty, they want to know you’re capable of saying *this is the wrong product for you, I shalln’t take any more of your time* if that really is the case. My daughter has inherited a fair number of my wacky genes; she has the ability to shock me to the core and yet she is loved for her honesty and good heart.

Organisations cannot afford gaffs; leaks of a confidential matter, betrayal of a commercial secret or an expression of a sentiment, opinion or idea that’s orthogonal to the group. So being a level 2 is seen as the practical solution. Audiences, however, know they’re not getting the real deal. They’re not seeing the people. This is the main difference between levels 2 and 3. It is the existence and universal understanding of a set of guiding principles. Rules and principles differ greatly, the latter offering a great deal of flexibility over the former. Take for example the stick man below. He’s throwing and catching a package. Never once does he drop and break the item. So he’s never broken the rule which states: “do not drop”. But he has violated the principle: FRAGILE.

To be a genuinely social organisation, the old rules of marketing have to be binned. People across the organisation need “to be on the same page” if they’re to tweet, blog or write comments in the open forum of social media. To get to level 3 involves:

1. Trusting a wider group of people to engage directly with their peers and audiences (internal and external)
2. Equipping the organisation with a set of guiding principles
3. Working through the pain of level 2
4. Scrapping old-world paradigms and replacing the velvet tongue of marketing with the authentic voice of individuals

An organisation that’s genuinely open — engages with competitors to discuss ideas, engages with audiences openly and frankly — is not the same as the one that thinks the illusion of one-to-one marketing is a great ambition. The promise of 1-to-1 marketing appeals to the old-world marketer.

A social organisation is one that’s confident in the power of ad-hoc, transparent communication. A social organisation empowers its people to engage in open conversation. A social organisation participates in authentic dialog not pseudo 1-to-1 marketing. A social organisation is *open for business* in a very real sense.

Apparently here in the UK there are 1 million people between the age of 17 and 25 not in work or full-time education. Can you imagine the waste? 1 million people not developing and realising the promise of their future? Before I was a teenager I determined that I’d work for IBM when I left school. We’d often drive by Hursley Park near Winchester when I was a kid and I’d say to myself “I’ll work there one day”. I didn’t know what happened the other side of *that sign*, I didn’t know there were 2,000 people that worked there. I didn’t know they were developing colour screens and disk drives. We’re talking late 70’s / early 80’s.

School, College, Uni…

The point is this, I left school (1979) in an era when the only thing to do for a kid with a slew of ‘O’ Levels was to go to college and then on to university. But being a self-willed kind of person I told my careers adviser I was going to work for IBM! “Yeah right!” came the reply. Well any way, I did, I spent my first 4 years of employment at IBM. This was partly a function of determination (a story I’ll tell another time) and mainly a function of era. A function of an older generation looking at a youngster and thinking: “let’s knock him into shape”. I cannot remember the guy’s name that hired me, he was a kindly old gent, told me I was a rubbish communicator but not to worry, they’d teach me. That was a different era. An era where the older generation were benevolent, they cared, they handed down experience without counting the cost.

It’s different now

Young people here in the UK leave school having been processed by a system that treats them collectively as a set of numerical possibilities, that could reflect well on their endless need for statistical improvement. I resent this system. My youngest son is 15 and the pressure he’s under to do well is extreme. Why? Because the school he attends wants to maintain its statistical high-ground, their focus is on their needs, not the needs of their students. I resent the damage being done to my son.

No wonder we have a generation of disaffected youngsters. They’re the result of a league-table oriented sausage machine. A system that pressures our children for better results than the preceding year for the sake of collective reputation, an ideal held superior to the needs of individual students. In addition, some young people have unrealistic expectations. They’ve been entertained by machines, difficulties in games are overcome with cheats or codes, boredom has been smoothed away by gadgets. Moving to the work place is going to be a shock: entitlement thinking simply won’t work, new behaviours have to be learnt and quickly!

Who gets the best jobs?

Not necessarily those that went to Eaton or even those with degrees. You’ll get a job in IT if you’re highly motivated, determined to learn even if it means learning by trial-and-error and learning from books. I say this because schools and universities do not invest at a pace that means they’re bang up-to-date. You can out-strip them and be useful to potential employers if you have a mindset that says “I can learn without being taught!”

Who gets the best employees?

Employers that choose wisely. Schools, colleges and universities cannot teach experience, drive or ambition. That’s our job. As employers we have the responsibility to do two things:

1. Shoulder the responsibility of employing and training young people
2. Choose our trainees wisely

Senior managers focus exclusively on this years profits — and shaping a trainee amounts to a distant ideal that doesn’t fit with any contemporary management instruments such as return on investment. We owe young people the opportunity of work and this has to be a conscious decision. We owe young people the opportunity to become the best employees.

PS: On reflection, IBM wasn’t my first job. I worked with my Dad from a very young age, mixing reconstituted stone in buckets for the production of garden ornaments and then working on building sites as I got a bit older. Well before being a teenager I used to start diesel concrete mixers, carry 112lb bags of cement and work anywhere from deep trenches to rooftops. I can’t think of a better way to inherit a *can do* attitude and thank my parents for putting aside safety concerns in the name of learning.