My son is learning to drive right now. He is taking lessons and finding his feet on the open roads.

He has a good instructor who is taking it slowly with him and making sure the basics are embedded.

He said to me the other night “its more complicated than I thought” and he is correct. When you break down the single activities, factors and elements that go into safely driving from one place to another, its mind blowing. Thousands of decision points, things that need to be done in the correct order, laws. Other drivers, weather, to name a few.

I’ve been driving for 33 years and that ‘complicated’ set of activities is second nature to me as it will be to you if you’ve been driving for many years. You get to the stage where there is almost no conscious thought going into the mechanical act of making a car move and all your attention is on the road.

To get to this level takes vast amounts of experience but, it all starts with training.

Training and Coaching at the core.

As it does with Social Media for your business...

When we engage with an organisation on Strategic Social Media there is usually a conversation with the leadership team about having their people posting content. There might be some concern about people saying the right and wrong thing: "How do I know our people are going to say the right things on Social Media?".... “what if our people post something they shouldn’t?”, there is usually a discussion about approvals “who will approve all this content that will be going out?” and there is usually a discussion around “how do people keep themselves and the company out of trouble and ‘stick to the path’?”…

These are all good, solid sensible questions that any leader considering transforming to Social Media to grow their business should be asking.

We often meet organisations that have rushed in.  They have people throwing content out on Social Media platforms and getting themselves in all sorts of knots. They end up taking chances and, in some cases, making very public mistakes.  This approach is the equivalent of me throwing the car keys at my son and telling him to head out on the roads and pick it up as he goes along…

Mistakes will happen in every walk of life, good training, strong coaching, and a good plan help to minimise the possibility of mistakes and let you get on with learning and practise with confidence and in safety.   

There is a significant difference between ‘a course’ and a ‘transformation’. You send people on a course, and they come back…then what?  You embark upon a business transformation, and you are already setting the tone for deep meaningful, organisational change.

So, to answer those key questions above, there are 5 key elements…

1.      Strategy

Any transformation programme worth its salt has a well-defined strategy.  We develop this first off and its acts as a central point for the programme going forward, for example:

-What we are doing this for

-What challenges we think we will have and how we will address them

-What strengths we have and how we will best use them

-What this needs to deliver

-Our Social Media Mission...

2.      Training

Social is a team sport. Working in groups, explaining how it works and showing you how to do it.

Setting the foundations in place so they become second nature.

3.      Coaching

1 to 1 focus with each induvial. 

Everyone learns at a different pace; everyone has different views and positions. Some people ‘get’ something right away, others take longer to get it.

The role of the coach is to home in on each person’s strengths and improvement areas and build a plan that brings the group along together.

4.      Process

We create a framework that everyone understands and can operate within. 

We create individual content plans that link back to the strategy and the overall purpose of the programme.

Putting into practise, measuring, adjusting, implementing (repeat).

 Everything about your Strategic Social Media is measurable.   If we can measure it, we can chart it, if we can chart it, we can see patterns. With those patterns we can plot a course.  

5.      Culture

We said earlier “You send people on a course, and they come back…then what? 

You embark upon a business transformation, and you are already setting the tone for deep, meaningful organisational change”.

Culture is important for success of any business transformation programme. Making space and changing the internal language. Putting Social on the agenda at meetings, applauding network growth, publicly talk about ‘that post’, share the news on “that conversation that came from Social”, that win that came from Social…share it all and get people talking.

Make the very fact that you are now a Social Organisation the 'new normal'.

Your Social Media Strategy keeps you on a path towards a position of Digital Dominance. 

Put those 5 elements into play and coat with liberal amounts of trust and belief and your people will do a great job.

Then we can bed down into the nuts and bolts.

We optimise the profiles of the team. This means their profiles will be buyer centric and digitally optimised, they will have profiles that are working for them when they are asleep – Few large companies have even thought about optimising their team’s profiles and focus on throwing money at SEO…so you are one step up.

Then we start growing your network. Connecting and building relationships with key people – we do this at scale and with strategy…another step up.

Then we build in influence. Creating rich and diverse content which educates, inspires, challenges and entertain our growing network and engage in conversation with key people.  

All of you are doing this, not just your marketing or salespeople… the whole team.

You will start to receive inbound from the new visibility and the people you are bringing into your network...

When we build in Multichannel networks, we boost your profile and content across different networks, you start to achieve digital dominance.

You start to take control of the digital narrative in your chosen sectors – We call this Digital Dominance.

You see, many people promise you the earth with a ‘LinkedIn masterclass’ that advertise changing your life in a 3-hour session. This is a waste of everyone’s time…

We know that to affect real business change, to make a valuable, measurable, and scalable contribution to the ebitda of your business, we need habits and behaviours to change.  We need new process, new language, a new framework, new thinking, and new action.

Every sector and sub sector has a measurable amount of digital chatter.  This about making your digital voice the clearest and most recognised in your sectors.

When we start to have your teamwork in a strategic and panned way, using keywords to optimise content across multiple channels – they start to take ownership of the digital share of voice.

It all starts to build: 

• Visibility - Your marketplace recognises and your team.
• Trusted advisor status - You are recognised as experts.
• Pipeline, growth & inbound - More opportunities.
• Recruitment opportunities – People want to work with Social organisations.

The whole team connecting and having conversations with people who can buy your products or services, people who can influence for you and people who can amplify your message.

We create a stable platform for growth to allow you and your team to take control of Digital and Social for your business.

Strategy – Training – Coaching – Process - Practise – Measure – Adjust - Repeat

Pure, Organic Social Media transformation for your business.

The conversation about whether this all works or not is over - dead - in the trash.

The question now is if your organisation has the culture to accept change, the mind to accept alternative perspectives and the hunger to win...

For 2022 its important you give your team all the digital skills they need to network, prospect, and close business online, regardless of your sector.

We regularly take management teams through how this is done and show the results from our client base. 

Always happy to have a conversation. 

Live Social ‘22

Eric Doyle

Crux / DLA Ignite