From Quick Thoughts Blog submitted by Ann Shea, Human Resource/Social Learning/Social Media for QuickLessons

An Interview with Bonnie Henthorn, Manager, Brandon Hall Group

With over 20 years of experience in various legal, research, administrative, and management roles, Bonnie Henthorn has been an integral part of Brandon Hall Group’s operations for the past 12 years in areas such as social marketing, staffing and human resources, research, KnowledgeBase management, and event management. She currently serves as an operations manager at Brandon Hall Group continuing with responsibilities across several areas including client services, project management, member center management, KnowledgeBase management, and marketing.

Q:  You are the main community manager for Brandon Hall Group, right? How did you become the person doing this?

Bonnie: Yes, this is one of my responsibilities; I do provide oversight of our social marketing activities. Social media came onto the scene and just exploded. Brandon Hall Group began using these services and, along with other organizations, has recognized the value – everybody’s learning as we go. Lorie Watson has come on board at Brandon Hall Group to help with social marketing and I’m serving as a mentor and coach as she learns the ropes. That being said, the entire team at Brandon Hall Group contributes to the effort. It’s important for everyone to interact with our customers, followers and friends. Otherwise people feel like they’re just being marketed to, and we want to avoid that – people want to talk about a specific topic.

Q:  How much time does it entail?

Bonnie: My guestimate would be about 10-15 hours per week, but that is, of course, supplemented by the entire team being involved, so the number of hours actually would be significantly higher. Brandon Hall Group employees all play an active role and work as a team engaging socially with their own social media networks – this could result in 100’s of hours per week, collectively.

Q:  Describe the different types of content you put on different sites…Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…do you contribute to the blog as well? Do you prefer certain types of content on the different sites? Do you use an auto-posting to help cross-post to different sites?

Bonnie: Our content varies quite a bit, and includes events, industry announcements, research items, and promotions. We also have several blogs related to different categories of research and related content is posted on each. For posting management, we use Tweetdeck for Twitter, as well as Facebook tracking tools.

In terms of content, we developed a plan for social media: We determined what our goals were for social marketing and then implemented it – tweaking it over time – and wrapped it into our overall business processes for different types of projects. For example, a webinar takes several weeks or months of promotion to ensure good attendance. We have, therefore, designed our overall planning process for webinars to ensure that we have ample promotion time, and set specific expectations of when and where these items should be posted. We do try to post at specific time intervals on all the different social locations. These include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, our News Blog, and other Facebook and LinkedIn groups that we may individually belong to that relate to the event or topic.

Editor’s Note: Links for Brandon Hall Group Blogs

• News
• Executive Performance Today
• Learning and Development Today
• Talent Management Today
• Sales and Marketing Today
• Excellence Awards

Q:  Do you think Community Managers are more prone to burnout than individuals in other positions?  What are your keys for staving off and managing burnout?

Bonnie: When you’re the only person doing it, sometimes you can get a little tired or fatigued. Having more people involved helps alleviate this type of fatigue. Working with a team of contributors alleviates stress and eliminates the feeling that “I have to do it all.” And having more voices makes the information more interesting to the reader. It allows readers to feel like they are getting to know the entire organization, not just the voice of one designated person. From a logistical standpoint, since it is important to have postings regularly, preferably daily on our social sites, and obviously we are not all available to monitor these items daily, we can tag-team our efforts to ensure that there is activity daily or as often as possible. Also, when you work remotely, you’re never turned off and sometimes feel that you always need to be online answering responses or posting something. The world is not on fire if you don’t post at 2 a.m. your local time.

As I mentioned, Brandon Hall Group prefers the approach that, even though we’ve designated someone to work in this capacity, the team works as a whole. That being said, for those who are responsible for most of the activity, the best advice is to avoid posting all at one time during the day. Space out the postings by visiting different sites a few times per day. This will help avoid burnout and writer’s block.

When I first started out, I would try to do it all at once, first thing in the morning, and I would end up with writer’s block. I needed to find a creative way to post about events and draw people in but in a creative way to make it interesting. Trying to do this all at one time was difficult, so varying the time of day can give you fresh insight as to what you’d like to say. Blindly posting the same thing over and over makes things redundant for the readers. If your followers/friends on Facebook and Twitter find that you post everything on Monday at 9:00 am, it becomes predictable. Varying the time of day with different content makes it much more interesting. Your readers never know when they might hear from you – it keeps things fresh.

In addition to our social media marketing, we have a regular newsletter where our readers expect to hear from us on a more regular basis.

Q:  What are the most important skills for a community manager?

Bonnie: I would say the top four would be: social media savvy (knowledge of the social networks); business acumen; attention to detail; and creativity.

Your social media person needs to know about your business and industry. That being said, a person can grow into the role, but they should have a mentor or coach to guide them. The knowledge of the social networks is not enough in and of itself. I think it is important to look for all of these skills and those skills working together will make the best community manager or social media marketer. Hiring someone solely based on their ability to navigate the social networks can be dangerous to your business without being sure they hold the other skills as well. The person posting for your company should also be able to put some personality into their posts and be at ease with sharing themselves with the readers – it’s not just about posting dates and times.

A good social media marketer is able to draw people into the story with very little text. They may be posting about the same item multiple times and it is important to include ‘pieces’ of the information so that each time, the reader gets a little more information creating the desire for more. The readers need to think about the topic in a different way each time they read about it.

Computer savvy and knowledge of the social networking sites comes into play so that the social media manager can help answer a reader’s technical questions. For example, a reader may not understand why they receive an email from Facebook every time something is posted – and the social marketer may need to explain how the reader needs to modify their own email notification setting. It’s best if you know the platform better than your readers.

Q:  Do you think a community manager is born with the aptitude or can it be made? Do you think someone new to an organization could make an effective community manager?

Bonnie: Certainly! New employees can bring a fresh perspective to what has always been done in terms of social marketing and managing online social communities within a certain company. We all use social media in our personal lives and we know what we like and don’t like in terms of notifications and being bothered by posts that we aren’t interested in reading. These skills transfer directly to business community management. After all, people can always join your groups and they can also leave too!

I’m a firm believer in learning by doing – if someone has an interest in learning something they probably can do it. For me personally, I learned to do what I do at Brandon Hall Group based upon the desire to learn. My background as a legal secretary for 15 years, and an executive assistant for 2 years, gave me some good basic skills, which I have now been able to hone as time progressed based on my interest in learning. The Brandon Hall Group company culture has also encouraged this type of work environment.

If your organization has employees who wish to learn the skill, give them a shot – give them a coach to help out and see what develops. It’s not for everyone, but you may find the best person possible for the job is already on your team!

Personality plays into the success of a community manager or social media marketer. For some who may be quiet and reserved, they might not be able to break out of their shell enough for this type of work. Or on the other hand, it may just be what they need to shine. The readers need to get to know you. When they get to know you, they will read a lot more about what you post. You want readers to know that you know something about the field you are covering and so you definitely want to post things that are of interest to you and your industry. A good marketer will grow into the position and get better over time.

Probably the best motivator for the community organizer or social media marketer is to see the effectiveness of their efforts. Trying to determine what particular outreach works is a difficult task, but when you can see the results of that effort in for example, more registrations for event, or significant participation in a research survey, it motivates the poster to strive to be even better.

A new community organizer or social media marketer needs to be sufficiently onboarded into the organization so that they know exactly what the company is about, what is the culture, what is the goal and expectation for the community.

About QuickLessons:

QuickLessons LLC is a leading provider of rapid eLearning development solutions. Their state of the art platform provides an online collaborative environment for users to develop high quality Flash based courses leveraging an extensive library of templates and out of the box development processes. With extensive background in advanced instructional design, QuickLessons was built by content developers for content developers. Learn more at www.quicklessons.com

In December, 2011, Brandon Hall had the opportunity to interview Jim Melillo, Chairman and Co-founder of Executive Conversation Inc. Jim has extreme knowledge and experience within the corporate development and treasury areas overseeing dozens of global mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and financings. For the last 12 years, he has concentrated on working with technology channel organizations both in EMEA as well as domestically and has held senior positions with a broad group of mid-market companies in the $200-$1,000 million revenue range. As CFO and director of NPI, Inc. Mr. Melillo oversaw one of the first “roll ups,” building the largest group of franchisee restaurants in the USA. He has done IPOs, Secondary offerings of equity and debt offerings through the SEC and the London Third Market, as well as worked with the FDA, IRS, (US and UK), USDA and US Patent Office in his role as a senior executive.

During his tenure in the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industries Mr. Melillo was involved in structuring and negotiating licenses or joint ventures with leading corporations around the world, including Dow Pharmaceutical in the U.S., Hoechst Rousell of France, Perstorp Chemical of Sweden and Mitsubishi Biologicals of Japan. Prior to that he worked for Boston Consulting Group where he served such clients as Smith Kline, OMC/Evinrude, Corning Fiber Optics, and Alpha-Philco.

Following is a portion of the December, 2011 interview with Jim Melillo:

You have been working with some of the largest and most successful sales and marketing organizations for more than a decade. What would you say are the biggest changes that these organizations are going to face in the next decade?

In the last decade we saw organizations begin to recognize that people were their greatest asset. We also saw the rise of software and processes focused on that realization. However, the application of that thinking, particularly in the sales and marketing process has been grossly underwhelming. I see organizations actually applying the idea that “our people are our greatest asset” in the future.

The second big change I see occurring in the sales and marketing sphere, is the proliferation of information. The exponential growth of information and the technology to manage that information will affect sales and marketing functions, more than it does research and development or manufacturing.

Many people may say that the biggest changes are going to be due to shifts in healthcare or changes in various industries, I would tell you that I believe there are going to be quantum shifts in both the application of the people within organizations driving the business forward, and the effect of technology and information on the sales and marketing process.

What are the greatest opportunities and challenges for traditional sales professionals facing this new “cloud” market today?

Let me address it from both the people that are within the technology industry and people that are not but are linked to the industry. So as an example, it is easy to think of the companies I mentioned Amazon, Oracle, and IBM as being within the phenomenon. On the other hand, you can think of GE Radiology, Hospira with infusion pumps in the healthcare industry both of whom have to adjust their business model to take advantage of their customer and the healthcare industry which is moving towards this cloud environment.

So let’s first focus on the technology firms. Within the technology firms, having a cloud [system] is a “so what?” I read an interesting article about Mark Hurd, President of Oracle Corporation, talking about the difference between his cloud and Salesforce.com, and IBM. He basically said that the cloud should be free, it should be open, and information should be capable of moving in and out. He’s already talking about second-generation cloud [computing], where you can start off at the Oracle cloud and you can move your stuff to Amazon’s cloud, and then you can bring it back.

Already we’re on generation two of cloud computing and I would say it’s not even rolled out. Talking about cloud computing in and of itself when you’re in the technology industry has already become a discussion of features and functions. Buyers are already down to “I don’t really care, maybe I’ll use the post office’s cloud maybe I’ll use Amazons.”

What technology people have to recognize is that now the discussion turns to what is the business change that that grows out of this technology. How does this impact healthcare, financial services, manufacturers. I’m already seeing products that are cutting edge, as a sales professional you need to come to me with the business effect rather than just come to me with the “cloud.”

To read the full executive interview members can access the interview at: http://www.brandonhall.com/memberstore/details/712/37/document-type/executive-interview/executive-interview-jim-melillo.html

For more information or to request a copy, please contact us here: http://www.brandon-hall.com/about-us/contact-us.html or
at success@brandonhall.com.

Organizations today are under a lot of pressure to perform. There are many ideas and thoughts being floated about as to how companies should improve performance. For any executive looking for answers, they will soon become overwhelmed with the amount of information that can be found and the infinite number of approaches that can be taken.

For many organizations, the thinking around improving performance is complicated and challenging. Most importantly, organizations struggle with where to begin and how to get started. Organizations struggle with clarifying their goals and objectives for performance improvement. The struggle stems from being able to focus on an enterprise wide approach to driving improvement that every member of the team can relate to and understand.

To improve performance an organization needs to communicate a plan that is relevant to every employee. The plan must also include an understanding of how every individual has a role in creating improvement.

With so many types of roles in an organization, the task of communicating a plan that promotes alignment and engagement at every level of the organization is daunting.

So where should a company focus it efforts on developing the plan? Improving the IQ of the organization through learning. A learning-focused organization will always succeed in generating the greatest level of performance improvement. Why? Because organizations are made up of people and investing in a highly educated and trained workforce is the best way to improve performance.

A learning-focused organization will always be in the best position to improve their performance because their people will have the knowledge and wisdom to change the organizational setting in a way that improves its ability to compete and prosper.

There is no substitute for smart people and organizations that promote learning and development have realized that investing in people is the key to long-term sustainability.

Where companies need to focus today is offering a learning platform that is on demand, highly dynamic and focuses on the individual learning style of the employee. Baked into this platform is the requisite understanding of what the organization needs from the individual in terms of performance improvement.

In essence, the goals for improvement of the individual should be aligned with the goals for the organization. Organizations today need to focus their efforts on implementing learning platforms that create a community approach to learning. This socialized learning approach will drive the collective intelligence of the organization and place it in the best position to improve performance.

In summary, a learning-focused organization that focuses on demand-oriented training and education tailored for the individual learner will not only improve performance but also maintain the level of improvement.

I spoke with the team at Covario recently and I’m very excited about the new Analytics Insights service they are offering their clients. According to the Covario team, the idea came about in response to a need expressed by some of their larger clients for “data-driven insights”.

Enterprise marketers increasingly are in need of experts who understand their business and can offer “non-obvious” advice on media strategy, metrics, organizational structure and competitive analysis to help them demonstrate campaign progress, show ROI and drive marketing innovation. Craig Macdonald, Covario’s CMO, stated “The vision for the new service is to expand our clients’ view of how to optimize digital advertising – particularly with respect to search – to drive their business goals”.

Craig Macdonald will personally oversee the new team and will initially focus on Covario’s largest clients including Research In Motion, Dell, T-Mobile, IBM, Urban Outfitters and Lenovo.

The Covario team will be producing breakthrough levels of insight for their clients in the following areas:

• Competitive analysis
• Attribution modeling
• Media-mix analysis
• Opportunity forecasting
• Budgeting optimization

Covario’s ultimate goal is to help their clients build “Digital Centers of Excellence”. For more information about this program, please visit http://www.covario.com/solutions/media-mix.

Covario is leveraging its deep analytical experience to form this newly dedicated team. I believe this team will create a unique and unmatched competitive advantage for Covario. Traditionally, companies ask their agencies for this type of information and are usually disappointed by their lack of insight.

Over time, Covario believes they will be able to standardize the process and offer the service through a fully automated approach. By automating the process, Covario will be able to engage a larger number of companies. For now, the team will work with a select group of clients to optimize the service before introducing automation.

Covario projects that the greatest demand for this service will come from brand advertisers. Covario will target the “CMO minus one” positions within companies with a heavy focus on executives responsible for media analytics. These advertisers place a lot of emphasis on the use of social media in their marketing efforts.

According to Covario, the process for engaging clients is simple. Covario will take their clients through a discovery process to identify key areas of need and then develop a specific scope of work based on meeting those needs. The goal of the analysis is to help executives better articulate the return on investment in media to their colleagues at critical intervals such as monthly or quarterly business reviews.

When I asked about the market potential for this service, I was given a very impressive figure. Covario estimates that approximately 1000 companies worldwide are spending $100 million or more on advertising each year. Covario believes they can capture 0.5-1% of their advertising expenditures with their new service. Covario stated that the staffing requirements for this service are incremental and are already aligned with the company’s present efforts making this service a solid contributor to the company’s bottom line.

Covario’s Analytics Insights Service, in my opinion, will be met with a rousing level of acceptance in the market place. Covario is finally offering companies around the world a level of analytics and insight for decision making that up until now has not been available. I applaud the team at Covario for developing this idea and I have no doubt that they will make it another positive endeavor in a long line of accomplishments by this cutting edge company.

Here are five helpful tips to assist you in managing stress:

1) Create a list – I keep a list on my desk top that I add and modify every day. This helps me manage both business related tasks and personal tasks.

2) When new things arise that create stress – a best practice is not to react immediately or respond, but to take a step back and reflect on what is put in front of you. Once you’re able to have a better perspective I find myself in much better mind frame to tackle the task or problem.

3) Try to take short breaks throughout the day to go for a brief walk, stretch, etc – especially if you’re in front of a computer a lot.

4) Find a time in the day that works for you for exercise – whether it is early in the morning, afternoon or evening – even if you can only get 20 minutes in -during exercise – the body releases chemicals called endorphins – the endorphins interact with receptors in your brain that help to reduce pain – this in turn reduces stress..

5) Last but not least – try to find fun in your work – try not to consider work – “work”, but a part of your life that you enjoy. Everyone is looking for work life balance – but whether you put in 6, 8, 10, 12 hours a day – 4, 5, 7 days a week -make sure you find things in your work that are pleasurable – you will then not consider work as work – but as part of what brings meaning to you.