Regulation of employee’s personal Facebook profile - can it be done?

Dear social media - sometimes I feel you are evolving so quickly it's hard to work out whether you are a company's friend or foe!
This week in My Marketing Week I am going to address a social media problem that a friend / client has experienced recently as I think it raises a very good point.

The Problem
To give you a bit of background, my pal and her husband run an aviation company that employs - you guessed it - pilots. Now according to her, these pilots are apparently a bit prone to posting inappropriate and unsafe comments about flying on their personal Facebook pages. Fair enough I hear you say, each to their own. But the problem lies in the fact that these pilots are friends with clients of the aviation company and these potentially dangerous posts could be an issue for the company.

This is not an isolated problem, there have been several examples of employees using social media to post video footage of them shoving cheese up their nose before putting it on a pizza, threatening violence towards fellow employees, boasting about staff sexual conquests etc. And in fairness to these employees they are probably not posting these updates in work time and therefore not thinking about the consequences those updates may incur. They're just trying to appear funny / smart / dumb / hot and gain more readers / friends / chicks or whatever the case may be.

As an Employer you can control what your employees do on your time, but you have absolutely no control over what they do with their personal time. So what can you do as a company to try and curb or influence your employees social media updates without appearing too big brothery?

The Solution
Develop a Company Policy which lets your employees know that their personal pages, blogs, and posts could get them in strife at work, and explain the types of content that could create problems.
Some topics that the aviation company could include in its policy on social media updates could be:

• The use of the companies planes & equipment, especially anything that's branded.
• Details of any flights conducted on company time.
• Use of client details.
• Get employees to clearly state that the views they express online are their own and that they do not speak on behalf of their employers.

Most of all - encourage your employees to use their common sense. Social media posts are permanent and are seen by many!!
Have you ever had to deal with an employee's inappropriate social media update? How did you deal with it?

Website Design - things I am learning along the way!

OK, so I’m back on to websites. Simply because I am still in the throws of getting mine designed and it’s been a long and hard road so far! I mentioned in a previous post that I’m being ultra fussy and particular with this because it’s my website that I’m designing. Trust me I have a lot more clarity when it’s a client’s website I’m dealing with! I will note here that because the main service that I offer is online marketing – my website really does have to kick but!

Anyway, the designer who is designing my website is a dear friend Amanda Leahy & you can check out her work here. I pity poor Mands for taking this job on and I’m sure she will speak to me again soon when her frustration with me has subsided!!

For the record, I actually did go into this quite prepared and I submitted Mands a full brief complete with a little table of websites that I liked and the reasons why. But you know what – I could have done better!

The good news is I am learning from this experience and I am now going to share some of my lessons learnt with you dear readers!!

Here are some things to consider when designing your website:

Lesson one: Search outside the square

It’s definitely a good idea to assemble a list of websites that you like and reasons why. My mistake was that I only looked for marketing websites and to be honest I found it hard to find really good ones within this industry. Since submitting my initial brief  I have had several AWESOME websites recommended to me like this one, thisone and this one. I love them and would love my website to take inspiration from such great concepts. I should have widened my search field originally. Next time I’m going to email a bunch of friends, family, colleagues and clients and ask them to email me a list of 3 websites that they love and why.

Lesson two: Regularly check back in with your brief

So I got my first design draft back and my head went into a spin as I tried to digest the aesthetics, the wording, the layout etc. There was a lot to take in and consider. As it turned out there were a few things that the home page design had not catered for which were really important to me. Regularly checking back to your original brief will ensure that you don’t realise these missing elements too late!

Lesson three: Get others to review

A fresh set of eyes are invaluable! This is something I have done - yay for me. I have sent draft pages of the design to a handful of friends and family to get their feedback. Most of these people have a background in communications or business so their input has been valuable and relevant and has either confirmed some of my thoughts or raised issues that I hadn’t considered.

Lesson 4: Try and stick to a timeline

Getting a website designed from scratch can take months & months. Try and set yourself, your designer and your developer realistic but snappy timelines.

Hope those lessons can be of use – I’m sure there will be more to come!! 

Social Media Post Block

This is what I've been suffering from these past few weeks and I'm sure I'm not alone in my experience!  I've sat down so many times to start my blog post for the week, written a few sentences and then stopped, completely unable to carry on.
It's one of the most frustrating things when you are pressed for time and need to achieve. I don't know about you but I can't justify sitting here pondering a concept. I feel unless I'm actually putting fingertips to keys I'm wasting valuable time. So just in case there are people who experience the same brain blockage syndrome that I occasionally do, I've included a few ideas below that may help overcome it. Disclaimer: I'm certainly no literary genius but these are the things that help me get on with a piece of writing:
1. Open up a word doc and just brain dump. Write down all the things you want to say about a certain subject, in no particular order, just get those words on paper. From there you can start sorting through what's relevant and shaping your article.
2. For the purposes of written communications that are to be shared & read online - keep them short & simple. People don't have time to read a long & overly verbose article. They want something short & sweet with a couple of value-add solutions to boot. So once you have written your piece, go through and take out all the unnecessary stuff.
3 Go for a run or swim. These exercises (when undertaken solo) can get the creative juices flowing. I often form the basis of my articles whilst running.
4. I like writing in a conversational style. Friends have said that I write exactly as I speak. I hope that's a good thing? What I think it does do is make my articles approachable to read and also much easier to write. I'm so glad we no longer have to subscribe to that stiff & pompous business style of writing - BORING!
Anyway, in the interest of keeping this short & sweet with a few value added solutions, I'll stop right here.
PS I'd love to hear any tips that you may have for overcoming writers block!

Playing Dress Ups - getting noticed just by looking the part

A very large part of the excellence of owning my own business is the flexibility that it affords me! This flexibility applies to so many things (which I am sure I will cover in future posts) and includes what I can wear to my home office on my work days. In winter my uggies are a staple and in summer it's flip flops all the way. Fantastic. However, when I leave my office to go to a meeting, pick the kids up from school, do a few jobs in town - I dress up! I put on my best work clothes (i've collected a pretty nice corporate wardrobe over the years) and replace the uggies / flip flops with a pair of heels.
I can't tell you how many people notice this. Almost every day that I am wearing my "work clothes" I am asked whether I work and what kind of work I do. Cue - elevator pitch - "I have my own small business providing affordable marketing solutions to other small businesses."
So there you go - the simple act of dressing up gets me noticed and starts conversations that could in turn lead to future clients. And that's what marketing is all about!

Standard office winter  footwear at Dragonfly HQ!

Small Business Website Challenge - when only the best will do

Wow! So all week I have been conscious to make mental notes about potential marketing challenges that I could post about. Let me tell you as a small business owner who works from a home office on a 5 year old lap top there seems to be many IT challenges that are hurled my way but luckily (for the sake of this blog) there are also a few marketing ones as well. And none more pertinant than designing one's own website. Phew! What a task! The irony is I help clients develop and maintain their websites all the time and with great ease but when it comes to designing my own - different story. All of a sudden there is this overwhelming tendancy to over think and over strategise every sentence, to thesaurus every word and look at one billion other marketing websites to see if there is anything they may be doing that I have not thought of. I've been so tempted to include every single bell,whistle and gadget and create the BEST EVER MARKETING SITE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!
And then I had a conversation with my brother about the process and he gave the best advice ever. Just keep it simple. Keep it clean, sophisticated, relevant and simple.
So after breathing a huge sigh of "oh yeah, of course, yep, that makes sense" I wiped my totally over complicated website brief clean and started again.
This time I focused on what my website objectives are, what is the key information I need to include without overwhelming or confusing (or boring) my clients and how can I keep the site relevant, dynamic and on the first page of Google! Ha, no pressure.
Anyway, I am just about to send the brief & content off to my web developer and am so excited to see what comes back.
I'll be sure to post the results.
What's the best thing about your business website?

My marketing week - The challenges faced by me – small business owner and marketing girl at Dragonfly Marketing and how I overcame them.

I love Mia Freedman and love reading her blogs, books, columns – anything she throws out there. I’ve been planning to write a blog for ages and I pour through hers every week searching for inspiration – and finally she has now provided it! Mia now writes a weekly post titled “My week that was” – perfect. I’m going to do that too but make it relevant to what I and most other small businesses come across every week – the challenges of marketing and running a small business.

Ha! Love it. I’m not only going to talk about my challenges but I’m going to rope in any friends, colleagues, clients and anyone else who I can think of and chat about their challenges as well. So we’ll talk about that and then hopefully about the solutions to those challenges! 

I know I’d benefit from this – what about you?