The Effective Social Media Executive (part 1)

The Effective Social Media Executive (part 1)

This is a part of a series of articles about social media executives influenced by the father of modern management book “the effective executive”.

The book actually struck me as being extremely relevant in both principal and practice so I will pick those concepts and try to implement them into the social media field to produce the effective social media executive.

In his book Peter Drucker dedicates a whole chapter to contribution, which is the contribution of the executive to the company or the organization.

This is a profound question to any social media executive, what is your contribution to the field or to the market, if you’re just posting, updating, changing profile pictures that could be great active and could drive both traffic and engagement yet it is not effective.  It’s just posting.

How to determine then what should be the focus of ones contribution?  As per Peter there are four factors

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four

Basic requirements of effective human relations:

• Communications.

• Teamwork.

• Self-development.

• Development of others.
To break down these four focuses in social media terms we need to look at each of them closely

•   Communication :

Communications have been in the center of managerial attention for years. In modern society however there has been great concern with social media communications. Now it is the social media executive responsibility to ask questions like
 what are the contributions for which will be known for?
What should we expect of you as your audience, friends and followers?
What is the best utilization of your knowledge and your ability?”

Which channels are you using and why?

•    Team work :

The focus on contribution leads to communications sideways and thereby makes teamwork possible. The effective work is actually done in and by teams of people of diverse knowledge and skills. These people have to work together voluntarily and according to the logic of the situation and the demands of the task, rather than according to a formal jurisdictional structure. The question here should be “Who has to use my output for it to become effective?”.

I am still amazed by facebook pages and twitter accounts that still talk only about themselves, their offers, their employees, and their company culture.

Social media as a medium gave us an opportunity to work together as a team of knowledge workers.
Define your output; define your audience and who can benefit from that. Then find you master group or your community creating a dynamic thought process resulting in an output that is both beneficial and effective.

      

•     Individual self-development:

In large measure depends on the focus on contributions. The man who asks of himself, “What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?”Asks in effect, “What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?”

•   Development of others:
  
  The executive who focuses on contribution also stimulates others to develop themselves. He sets standards which are not personal but grounded in the requirements of the task. At the same time, they are demands for excellence. For they are demands for high aspiration, for ambitious goals, and for work of great impact. People in general, and knowledge workers grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted.

So in order to recap in social media terms these 4 main focus points can be easily implemented in our social media strategy and our social media lives.

A-     Communicate : Be social don’t act Social

B-      Teams work: Find your tribe , create a mastermind group

C-      Self development: it’s a dynamic social world and you should be too.

D-     Development of others: adapted to the platforms and set bar for the achievement for yourself and others.

Thanks for reading I hope that you found this adaptation of the book interesting would love to hear your thoughts feel free to
tweet me @fouad_khafaga
or
googl+ :khafagafouad@gmail.com 

Creative thought and the creative process of linking ideas.

Written by: Fouad Khafaga
Twitter: @fouad_khafaga

Linking

One of the interesting things of the human ability is that we are able to connect and link ideas that in their own nature not necessarily relate-able, for example the evil spirits and the dark those are two independent ideas that does not in their foundation share a common aspect, yet we were able to link those two ideas to create tales, music & movies.

In a lot of the horror movies they use the concept of the haunted houses which are just the host of the two ideas evil spirits and darkness. The concept of merging ideas in this way was able to produce many creative applications in business, entertainment and human development field.

Here is an example

When seen from a distant chess players can sit still in the same place for hours, this in the first sight does not seem like a physical activity and in fact it’s far off from being a sport. However when asked about chess player say it’s a sport and it’s a bloody sport.

Idea 1A : chess                                                                                 Ideas 1b : martial arts

creative link : the book samurai chess

the writer made a creative link between the martial arts techniques and common philosophies like the art of sacrifices and the how to weaken the enemy physically and mental and applied such techniques to a chess board which resulted in what became a very interesting read and some revolutionary concepts.



Note: we can also make the same link through the book art of war by writing a book titled the art of chess war for example.

Our brain contains 86 billion neurons every new connection between two new neurons makes us smarter; following the same concept making new connection between thoughts that might seem either irrelevant or unrelated creates a new channel of creativity.

Consider thinking of cars body and human skin, seems like 2 far apart ideas yet BMW doesn’t think so they did introduce a concept car called Gina the this is what they can to say about the design of Gina :


“The GINA Light Visionary Model has an almost seamless outer skin, a flexible textile cover that stretches across a movable substructure. Individual functions are only revealed if and when

They are needed. With this model, BMW Group Design initiates a fundamental discourse about the characteristics that will affect the development of cars in future. It is therefore fundamentally different from concept cars, which reflect what is expected of them by implementing as many elements as possible in a future production model. In contrast, the GINA Light Visionary Model is a vision of future cars and serves as an object of research.”

Not just skin its seamless skin. The concept is available online on the BMW web site for more details and information about the concept car.

Another field that uses the linking technique in a creative manner is Guerrilla Marketing the idea is to link urban Guerrilla war techniques in the Marketing world. Here is how the founding father of Guerrilla techniques Jay Conrad Levinson defines his art:

“I’m referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always — achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money”.

The original term was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book ‘Guerrilla Advertising’.
Guerrilla marketing is often ideal for small businesses that need to reach a large audience without investing a huge lump sum of money or if they simply have a tight budget on marketing and advertising. It also is used by big companies in grassroots campaigns to compliment on-going mass media campaigns. Individuals have also adopted this marketing style as a way to find a job or more work.

Now Guerrilla marketing and Guerrilla art can be seen all over the world creating high brand awareness and an amazing advertising impacts with low budget exactly like it was intended to be.

Comedians, writers & concept artists use the linking technique in their character creation process, they try to find two ideas that obviously doesn’t match and create a character around it, this provide them with a human cognitive paradox and depth of character.

 Like for example a military general who’s into cake baking and wedding decoration, a nun who owns a casino in Vegas or a doctor who is sick (HOUSE A.D.).

The linking technique is one of the most widely used creative techniques that can be observed in a Variety of fields.

Five Factors to consider while watching Shark Tank

Twitter: @fouad_khafaga
                  

In Season 5 the TV series shark tank attracted an average of more than 8 million weekly viewers, this made startups , SMEs and entrepreneurs tune in taking notes and looking for free business advice yet these are 5 factors that  you should consider before modeling your business on a T.V. show.

1. They don’t give you the full picture:
   
   Because of the dynamics of the show the viewers get an illusion that what they see is pretty much is what happening on the set (diverse ideas, pitch reviews, questions and feedback) yet truth is that out of 45,000 people who applied to be on the show in 2014, less than 1 percent got the opportunity to pitch their businesses to the sharks.
2.  They don’t finish the deals (Done on T.V.):
   
   not every one who pitches an idea is saying the truth about their business some fudge of their company's financial figures, or make false claims like they have a patent on a product, some actually evaded taxes which is misleading for the sharks and that’s more than enough to cancel the deal.
   
   
   
3. They don’t invest in services :
   
   85% of the deals that are done on shark tank is actually for products even though digital  markets are cost efficient, delivers conversion  and help generate better revenue. In other words if your start up in the next Netflix, YouTube or even Google don’t expect to get a deal on shark tank.
   
4. They are wearing one hat:
   
   May be in their own businesses the sharks are ambitious, visionaries, welling to take calculated risks yet on the program they are putting their investors’ hat on.  They are not willing to share the same passion, dreams or vision with you, they need to share only the profits as Kevin always says (cash flow, numbers and show me the money).
   
5. They don’t believe in rough starts:
   
   Even though by media terms the show had a rough start the first season didn't even break the top 100 primetime shows in terms of average viewership. If your sales are not high, didn’t break even and the business is not scalable most probably the sharks will be out.
   
   Sources: http://bit.ly/1HIm1vk
                   http://entm.ag/1Es6ij4
                   http://bit.ly/1g3FRW8