We were asked, along with UK4Business, to present an introduction to social media by the Gestalt Centre in London at one of their breakfast briefings.
This was an early morning meeting and the Centre provided Danish Pastries as well as croissants and fruit for all the attendees. I had an early start as I had to catch the 05:55 train from Farnborough Main and get to Shoreditch to get set up.
Attendees to the presentation were users of the Centre or members of the local business community. We covered in depth the importance of websites and adding new information regularly and using social media to ‘drive’ visitors to the website.
Several of the attendees were counsellors who used the Centre’s facilities and this prompted:
How can I post about what I do as all client conversations are confidential?
The obvious answer we all agree – was that you can’t. Even anonymised posts about symptoms and advice could be easily recognised by patients so this would clearly not be a route for generating website content. My suggestion was to step back from clients and to look elsewhere on the Internet for posts by others about counselling in general or specific ailments and then write a commentary or comment piece that references the original article or research.
Why would I be personal rather just stick to subjects around my business?
This query prompted a wide ranging discussion both for and against being too personal in your Tweets. In summary my advice was that as the owner of a business it would be OK to include some personal opinions or opinions in social media as your clients would be meeting you and it would help them to understand you better.
A more general query was the following:
I want to make contact with customers of rivals – any suggestions?
We discussed various methods of engaging with customers of rivals, ranging from simply retweeting selected tweets of theirs to responding directly to their tweets.
I was particularly concerned about the number of businesses that gathered information but had not registered with the Information Commissioner for the data that they held on clients or potential clients. Hopefully this would be remedied sooner rather than later.
After the meeting I had some nice feedback and some social media posts.
“ Thank you – feeling more confident”
~ Alice of Them Design“ Very Informative and clarifying for a newish person in social media. I feel I got some simple and clean steps on my social media journey. Thank you!”
~ Emerson Registered Shiatsu Practitioner“I can now see how social media would work for me”
~ Andy Rushton Andy Rushton Counselling“Thank you so much for offering your skill & expertise. It is much appreciated”
~ Jonny Counsellor
Enjoyed a great talk today delivered by @ian_hardacre . Thank you!
— CounsellorShoreditch (@counsellorskype) March 27, 2014
Thank you @socmediabureau @GestaltLondon @ian_hardacre for the insightful talk on social media (and for breakfast!)
— Alice Chilton (@Alice_Them) March 27, 2014