Get help

- When I talk to leaders about social media, the first question that so many of them have is: Where do you get started? My answer to them is to get help. There's a lot of great people out there that really understand social media well. You can of course hire external third parties and consultants. You can look internally at your team, and if you don't have a lot of DNA built up there as a social media or a marketing organization, it's time to start doing this. I'd also suggest looking at people in your company that are savvy. Maybe there are really good social media practitioners that you can do a reverse mentorship with, that you can talk to about where you should be and what you should be thinking about. I think getting a better understanding through all of these conversations is going to help you as a leader to really get started. In getting help, the whole point of getting help is to help build you up as a leader and to give you a must-have tool in your toolbox. I want people to remember that this getting help and maybe doing a reverse mentorship with your team does not mean that you're just going to get them to start doing your social. It means that you're going to get them to help you understand how to do social and think about getting involved and engaged with your customers. With my company, every day I wake up and I look at mentions of our brand, I look at who's talking with and about our company, and I use this as an opportunity to have a conversation with my customer. The information that I get out of this is invaluable, and I think that if we were to think about a different era where maybe you wanted to learn about what customers think about your brand, you would have to do something like hire an audience research company who would then go and build a focus group audience, who then would go and survey the focus group audience, who would create and tabulate a report, and then would serve that report back to you. The lag on this and the cost on this is really big, and in this era you're able to get millions and millions of dollars of customer value and understanding of your brand for free. I really encourage people to use this.