In her blog, "New Adventures of an Old SID", Chris Syme writes about why athletic departments should encourage staff members to develop their personal brands through social media. It's a win-win situation, according to Syme.
Read this online and see Syme's other blog entries here: Old Adventures of a New SID (note: graphic courtesy of www.hajiflemings.com)
We spend a lot of time trying to build unity in athletic departments. Offices can be spread over a campus and people can feel disconnected from the whole. So why would we want to encourage individual coaches, programs and staffers to develop personal branding?
A recent article in the winter 2010 issue of The Public Relations Strategist addressed this topic in an article, "Recruit and Retain the Best Talent--Why Companies Should Encourage Personal Branding."
Many organizations are struggling with the idea of employees using work time to blog, twitter and post on Facebook. Author Ed Schipul says, "...social media has provided an ever-expanding array of channels through which individuals can advance ideas and build their brands. As more people become content creators, (companies) have the opportunity to leverage the creativity of of employees--their words, photos, videos, and even music--like never before for the benefit of the organization."
He goes on to say that personal brands can be disruptive to companies, but they more often reflect positively on an organization and contribute to profitability. I can also tell you from experience that the more personal branding you encourage through social media, the easier your job (as social media director) will become. Now, instead of having to create all the content, you have help.
We made a conscious decision at Montana State last year to encourage our coaching staffs to develop personal brands. We had sessions on effective Facebook, Twitter and YouTube usage. As the social media person in the department, I help many of them figure out the best way to promote themselves in addition to what we already do for them. We have links to all our coaches websites, blogs, twitter feeds and Facebook pages on our website.
Schipul's article gives some good suggestions for getting started.
1. "Establish clear policy."
Our administration had always had pretty understandable guidelines about what was acceptable behavior for players, coaches, and staffers, so this became an extension of who we already were. I helped "coach the coaches" occasionally on what was appropriate and also gave them tips and tricks for using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
2. "Conduct an (ongoing) audit. Maintain a data base (or URLs in our case) of people who are creating content and follow them."
This is my job and I get help from another SID who follows his sports as well. We keep an eye on tweets, posts and blogs.
3. "Encourage others to participate in the conversation. Those who are most passionate about a given subject are most likely to create great content that builds buzz."
I encourage the coaches that like to create content. We ask them to re-tweet the department feed and we do a lot of cross-promoting of video on our website and other websites of our staffs. We tweet out new blog posts by coaches and our booster club also cross promotes the content.
Our football staff has a great passion for social media, but they are busy. I take pictures and videos with a Flip camera at spring ball practice and post them on our website as well as on their Facebook page. Ulimtately, this drives a lot of traffic to our website.
4. "Promote them."
Again, we post links (as many do) to all our "private" department websites, twitter feeds, blogs and YouTube channels. Just remember if you are going to promote them, you will have to pay attention to #2.
5. "Keep them in the loop. Think of your internal content creators as influencers who can help deliver your messages."
I email everyone in the department who has a Twitter feed when we have an important news item and ask them to re-tweet. It might be asking a basketball coach to tweet a news item about four All America nordic skiers, but it works.
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In my next blog post, I'll write about the second part of Schipul's article that talks about best practices. I wish the article was online, but this particular one is not.