Eric Ungs

Posted by Eric Ungs

The importance of understanding your purpose for involving your brand within each social network.

What value will your community gain from your presence. These questions must be addressed before diving into a social networking platform, or at least start with an idea and evolve it. Each platform may serve a different purpose, in most cases it does. Different people use different mediums; before diving in you need to distinguish who is where and strategize accordingly.

In most cases this is a trial and error process. If you’re not creating any type of community maybe you are seeking or approaching the wrong relationships. This is where your patience is tested, building and gaining trust to mold your tribe takes time, let it develop.

I am the voice of the Twitter handle and Facebook fan page for the Arthritis Foundation Iowa Chapter. These two different networks reach two different audiences. Through ‘trial and error’ I have found that the community I have created on Facebook doesn’t reside on Twitter, so I had to rework my Twitter strategy accordingly. I am taking the approach for my Twitter handle of building a community around other non profits, organizations, and businesses within the state. This is taking more of a professional relationship approach, partnership if you will. I also reach out to the national advocates who have strong voices for Arthritis education and funding. Building these types of relationships may/will become beneficial for future opportunities.

My Facebook presence serves as a coffee shop.

It’s a place for those whom are ‘around’ arthritis to come and chat; share stories, give advice, and mostly, to be a support system to those who live with the disease. This is also where I share scheduled events and fundraising efforts. I must add that I do have my Facebook automatically feed into my Twitter. I feel the information I provide on Facebook brings an even more authentic and genuine approach to my Twitter handle. I don’t, however, feed by Twitter to my Facebook status updates, but is viewable from the fan page. Automatic Twitter to Facebook usually doesn’t fly with the Facebook crowd because they’re feed becomes over-saturated. Your status pushes others down, more is missed. It’s crucial to find the line in the sand to know when your updates have become inconvenient, and hate to say it, annoying. Thus resulting in unfanning, unfollowing, or even hiding your status updates. You have failed in developing this relationship.

The point is…

When you’ve decided to explore different platforms you need to know why you’re there and to whom you’re wanting to connect with. If you have these answered before hand your navigation is much clearer, you’re able to set goals and define a strategy.

So what are you waiting for… mingle.

Photo source: martin.canchola

Posted by Eric Ungs

As I am reading Linchpin by Seth Godin, he discusses emotional labor versus physical labor. Briefly; physical labor is the type that causes fatigue, it’s work, hard work that someone of authority has told you to do. Emotional labor is something that is not generally on your day-to-day checklist. It’s a type of personal uniqueness that makes it hard to replicate; your smile, generosity, passion, caring, sincerity, etc.

The top of your company’s totem pole consists of the owners, executives, and managers. These are the folks innovating, implementing, creating, enforcing policy, and ultimately setting your daily agenda of things do to. At the top of the totem pole you are able to see far and wide of the beautiful scenery, but as you start to slide down, its breathtaking view starts to become non-existent, so does your humanity, your voice.

Why is it that at the bottom of the corporate ladder you have NO voice?

It’s assumed that the less you make the quieter the voice. In most cases, this assumption is true, but why? Isn’t the bottom of the totem pole generally the first thing to come in sight considering it’s at eye level? The same holds true for most organizations. The bottom of the ladder being the first, last, and most times, the only contact with the customer. But yet organizations have them abiding by a set of rules on how you should say this and when. Let them create their own voice. Let them use their emotional labor that they share outside of the workplace that has them being liked and loved by so many people. Let them showcase what defines them as a human. This type of interaction is contagious and soon the customer, manager, and your colleagues will catch it. It’s called creating a human relationship. Humanize the workplace instead of always having to read off of a transcript that the consumer has heard a million times before.

Does your organization allow those in contact with the customer have their own voice?

Posted by Eric Ungs

At the end of each week I will share with you the interesting things I came across through my “e’s Week in Review” post. It could be anything; blog posts, tech products, new apps., quotes, etc. If you have found any interesting tidbits or news, please share in the comments below, I’d love to hear about them.

When you have the enthusiasm and the passion, you end up figuring how to excel. — Deena Kastor, U.S. Olympic Marathoner

1.) Brazen Careerist: I finally decided to see what Brazen Careerist was all about and I am glad I did. There are tons of very useful and compelling content. It’s very simple to navigate with its clean design, and finding connections is a breeze. You can either import those from your other networks, start reading and fanning, or, most importantly, join the networks that best match your interests or purpose.

2.) Blogcast FM: Is a podcast by bloggers for bloggers. It was originally a weekly podcast series called ‘up and coming bloggers’, it then took a life of its own. There are tons of great interviews in here to really get your heart pumping in wanting to leverage the opportunities that lie within this space. It paints you a nice picture that all bloggers started out essentially in the same place, making it a litter easier to step out of your comfort zone. I enjoy listening because it keeps my motivation always lit.

e’s Weekly Read:
“Linchpin – Are You Indispensable?” by Seth Godin