Why you shouldn’t be paying for a social media certificate

Social media is and has been a rapidly expanding field, from basics like Twitter and Facebook to newer tools like Pinterest. Social media skills are becoming more and more in demand, and so – somewhat naturally, one might suppose – there are classes on social media, consultants (like me) specializing in social media, and last but not least, social media “certificates.”

Several universities and companies – including Harvard University – are offering certification courses on social media, some of these programs costing outrageous amounts of money. Most of these programs take about eight weeks, at the end of which, if you’ve completed all your projects, you will receive a social media certificate.

“Hang on,” you might be thinking. “If social media is such a vital skill, why is it a bad idea to get a certification in it?”

It’s as simple as this: social media, like any other field, requires study, practice, and close examination of social media tools and shifts over a somewhat lengthy period of time. Would you trust an economist who took an eight-week crash course and was certified in economics? What about a nurse who only studied nursing for eight weeks? Of course you wouldn’t – and social media is no different.

Both employers and prospective employees should be skeptical about these so-called “certificates” – social media is a valuable field, and skills in it are increasingly necessary to promote and sustain a business, but the concept of social media certifications seems like a rush to just cash in on it, and feels scammy at best. Social media is a dynamic and consistently expanding field, and it takes much longer than eight weeks to declare yourself a savant.

How, then, do you demonstrate your proficiency in social media? First of all, keep track of your records and impact around the web. I keep a spreadsheet that I update regularly (about once a month) to measure my audiences on social media networks, along with other relevant details like retweets and shares, replies, and so on.

Tools like Klout and Twitter Grader can measure your influence on the web and return a score number to you – the higher, the better (a good Twitter Grader score is anything above 80, and a Klout score above 40 is considered good). MyWebCareer is a somewhat new but invaluable tool to measure your audience, internet footprint, and the overall quality and success of your online profiles. These number scores tend to fluctuate – you will see highs and lows over lengthier periods of time – but if you’re doing your work right, you shouldn’t see a dramatic downward shift at any time.

If you’re looking for something more concrete, Smarterer offers up crowdsourced testing to determine your knowledge of a given area. The downside to Smarterer’s testing is that you can’t retest, but you’ll consistently get updates when new questions are available for tests you’ve previously taken, and the team monitors questions and allows feedback on individual questions, particularly from expert users.

To sum up, all these are tools that you can utilize for free to show an employer your proficiency, as opposed to taking an eight-week certification course and spending inordinate amounts of money on it.

Occupy Wall Street – and why it’s good for your business

Occupy Wall Street has firmly penetrated the American consciousness – and indeed, made a global impression – with its liberal ideals, demands for social justice, and nationwide demonstrations, with some resulting in violence against protesters by the police and other law enforcement agents. It has been called the Vietnam protest of the 21st century, and in many ways, it is similar – a variety of people, with vastly disparate backgrounds and from different age groups, have unified under a common cause and experienced oppression and violence for their audacity in questioning the actions and management of the status quo.

From a business perspective, Occupy Wall Street could actually be an economic boon. Several issues that the Occupy movement addresses, if addressed constructively, can assist our economy in firmly regaining its feet.

One of the biggest issues OWS is attempting to address is income inequality. To dissect that term a little bit, income equality is not about giving everyone the same salary; it’s about equal spending power when it comes to lifestyle. Whether you are a cashier, a janitor, a professor or a CEO, your salary should be enough for you to support a home, the essentials of living (food, clothing, a vehicle, health costs, and so forth), and enjoy a luxury now and again.

People with steady and reasonable income do something very simple that stimulates the economy: they spend. A person who is earning enough to support themselves, with a little left over, is more likely to spend than someone who is barely getting by, or even worse, is homeless or hungry (25% or more of the homeless population in the US is gainfully employed – no joke). No matter what you’re selling, it behooves business owners to take an interest in this issue, if for no other reason that it will help to keep their homes intact and their stomachs fed as well.

Another issue is mounting student debt. A few economists have argued that the rising amount of student debt is actually hurting our economy, for the same reasons that income inequality is hurting it. Students who have just graduated – and students who couldn’t afford to graduate – who have mountains of debt are not going to be spending money. They’re too busy worrying about how they’re going to pay their rent and eat after they make their loan payments each month.

While the ultimate solution to this problem is as of yet unclear, it is an issue that many Occupyers seek to constructively address, and is likewise an economic, if not personal, area of interest to business owners.

Regardless of whether you are a hardcore proponent of social justice or a cautious conservative, Occupy has something for everyone. Supporting responsible economic reform, keeping spending dollars in the pockets of citizens, and ensuring that everyone, from farmers to stockbrokers, has enough – that’s just good business.

The Lean Startup Concept

Everyone knows we’re in a recession, right? Partly for this reason, the concept of the lean startup has spread across the United States and now worldwide, a truly minimalistic approach to business. Eric Ries’ text has reinvented how we think about and conduct business, and as far as I can see, it’s all to the good.

A few of the concepts presented are truly brilliant, and, after discussing the book with a few business colleagues here in Finland, ones I realized that I’ve employed in my own business practices. One is “start fast, fail fast” – minimizing your turnaround time for business plans and concepts. Another is that a successful business doesn’t have to start big; indeed, if a business starts big these days, it seems more likely to fail than a business who starts with the bare minimum of essentials.

Something that has to be recalled, though, is that the concept of the lean startup doesn’t preclude investment per se. In my opinion, it simply calls for smarter and smaller investment – minimalism hard at work. Come up with a concept – a few, in fact – figure out what you want to do, what you need to learn, what you need to operate, and go about obtaining those things with the least amount of time and money possible.

This can apply to classes or consulting you seek out as well. The lean startup concept can apply to teaching your employees what they need to be successful. Let’s say, for example, that a class in web communications tools is available at a local college for the cost of $500. Would you spend $500  - and a whole semester – taking that class, or would you spend $200 and less than a week obtaining the knowledge you need to use these tools successfully? I know where I’d be putting my money.  And that, to me, is what the lean startup is all about – getting what you need most with the least amount of pain.

Of course, the lean startup isn’t all fun and games, either. Founding a lean startup, and evolving it into a lean business, takes a lot of hard work and sometimes very long days. For a lean business, six months to a year turnaround time for delivering a product or service, or testing a business plan – which is standard for most businesses – is too long. Aiming for a much shorter turnaround time, say, one to two months, is ideal. The idea is to work smart instead of necessarily always working hard, and test a concept out to see if it’s profitable within a short period of time.

The lean startup is a relatively new concept, but it is completely revolutionizing the way we think about business by telling us that we don’t have to get thousands or millions of dollars in investments, that we don’t have to spend two or even five years making a business profitable, that by utilizing the tools we have at hand intelligently we can build something out of next to nothing – and that’s the kind of business that I want to serve.

Business in Finland

I’ve been curiously absent for awhile, for one main reason – I spent an extensive amount of time over the last two months preparing to come and take language classes in Finland in preparation for degree study next year in this beautiful, forested nation.

Although Finland’s culture is unique in many ways, one of the things I’ve paid close attention to is how business is conducted in Finland. Finns do not “upsell.” They don’t really “sell” at all. They will say what needs to be said about a product – just the facts – and they will allow the product to sell itself. They figure if you want it, or need it, you will buy it. If you don’t, you won’t.

This confuses some people from western nations, especially Americans, who are very used to being sold to (although plenty of us grump about it, it’s nevertheless sort of a cultural standard in the United States). This way of doing business is very straightforward. The Finns will answer your questions about a product if you have any, but apart from that, they will simply stick to the facts. I am still struck by the fact that when I go into a shop to buy something, I will sometimes be asked if I have a store credit or discount card, but I am never asked if I would like to buy one. This tells me that they respect my intelligence in choosing whether or not I actually want a store credit card. I’m sure I’m not the only one to complain about irritating shop clerks harassing me to open up a new credit card!

Some western Europeans or Americans may find the Finns’ way of doing business rather abrupt, even rude; but it’s important to consider the cultural dynamics at play here. The Finns really like silence; they are so respectful of it that even when you are in a restaurant, you will not have to deal with a waitress or waiter coming up to you when you’ve got a mouthful of food and saying “So how is everything?” They are respecting your personal silence, and this approach carries through to business. They do not like to be harassed in this fashion, and they follow through by extending this same courtesy to people that visit their nation, whether they are selling you a bottle of water or giving a presentation. They get straight to the point, and they won’t waste your time.

As a consultant, I can genuinely appreciate this approach. The modern age moves so fast that an hour is like a blink. Most of us don’t have time to be sold to, and sometimes we don’t even have time to sell. The less time we take to say what really needs to be said about a product or service, the bigger our value – we wind up saving ourselves and our clients or customers valuable time, even if it’s only a few minutes. I think this is something that the Finns are also cognizant of as a culture – that time is short, and the less of it that’s wasted, the better off everyone is.

I think so, too.

Social Media and Customer Service

Everyone uses social media for one reason – to be heard. But who’s listening? In a crowded room where everyone’s talking, sometimes it’s hard to filter out what you should really be paying attention to, and when.

Nevertheless, social media provides business owners with a valuable tool – a way to address customer service without fielding dozens of phone calls or emails. One way to approach this is by asking questions: on your Twitter or Facebook, you could ask your clients (or potential customers) what they’d like to see built, done, addressed or accomplished. Then sit back and wait for the responses to roll in, and use that feedback to ascertain what you should be working on next.

You could even go one step further – hashtagging in Twitter is a much-used but probably underrated tool when it comes to business management. For example, if I were to ask a question of my audience what they’re interested in or what they want to see, I could ask them to reply to my Twitter post with the hashtag #maenadcreative and keep a column in TweetDeck dedicated to that hashtag so I could more neatly organize responses to my queries. Same with Facebook; it’s easy enough to keep track of comments on my own page, but people who have ‘liked’ my page could also tag me using the @ symbol and typing out Maenad’s name to ‘tag’ it.

Social media is great for being heard if you know how to properly utilize it, but it’s not just for broadcasting – it can be great for business management, too.

Social Media and SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a powerful and essential thing in today’s market, and yet it conjures up a misleading image in the minds of most – a complex mesh of code, keywords and internet catchphrases that sounds as if it can never be unraveled.

While SEO isn’t exactly a simplistic process, it is possible to do without spending boatloads of cash. Social media has contributed drastically to boosting SEO for business as well as the individual. What SEO does, without using a ton of complicated terms, is index keywords and web presence to shoot your business to the first page of search engine results.

Why is social media so important to SEO?

The greater your web presence, the higher-profile your business. If you Google my name, for example, the entire first page of results comes up with my modeling portfolio, my LinkedIn, and a bunch of my music sites and profiles. If you Google Maenad Creative, same thing, along with some pages on the Greek myth. But a larger problem is at play here: most people won’t be looking for you specifically. They will be looking for a specific product or service that they want or need, and that’s where social media and a well-written website comes into play.

What every business wants is to offer a product or service that will appear front-page when someone looks for what you’re offering. To that end, you need thorough knowledge of how keyword indexing works (or an employee or contractor who does), of how to appeal to a local audience (for starters, at least), and how to utilize that foundation to expand your business and thus your profits. When I started out in social media, I had a few local fans in my home state of RI for my music projects. Six years later, my fan base has spread all the way down the east coast and across the pond to Europe. Music is a tough field to make a profit in, no doubt, but during that time I’ve gone from paying for my art to seeing my art pay for itself to actually making a profit (something I feel extremely fortunate to be able to experience!).

How long does it take to see an increase in business?

Like they say in philosophy, it’s all relative. Some businesses take longer to see an increase depending on what they are offering, their location, and how well they utilize web tools. Some businesses garner attention very quickly, if they are offering a popular product or a very new and innovative service or product. An increase in business may take as little as a few months; it may take as long as a year or even two. It all depends on the aforementioned factors.

Can you help me with social media and SEO for my business?

I certainly can! If you’re interested in having me boost your web presence and help you with SEO, shoot me an email at muse.en.lystrala@gmail.com and we’ll talk!

Use the past, create the future.

I’ve been working in social media for six years – exactly the same amount of time as I’ve been a professional, independent musician. I initially began exploring the world of social media as a means to promote and market my music, and over time, turned that skill to the tech field.

Social media is ever-evolving, and so are the methods that people use to employ it. Over the course of my career as an independent musician,  I have climbed from a following of a few dozen to more than a thousand across several states and nations – from the US to the UK to the Nordic countries. This journey was incredibly rewarding – and humbling. Social media was the means by which I began booking regular shows as a solo performer, and even by which I was invited to partake in a national event: Electronica4Life, a series of benefit concerts aimed at raising money to save wildlife affected by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

My work with Jack Templin at RI Nexus, which began in early 2010,  presented a unique challenge – employing social media and content coordination to unify RI’s infotech and digital media community. During my first year on board with RI Nexus, I was able to drive a slow but steady increase in traffic to our site. Our Twitter followers has doubled since I came on board with the project, and our Facebook fan base has slowly but steadily increased. We saw increased numbers of attendees to Providence Geeks and other tech and entrepreneurial events, such as RI Nexus Open Coffee.

I worked with Boston-based Smarterer as a temporary contractor to assist them in their content acquisition efforts for their tech-based aptitude testing. When the project had ended, I learned that I had been very key in assisting Smarterer to achieve their content acquisition goals, and I had turned several people on to using the site.

Several years ago, I joined the Bella Morte Street Team in order to assist rock band Bella Morte to receive increased numbers at shows and market their music more effectively. For a year, I captained the team, and with the power of social media, this national headliner saw greater numbers at nearly every show during their national tours.

As an independent musician and contractor, and now as a student of business, I have gained significant experience in business, and uniquely applied it to artistic endeavors. I began casually advising artist friends of mine on how to gain exposure, and over time, I began to give serious business consulting to other musicians, promoters, and artists. Several of these artists have reported increased audiences after meeting with me.

As a musician, I have also contributed my skills to collaborative composition and film scoring. Last year, I worked with Rich Camp on his production of “Gotta Find Barry” on scoring the film. I was thrilled when Rich reported to me that the score was very well-received, and assisted in the success of the film.

I feel astonished that my efforts could contribute to so much success, and humbled as well. This is my goal: to assist tech and creative professionals in achieving similar successes and to create a niche for themselves in which they can thrive.

The digital world and the world of business undergoes constant shifts. My purpose, and my goal,  is to stay atop of the crest of the ever-surging wave of these evolving tools, and use the past to create the future – the future success of small business, startup, and solo initiatives in the tech and creative communities.

Let’s create something together!

What is Maenad Creative?

Maenad Creative is a one-woman consulting company serving the creative professional and technology communities with social media management, content writing, email campaigning, online journalism and blogging in a creative, interactive, and innovative way.

What can I do for you?

In the tech community, I have extensive experience with blogging, social media management, content writing, acquisition, and community management. If you’re a tech or arts company looking for a reliable consultant to spread awareness of your brand and boost sales and audience attention, I can assist you.

My main background lies in the performing arts, specifically in music. As an experienced singer of twenty-two years and an independent musician of six years, I can advise you on launching an arts career and using social media to its fullest to expand your audience and gain exposure. In the past, I have also worked with designers and artists. If you want to gain exposure but aren’t sure how to utilize digital tools to the max to do so, I can help! In addition, I can help you craft an arts resume that reflects the best of your artistic experience and talents.

Musically, I have extensive stage experience and can offer advice on performance and booking. I occasionally teach music in the form of vocal instruction and coaching, and as a classical and electronic composer, I can score your video, film, or interactive art projects.

It’s a rough economy – money matters.

Everyone and every business needs good value for the money they spend. I offer reasonable rates for hourly and per-project consulting – let me know what your needs and budget are, and I will work with you to fulfill your needs at an affordable rate.

Where do we go from here?

If you’re interested in contacting me for a project or consulting, you can email me at muse.en.lystrala@gmail.com. Visit my LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/museofprovidence for information on my experience as well as recommendations.

I look forward to working with you!