Tweeting for your business? You have a personal Twitter account and you’re wondering ‘Should I use that?’

People that run Twitter accounts on behalf of brands often use their own usernames. Or a combination of both, like the pioneering RichardatDell, who was one of the first people worldwide to start using Twitter for his job.

Why do people take the personal approach? It is simply easier to engage with others as another person.

Also, there’s a deep psychological need in most of us to unite our different ’selves’ if possible. To present to the world all we are. And if you are happy in your work, if your work is an expression of who you are as a person, you’re likely to be more inclined to combine your work and personal Tweets.

Being yourself on Twitter is easy (you don’t have to think too much) and has the added benefit of showing you as a more rounded, more real person.

Mixing business and pleasure

But what if you move jobs?

Unlike many other online services (email, IM, etc), you can actually change your Twitter username and even your Twitter name. So you can use one account and adjust the name as you move between jobs.

What about the arguments that say you should have more than one Twitter account? One account for your professional and one for your personal life? Perhaps. We all have many different sides to our lives.

At one of our training courses, I met a marketing manager for a cosmetics brand who, in her spare time, ran a Twitter service dispensing sexual advice and tips. For her, having two separate accounts made absolute sense.

Luckily tools like Hootsuite now make it easy to manage many accounts (including Facebook & LinkedIn) at the same time. This is quite handy.

For me, Twitter is a firehose for all I have to say on media, South African politics and everything else. I’m on the wrong end of 30 and rarely do stupidly embarrassing stuff these days, so it’s ok. But still, Hootsuite allows me to direct more personal messages to Facebook, hard core business ones to LinkedIn.

Sorted.

There’s a number of companies out there providing social media training, like here, here and here. All these courses differ in some respects. Some of them look promising too.

So why are we starting a social media training course? We’ve been asked about social media, a lot.

Meet The Media Guru | Cory Doctorow by *Meet the Media Guru*

We’ve developed social media strategies for the World Economic Forum. We’ve given talks and training at Ketchum PR, Kroll, the Salzburg Global Seminar and Open Road PR. And recently we’ve been asked to give meta training – training at a company that does training.

Not long ago we wrote a blog post about new roles in communications. Social media will not only change marketing practise, it will impact the very structure of your business and organisation.

We have something unique to offer, which is a little different from all the above said courses. And what is that?

Strategic

We have a deep understanding of the historical trajectory of media change. Or put another way: we’re in the midst of the democratisation of media. Who knows where it will end?

Only knowing one tool like Twitter won’t help you spot a new one like Foursquare. We’ll impart to you the principles that will help you navigate and anticipate what might happen next.

We’re into creative practise

Don’t confuse that with zany or brooding. We’ll help you think outside the box, but deliver practical solutions.
What is a good example of digital creativity? Matt Cutts of Google explains in this video how you can get your website seen and linked to by spending only $100. That’s geeky and useful creativity for you.

In short, we think our courses will enable anybody with a passion for communication and an open mind to explore social media for themselves in a focused way.

When creating our course we looked carefully at what is out there already.
As a result we ended up creating three courses:

1. One course is social media for PR people. Of the old media marketing configuration (PR, Advertising,…) we think public relations is best placed to do social media. In our experience many PR practitioners lack insights about why social media works and how to actually do it.
2. One is social media training for leaders, like CEOs and Entrepreneurs. This is a strategic course about how best to manage social media in a world where everybody is a media outlet.
3. And then we have a hands-on practical in-house social media course. Because ultimately Social Media is best done by organisations themselves.

We welcome any feedback on these courses and anticipate adapting them over time.

Media is changing. Organisations and business are looking for Social Media expertise.

We think that public relations companies should – in theory at least – be best placed to serve this need in the short term. But they are not doing so yet. Partly because there is a lack of understanding. Partly because of a lack of practical experience.

And in the longer term companies are best placed to do social media for themselves.

To address this state of affairs RAAK has developed three courses -

:: We have a Social Media course specifically tailored at the PR industry to give public relations professionals the tools to raise awareness and engage on behalf of their clients.

:: There’s a more strategic course for executives that helps them to decide what to about social Social Media with respect to their organisation, but also contains some practical elements for them to raise their profile (Executive visibility) using social media.

:: And there’s a very hands-on course that teaches the ins and outs of how to ‘do’ Social Media on a daily basis inside an organisation.

Find out more on our dedicated Social Media training page.

Since fellow RAAKonteur Wessel wrote his post about PR, advertising and the new roles in communication, and David Meerman Scott’s penned his thought-provoking Is it time for companies to hire a Social Media Administrator, we can now officially add social media administrating to the list of services we offer.

And not just in one way. In two.

In a previous life, we built a website, blog and e-commerce solution for WHERE, a new and exciting (ethical) fashion brand. And last week they asked us to advice them on an ongoing basis on how to use the right social media tools.

Good on them. Good for us.

So now we make sure they have access to the right tools, use them well and that their website is in great SEO shape. We also double-check their blog posts and tweets if needed. And listen for them. That all makes it easy for them to be up-to-date, found and be part of the conversation.

But as with most new things, it was a particularly interesting exercise in how to quantify this service, a problem that was also mentioned in Jason Falls’ very decent blogpost about the culture clash between Social Media and Ad agencies and in Jay Bear’s comments on that post.

It’s not that straightforward to bill or staff for.

Because Social Media is about knowing the brand through-and-through-and-through. And through.

And, ideally, about being part of a brand 24/7, because your crowd doesn’t stop talking about you. Which means that even reacting quickly to a crisis can be a bit late – as Domino’s Pizza recently discovered.

Thirdly, it works best when you have the power to make day-to-day decisions without having to go through layers of sign-off procedures.

Based on those thoughts, I can see two models working:
1. A retainer model (we prefer to call it the ‘plug-in‘ model) where you’re really close to the brand (or the organisation) and you guide them on a day-to-day basis. This is more suitable for small to medium-sized companies, who can’t afford to hire a full-time person and trust you to do what is needed.
Will this be easily scalable when the brand becomes bigger? Possibly not. Option 2 might then make more sense.

2. A training model, which aims not only at consulting, but also at teaching key people at various levels. Those key people could be CEO’s as well as Brand & Product Managers. It could be someone from the Marketing department, a customer service rep or even a developer. Anyone who’s into and understands the medium and is keen to take on the role of ‘Social Media Administrator’.

Importantly, this training course should not only be on a strategic level, because Social Media is about ‘doing’ it. In other words, how you write a blogpost, what keywords you use, how to craft a Tweet, how to produce good audio for video. The list goes on.

For now, we use option 1 for WHERE. And we’re currently developing option 2 into a workshop about ‘Social Media in PR’, about which we’ll write some more soon.

Exciting times! And we’ll see if these options still stand in a year’s time. Or even in a few months.