Social Media Training Needs - Survey Results

Like many PR firms, at Emanate the transformation to digital is one of our highest priorities. Training is a critical pillar of the transformation. We recently polled the Emanation about their digital training needs, asking them about their use of social media and what they most wanted to learn about.

Usage:  Almost everyone at the Emanation uses social media personally and most use it professionally in some capacity.

Learning: We asked the Emanation what they most wanted to learn about. They prioritzed:
1. Measurement and ROI
2. Law, guidelines and best practice
3. Influencer mapping
4. Socia Media Trends
5. Deep Dive on Facebook
6. Deep Dive on Twitter
7. How to use SM to pitch

It was good to see that the entire Emanation is engaged in social media in some way and interested in learning more about how to make it a more integral part of what we do.

What We Are Doing About It
Our goal is to make digital a seamless part of what we do. To that end we are "skiling-up" the entire Emanation. The aim is for everyone to have at least basic digital skills and many will have deep skills in specialized areas to complement their traditional skills. Very few will be exclusively digital (I am one of them and most of my job is to be a digital coach). This way we avoid creating a digital silo and ensure that we have digital skills that can be deployed seamlessly across the firm where they are needed.

We have three key initiatives to accelerate our digital education.

1. Team Digi: This is an informal team of Emanators from across the whole firm who care passionately about digital. This team are catalysts in accelerating our movement to digital and they are leading the charge in training. They meet every week developing training, sharing learning and working on our digital offering.

2 Training Program: We have an on-going training program and we are adding specific digital modules based on the survey. There is a basic Social Media 101 that is a grounding in the topic. Additionally there are modules around specific strategic areas like best practice and influencer mapping. We will also have deeper skills training for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Anyone can participate in the training. We will be making the materials available publicly so that others can benefit outside the Emanation. Here are the modules we are working on:

• Social Media 101
• Law, Guidelines and Best Practice
• Influencer Mapping
• Measurement & ROI
• Facebook Deep Dive
• Twitter Deep Dive
• Blogger Relations

3. Checkits: As way to share ideas we have created an internal email alias called "checkits". If someone sees a cool digital thing (The Old Spice campaign was one) the email to the "checkit" distribution list. This way we are always sharing ideas and the latest trends. Our weekly Things We Loved posts are a summary of sum of h best of the week's "Checkits"

You can follow our progress on Twitter @EmanatePR.  How is your firm is tackling social media training? Let us know and we promise to share.

Adam Turinas