Practical Social Media Tips

Talk the walk

Walk and chew blog at the same time! Photo by James Cridland.

Does your whizz-bang new mobile (cell) phone have a built-in or downloadable dictaphone?

If it does, you may be able to blog without blogging.

Simply dictate short posts when you’re doing anything that may interest your staff, clients, suppliers or other ‘watchers’.

Then, get a keen youngster to transcribe them verbatim for a few coppers.

You can then whack these blog posts into shape yourself, or send them to me for optimisation.

Dictating on the run means you don’t have to find time to sit down and write from scratch.

It also adds an immediacy to content that readers find attractive and refreshing.

Imagine you run a foundry. One day, your metallurgist reports that a batch of casts is failing quality checks.

You hurry into the hot, dusty space, cursing into your dictaphone. Within minutes, your expert eye tells you the resin isn’t binding the sand cores as it should.

You press ‘record’ and rattle off your diagnosis and plan of action.

Then you email the sound file to your scribe.

Before day’s end, you have a blog post that:

1. Alerts management and staff across your organisation so they can swing into action.
2. Makes your resin supplier leap out of their skin to rectify the problem in record time.
3. Explains to customers that a batch may be delayed (because you refuse to send imperfect products). 
4. Enthralls and educates students (i.e. future staff) and other parties interested in the cut and thrust of your products, processes and industry.

That’s what I call multi-tasking.

If your phone can’t do this, you may wish to invest in a dictaphone.

Let us know how you get on!