In the last 2 years, social media and social networking has transformed how individual service providers – such as executive recruiters (me), lawyers, CPAs, dentists, executive coaches, benefit consultants, bankers, strategic planning consultants, and Vistage/TEC Chairs – to name just a few – have dramatically leveraged their networks and generated an abundance of business leads and opportunities.

The Executive Search recruiting business Brad and I manage is a prime example of the leverage/power of social media and networking. Our business is dramatically different today than it was 2 years ago – both in terms of how we engage with clients and how we find candidates. Our customer service level is dramatically higher through some of these tools, our costs are lower, and our speed in providing candidates has increased substantially – all through leveraging the tools of social media and social networking.

As a Chair, you can apply many of the best practices that individual consultants and coaches use in social media and social networking to advance and improve their success.

e-Course Vision/Objective:

The goal of this e-Course is to give you as a Chair a structure or framework for using social media to find and acquire new members. The e-Course has both short-term tactics (such as advanced searching on LinkedIn) to find potential leads immediately and longer term tactics (such as blogging) to build a local reputation and act as a magnet to attract the interest of CEOs.

At the end of 60 days, you should have all the tools necessary to embark upon a systematic and structured path of investing 15-30 minutes a day on social media activities that should within 90 days of completing the e-Course - you'll begin to develop a pipeline of an abundance of warm-to-hot leads and referrals for prospective members.

There's a caveat to this claim: You've got to implement ALL the lessons and be willing to invest 15-30 minutes on average every day to grow, nurture, and build your social media brand and reputation.

Effective use of social media and social networking is still at an early adopter phase. It will probably be 3-4 years before we see widespread and common use of social media tools/activities/sites among CEOs. This e-Course is intended to put you way ahead of the curve so that as your CEO prospects begin to accept and use social media, you're presence will be established and powerful.

The e-Course will begin with a few core tools you'll need for organization and tracking content and information you collect now and in the future - particularly information you would like to share with your network. We'll then move onto how to leverage and turbo-charge your use of LinkedIn. After we finish with LinkedIn, we'll talk about using Twitter. We'll move into the later part of our e-course with talking about marketing using drip nurturing (remember Jim Cecil?) and blogging to establish your brand/credibility/reputation. We'll come to a close with a few additional tools for leveraging your time in social media. Finally, we'll wrap it up with a proactive social media plan, and some tracking tools to gauge whether your getting a return on your social media time investment.

We're going to immerse ourselves in using social media through the delivery of content in this e-course. All the lessons will be delivered through this blog. Our discussion forum will be the LinkedIn Chair Discussion Group I moderate. We'll actively learn to use social media by working through it "real-time" in this e-Course.

How will the e-Course be delivered?

Every two days a new Lesson will be available. There are 30 Lessons which will be delivered every other day over a 60 day period. You will automatically be able to view the new Lesson 48 hours after the previous Lesson. You can view each Lesson as a Page on our Chair Blog at http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/vistagechairs

I'll broadcast an email note to the e-Course participants as each new Lesson becomes available as a reminder - both as a traditional email and through your LinkedIn Account.

Hover over the menu item titled "e-Course" right under the IMPACT Hiring Solutions logo/header and you'll see each new lesson as it becomes available. You'll also have access to all the previous Lessons. I will occasionally add a blog article to supplement the e-Course Lessons. I will also provide a variety of downloads, audio, and hopefully some video content that will enhance our e-Course.

Lesson 1 Overview

A. Using SaaS (Software as a Service) tools to create an infrastructure for productivity as you start to use social media sites and tools. These include such tools/sites as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Evernote, Hootsuite, and Licorize to name a few.

B. Establishing the philosophy/framework for why a Chair should invest their time in using social media to find, attract, nurture, and engage with potential CEO members.

You’ve been hearing the drums beating loudly that everyone should be using social media – but the big question is: Can it be a more effective “channel” for finding and engaging with potential CEOs that the traditional models of cold calling, telemarketing, email blasts, and random networking?

I plan to demonstrate through this e-course the tremendous leverage, reach, impact, and productivity that can provide value to a Chair through “simple” use of social media and social networking.

NOTE: As you register for various social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious – I recommend using the same “branded name”. This is name by which others will find you and see all your content and information grouped together in google or other searches.

I would like to recommend you use your personal name as your account name, such as “Mark_Taylor” or “MarkTaylor”. I choose a slightly different approach since there was already a cartoonist named Barry Deutsch. I chose as my branded name Barry_AT_IMPACT and that’s the one I use in most situations (except I couldn’t use it on Delicious so I used a variation of that name). You could also use a more generic name to describe your services, such as “NYC_CEO_COACH” or “Vistage_Chair_Atlanta”. The key point is to use one common branded name everywhere.