Reverse mentoring my old boss on social media for his new start-up business

Recently, I connected with my old boss David, who had taken an early retirement package six months ago from the company I work for. Initially, I wanted to meet with him for lunch and share some of my work problems in hopes of gaining a little advice. What I didn’t expect, was that he was seeking my help and had questions about using social media and weather it could help launch his newly created small business doing studio recording.

It felt a little strange, as he had been a leader to me for years, and now he was turning to me for mentoring. First, he described his problem being that his business website was home-spun and lacks luster. Second, was that he wasn’t sure how Facebook or Twitter could do to help gain visibility of future clients to increase business. Lastly, he wanted to promote the artist he works with so that they could be recognized too.

The following were three tips I gave David in hopes of improving his small business through social media:

1. Tweet – More like, get a twitter (twitter.com) account and start using it. Facebook too, can be used as a channel of social media to create updates on current and upcoming events at the studio. Tagging an artist in a post like ‘#XYZ was in the studio and we are making progress’ can give David’s studio visibility to followers of that artist that maybe looking for future studio to record their own material.

2. Blogging software – I suggested that David migrate his home-brewed, static website to a dynamic blogging solution, such as WordPress (WordPress.com). His readers could make comments on postings that could then be tracked for views and create a connection to potential new clients. Other useful features he could utilize are themes, scheduled content management and all-browser compatible source code. These items could greatly improve David’s site appear and the amount of time he is spending on regular updates.

3. Content is king – David needs to be creating frequent posts to his blog on current events or things studio related to build interest for readers to come back. David could keep it interesting with pictures and/or short videos through youtube.com of highlights of his in-studio performances to share with readers. Re-posting artist bios and list major accomplishments would promote his abilities while easily add another posting.

These were just a sampling of suggestions, as by now I could see that David’s mind was full of new ideas ready to move his small business communications strategy forward. This connection could be the start of new chapter in our relationship as a reverse mentoring (http://wp.me/pCS6k-1Mf) or paying a favor back for all the years of learning he gave me.

Tell me what you might suggest to my old boss as ways to improve his social media presence? Have you been in a formal reverse mentoring role before?