Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

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Develop Your Social Business

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

As the practice of social media continues to grow, companies are striving to evolve their operations and incorporate social media on their journey toward becoming a social business.  Just what is a social business you ask?  Not the business practices around societal needs, but the business designs that incorporate new models of intreractive communications using social tools, social media and social networks.  As employees and customers drive the need for open, transparent, realtime interactions, companies struggle to keep up with the demand.

While companies are still trying to understand the new phenomenon of social media, practitioners of social media are trying to understand business.  Many social media practitioners got into the field as it emerged from public relations and corporate communications.  While practictioners understand how social tools work and how to become a conversation evangalist, most do not have the ability to connect social media throughout business in a way that executives understand.

Executives make their mark by executing plans against managed risk better than most.  Sure there is leadership and specialties in finance, managment, marketing, etc but when you boil it down it is still about getting the job done more efficiently with less risk on the behalf of the shareholder.  Then comes social media with the promise to be more connected to customers, be more transparent and have better relationships.  Traditional executives cannot even begin to understand how to put their arms around this.

Everyone gets that people’s expectations are changing in the ways they want to communicate, purchase and relate to companies.  Businesses understand that it’s here and not going away.  There is still a missing translation layer of what companies need to do to meet the changing expectations of customers and employees in a way that is executable and that manages risk.  Thus the desire to design the organizational framework to match the changing needs of individuals, or, designing a social business.

Companies today are simply not set up to be a social business.  They are still designed the same way they were set up in the 1950′s and 60′s where experts hold-on to specialized information and company messages are funnelled through the marketing communications or executive ranks.  Lifting that veil involves a risk tolerance that is simply too high when compared to the benefits.  This post is designed to address the risk side of the equation not the benefit side just yet.

In managing risk across the enterprise, you need to have some staples in place like governance (where the accountabilities lie), escalation procedures, training for employees and purpose that maps back to objectives.  Your systems need to be proven to scale, you need to provide some consistencies in approach across departments and geographies.  Designing a social business is more than simply being conversation evangalists.  To help flesh this out further is our host this week Maria Ogneva (aka @theMaria).  Maria spends her time evangalising the business benefits of integration and social execution for the leading micro-collaboration platform, Yammer.  The discussion this week will cover the following topic and 3 questions:

Topic:  Develop Your Social Business

Q1:  What does it mean to have a social business?

Q2:  List some steps you need to integrate social into existing processes.

Q3:  How do you know when you have a Social Business (as defined before)?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, July 19 at noon ET.  Follow #sm119 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in B2B, corporate, social media | Comments Off

What kind of training / education / experience “qualifies” you to do social strategy?

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

Ninjas, Gurus, Specialists, Experts – how do you hire the right person or develop the right skill set to develop your social strategy, implement it and then manage it long term?  Companies struggle with this very issue when looking to start managing social media.  Those who have attempted to set something up early on mostly went to the person who already used social in some way and put them in charge of strategy, direction, budget and gave them access to senior executives (including sometimes the CEO).  As crazy as it sounds when writing this, it is a reality that I see over and over.  It becomes quickly apparent that social users don’t always make the best business operators.  Another challenge is that every company thinks of social very differently.  It has become a bucket term for everything that is engaging or interactive and therefore difficult to pin down exactly what skills are needed.

First, let’s uncover what we mean by social media.  Social is a transformational way of communicating via digital channels.  Where that fits within the enterprise is subject to the needs, focus and objectives of each company.  This could include:

  • Marketing – both customer facing and internal campaign management, branding, promotion, research, product specific
  • Public Relations – social press release, incorporating rich media, distribution of content
  • Employees – Internal communications, communities of practice, knowledge management
  • Partner / Channel – dialogue with partners, suppliers, channels
  • Service / Support – manage customer issues in the channel of their choice, when they want help
  • Human Resources – recruiting, evaluations
  • IT - managing new tools, architecture to support, integration into legacy systems
  • Innovation – systematic way to incorporate innovation as an asset

Think about the list above and consider all the pieces needed to make any one of those social initiatives successful.  Skills might include:

  • Strategy – strategy development is very different than implementation or delivery
  • Content Development – from tweets, to blogs, to video, audio, imagery – it may all be required for different reasons.  Those who can blog, my not be good at instant tweets or creating compelling videos
  • Training – employees need consistent training and a framework by which to operate and measure performance from
  • Change Management – social communication and engagement is a seismic shift for many companies.  Policies, procedures, culture, expectations all need to be reset across the organization
  • Communicating – some people are good at public speaking, some not.  Some are good on video, some audio, some only written communications. These are all very different skill sets.  Tone is important, empathy and enough corporate knowledge to “speak” credibly.
  • Technical – to sign up for an account, manage a Facebook page, start a blog, incorporate collaboration tools internally, or anything else with social requires some capability to evaluate, choose, implement and run some type of tools

All of these skills are completely different career paths in many cases and require very different capabilities, backgrounds and experiences.  It is unrealistic to expect for one person to be able to truly be good at all of these skill sets.  It is important to understand the goal of your social efforts and the different skill sets required to develop, implement and manage it.  Only at that point can you begin to put together the resources needed to be successful.  To manage the discussion this week is Meg Fowler who is returning to host yet another chat for us.  Her take on the topic is below:

Individuals from a wide variety of educational and experiential backgrounds are taking on roles with social business components (social strategy, community management, managing social campaigns) and within the social business space. As a result, we’re seeing more debate over what actually “qualifies” individuals to take on these roles and tasks, and the ideal background to climb the social business ladder. On the other hand, we’re seeing debate about what skills and experience those in social roles might be lacking — holes that can’t help but have an impact on the success of their initiatives. There are many, many questions swirling around this debate, but we’re going to take on these three specifically today:

Topic: What kind of training / education / experience “qualifies” you to do social strategy?

Q1) If you work in social business / have social components to your job, what aspects of your background come in to play most often, day-to-day — and what types of experiences do you wish you’d had more of to prepare you for your current role?

Q2) Is a facility with social media more a function of temperament, or training?

Q3) If you’re starting a social media initiative in your company, would you tend to hire from within and train someone for the role (with consulting, workshops, conferences, etc.) or hire someone from outside your company with social business experience?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, April 5th at noon ET.  Follow #sm105 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in corporate, Human Resources, social media, twitter | 2 Comments »

Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

The rush is on!  Go to any government conference or read many of the case studies that have been developed and you will see the industry (of the Government) congratulating agencies basically for “trying” social media.  Much like the private sector, government agencies have been diving into social simply by signing up for accounts.  According to a study just released by L2: over 80% of the Government agencies they studied had a presence on each of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  Even with all of those accounts, that same study rated 75% of those same agencies as having a below average or average at best digital IQ and if you try to find any meaningful case studies out of all that activity, you will be looking a long time for very little.

So it’s safe to say that activity does not equal progress when it comes to social media adoption and usefuleness whether you are in the public or private sector.  But before we call all Agencies on the rug, it is important to to recognize some glimmers of brilliance from the study:

  • NASA – is the clear leader of Agencies with innovations in social that include tweetups, the Buzzroom experiment, incorporating social into their websites that drive demonstrable traffic and innovation challenges that drive results.
  • Data.gov & Challenge.gov – both are cross-agency sites designed to aggreagate public sector needs with private sector innovation in an open and relatively transparent way.
  • Armed Forces – have taken to social media for recruiting purposes and have been doing a very good job at it.  Sites like the National Guard have teamed with private sector sites to crowdsource “cool factor” with their Show Us Your Guns campaign.

These glimmers of hope seem to be just that.  Right when it seems an agency is embracing social (TSA Blogs), they slide down the slippery slope into oblivion.  When you start to look at reasons for the lack of effectiveness, one recent survey from the National Assn. of Counties who surveyed their member counties reported that almost 80% said they had no social media policy in place.  While it is not the only reason, it certainly would contribute to a lack of effectiveness in using social media within government.

It seems that what is missing is simple execution.  Like anything new, the technology often gets adopted before the governance is in place which leads to a wide open door to a room full of risk, unlawful activity and plain mis-judgements that stem from an approach that is less about trial and more about error.  The good news from this is these challenges have already been addressed.  Many private sector companies were leaping into the social world led be interns and a rogue IT person and have learned many leassons about privacy, governance, systems integration, managing digital networks and more.  So the real question becomes how to transfer the tribal knowledge that is being accumulated in the private sector and use it to short-cut public sector initiatives.

It was exactly one year ago that we did our first event on how the digital world was impacting the Government.  Being one year later, we thought it would be interesting to see how far this conversation has come.  Who else is bring this conversation into the spotlight other than John Moore.  John brings an innovator’s mindset with the battlescars to prove his experience.  He has many accolades including founding and running The Lab for all things Gov2.0.   For this week’s event, the topic and questions are:

Topic:  Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Q1:  What is “Open Gov” or “Gov2.0”?

Q2:  How can business work with Local/State Gov in social?

Q3:  What do social businesses need to know to work with Government? 

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 30 at noon ET.  Follow #sm88 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in social media | 1 Comment »

Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Like hormone crazed teenagers day dreaming in class, Brands are very similar.  We fantasize about creating advocates, yet when we we get them, we’re not quite sure what to do with them.

Everyone has an opinion on brand advocates, how to get them, how to activate them, etc (all good stuff by the way).  Most of the discussion is about getting advocates to do things though.  Get them to write another product review, blog about us and retweet our promo.  If I was your brand advocate, I would need a vacation for sure.

So give them one.  I don’t mean airplane tickets, hotels and coconut drinks on the beach.  Just a simple vacation from doing all your work for you.  Figure out what to do for them.  What could you do for a “friend” of the company that you just do because you like them, not because you expect anything from them? 

Most companies build extensive sytems to manage brand messaging, create brand loyalty through rewards and messaging but you have to do something before you get the benefit.  What if I just got a promotion and started traveling.  I take four trips in four weeks and my typical pattern is four trips over the course of a year.  There should be triggers going off everywhere that are simply meant to create a great experience from my brand.  I may not be at the “Gold” level but if there is a suite that’s available for my stay, give it to me.  The good will business that comes from it is unmatched.  Advocates are created over time with brands that have a strong reputation with me.

A Brand’s reputation is shaped as a cumulative feeling across EVERY personal experience I have with that Brand whether receiving my bill, using the product, calling customer service or seeing an advertisement on TV.

If that’s true, a Brand manager simply needs to create more experiences faster than the customer will create for themselves on their own time.  Instead of sending over a coupon, send a box of your new product to their door to try out.  Leave a bottle of wine on their pillow when they were expecting the bottle of water that everyone else gets.  Instead of focusing on what you can get your advocates to do for you, try spending some time coming up with ideas of things you can do for your advocates…just because.

Brands spend a lot of creative talent on getting consumers to “Like” them yet once they do, companies are not set up to continue to manage the relationship.  With that, our event for this week being moderated for the first time by, what I would consider, an advocate of #socialmedia.  We met Chris Kieff as a regular contributor on our events and now he is moderating his own.  With a great perspective and tons of experience, we are excited to have Chris lead this next event.  The topic and questions will be:

Topic: Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Q1: What is the best way to find advocates in social media?

Q2: Now that we’ve identified advocates, how do you build relationships with them?

Q3: How do you enable them to carry your message virally? 

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 16 at noon ET.  Follow #sm86 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in Branding, Listening, social media | Comments Off

Building Your Reputation Using Social Media

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

The three most important components of who you are: reputation, reputation, reputation.

The social media industry spends a lot of time talking about the brand.  Whether it’s your corporate brand or your personal brand everyone has an opinion of how to market yourself.  That’s what it is afterall is marketing.  The branding police come in and say the product will conjure images of…..”being a kid again” or “going to the county fair” or (you get the pictures).  What happens after you buy the product and decide the packaging is hard to open or that it really doesn’t perform as advertised?  Well, they make television shows for that (PitchMen).   The same goes for your personal brand.  how many times have you “heard” about the accomplishments of someone then when you actually work with them only images of SnakeOil come to mind.  Once you “out” the product or the person, you will not use them again no matter how good the markting message is for them.

I have a hard time with spending so much time on your “Brand” for that reason.  All of it is glossy brochure-ware unless you can actually do something.  My preference is to push people and/or client’s brands to focus on their reputation.  Autos are a good example of what I mean, you don’t buy a Lamborghini for comfort and you don’t buy a Lexus to go fast.  Both are remarkable cars in their own right however the Lambo’s reputation is built around speed and the lexus around comfort.  That’s what you get when you buy them irrespective of whatever kind of marketing stuff they put in front of you. 

I pulled a couple of thoughts on personal reputation from the website Brand-Yourself (horrible name, I know).  They defined your reputation as this:

It’s the iconic who, what, why and how principle.
It’s developing, celebrating and using that internal and external persona, that is already there and a part of our DNA!

Who are you?
What do you stand for?
Why should you serve?
How can you better the community that supports you and the world you live in?

Who you are is the combination of your external appearance or image and your internal essence.
Whenever you are out professionally, make sure you are dressed appropriately and groomed. People do notice the fine points and that can say a lot about you. Ask any professional etiquette coach about how important style, flair and appropriateness is in making a first impression!

What you stand for is about your values, attitudes, demeanor and how you express your unique qualities.
Show people that and they will make a connection with you because we all look for those commonalities in our relationships with others. Kindness, sense of humor, integrity, generosity, creativity, caring all speak volumes about you to others.

Why you serve is how you want to be remembered.
Whatever causes or social leadership you are passionate about will not only drive and motivate you naturally but draw people to you. Step up, volunteer, join a cause, initiate an action, support one that needs some help.

So what does all this mean?  It means that it doesn’t matter if you have 3,ooo followers or 300,000 if you can’t articulate your strategy for a client.  It means, if you can’t legitimately help a client then refer them to someone who can.  It’s substance over talk, results over industry stats.  Our moderator this week knows alot about reputation as she has one of the best in the public relations industry.  Kami Watson Husye is the president and COO of Zoetica Media.  Kami is well respected for her work and her missions and will lead our discussion around managing your reputation.  The topic and questions this week are:

Topic: Building Your Reputation Using Social Media

Q1:  Is reputation more important than a “personal brand” in #socialmedia?

Q2:  Be it a personal or professional crisis, what is your plan for handling a negative backlash in #socialmedia?

Q3:  How do you scale online success for an organization or individual as your reputation grows?

This chat will take place on Tuesday August 24, 2010 at 12 noon eastern.  Follow #sm74 from any Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The event will start at noon with the first question and Kami will move to the next question every 20 minutes for an hour. 

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Posted in Branding, social media | 3 Comments »

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I enjoy hearing about companies having success with social media and I am certainly intrigued in understanding how they got there.  After researching dozens of case studies (as many as I have been able to get my hands on) one theme rings through.  Most of these companies have had success with little more than a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, not usually very sustainable or repeatable though. 

Then you hear about all the companies developing their social media strategies.  This becomes the plan behind a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, yet not very successful usually.  Why is this?  For one, the conversation usually starts with “We need a blog!”.  The boss needs to be able to cover their trail, so they require a strategy to go along with it.  The team creates a strategy full of love and happiness, the boss has no clue what it means and three (3) days later…violla!  The blog is in place.

The point of this (yes there is a point after all), is that no where in here did anyone tie a social strategy into a business objective.  You don’t hear much around “we created x number of new sales or x reduction in costs because of our social media strategy”.

Having a social policy or code of conduct for how employees should represent the company (both internally and externally) is needed.  Having some thought around governance and a crisis plan is certainly good measure.  However developing a social strategy that does not tie back to meeting some corporate objective is simply a waste of time.  Instead, create a business strategy that includes social media to help solve a problem faster, better, cheaper (assuming that it will). 

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what you want to call your efforts.  Call it a social media strategy, call it a business strategy or call it a Bazinga!  Whatever you call it, it has to tie back to some real value to the business.  To ensure that we do tie it back to the business, our host this week is B.L. Ochman.  B.L. is a 2nd time moderator for us (#sm45) and is recognized for her contributions to this industry.  For the chat she will cover the following topic and questions: 

Topic: Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Q1:  Should you create separate social media strategies or business strategies?

Q2:  How do you budget for social?

Q3:  Do you train staff for social or hire for it?

 

The chat will take place Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 12 noon eastern.  Follow along by monitoring #sm71 from your favorite Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page (www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live).  The chat will begin at noon as B.L. tweets the first question and the conversation will start.  Then at 12:20, the next question is asked and 12:40 the final question.  The conversation is fast-paced and full of helpful insights from the people who are blazing the trails in this industry.

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Posted in corporate, ROI in Social Media, social media | Comments Off

Buiding our own Frankenstein: Is engaging with customers via social media required, or optional?

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Social media is the greatest boon for business since, well, the cash register right?  I mean just log onto twitter and grab some Facebook love and sit back, watch the customers start lining up and make sure your cash register is full of change.  It’s that easy.

Listen to a few “experts” and they make it sound that easy.  Some agencies focus on creating Facebook pages, widgets and applications and sell it to everyone who will buy it.  Just change the colors and voila!

The fact is that social media is not the savior for everyone.  Social media is not the silver bullet, the people behind it are.  Some companies will be poised to take advantage of new forms of engagement and new ways of interacting with customers, suppliers and employees.  Then again, some won’t.

Just having a tool will not make you successful, the purpose, strategy and planning you do first might.  The way you integrate it into the entire campaign or initiative might.  Having a clean user experience may make poor tools perform better.  Even as simple as configuring the tools to support the initiative and not using the tool to define it.  Understanding the science of networks, the phsychology of why people participate and making that work for you and not against you is another way to make your social initiative stand out.  Once again, it’s not the tools, it’s the heft of the planning and purpose behind them.

Some companies have figured out how to make television work and some are still trying to figure it out after 60+ years.  For some companies, radio works great and is less expensive than alternatives.  Your business cannot be forced to go social, it has to be ready for it.

So how do you know if your company is ready to go social and what do you use first?  This week’s host of the 70th edition of #socialmedia chat will help us explore just that.  Jay Baer has been weeding out the social media overgrowth for a long time and has ben helping companies figure out their right marketing mix for more than a decade.  This week’s topic is:

Topic:  Buiding our own Frankenstein: Is engaging with customers via social media required, or optional?

Q1: What are the circumstances when a company should NOT engage with customers via social media?

Q2: What are the organizational drawbacks to engaging with customers in this way?

Q3: How should companies modify their interactions, based on individual customers’ influence (if at all)?

Join in the discussion Tuesday 7/27 at noon eastern by following #sm70 from any twitter client or simply goto our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in corporate, social media | 3 Comments »

Weaving Social Throughout Your Organization

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Companies are challenged to grow in uncertain times and to do more with fewer resources. There is a continuous need to explore new systems and methodologies to help your employees work smarter internally and engage external resources who will advocate more often with less incentive. As a result, organizations are turning to the promise of new web based technologies.  As our moderator, Adam Cohen puts it:

“Social media is changing the game, providing new touchpoints, technologies and techniques for businesses to build, maintain and encourage relationships with customers.  But social media tactics and tools alone will be limited in their business impact.  When combining social media with other interactive marketing practices, the results can magnify both.  In other words, social media integrated with other forms of marketing is greater than the sum of the parts.”

So what are the parts and how does the sum equal more than the parts themselves? 

Social media should not stand alone and “being social” does not change your objectives.  Being social merely changes your approach to achieve those goals whether internal or external focused.  When used as part of your digital ecosystem, the results can be significantly more valuable.  Consider the following areas:

  • CRM + Social – although we discuss it quite a bit, the market is still not at a point general adoption.  Social CRM provides an opportunity to know more about your customer’s frame of mind at the time and better understand life events that may affect purchase decisions.
  • Search Engine Optimization – most companies have paid and organic search strategies.  If your site does not optimize for what customers are asking for then your your competitors will enjoy more organic result while you will end up paying dearly for your web search traffic.  As social typically creates a wealth of fresh content (of which gets spidered by the engines quickly), you can focus the topics of your content to better effect organic results that your prospects are using at the time.
  • Content Management – Ask this wealth of content is developed, you are creating a corporate asset.  If you are a global company or run across an enterprise, there is a lot of value to making those assets reusable across campaigns, countries, departments, etc.
  • Mobile - find companies where they are, when they are there and in the way they want to be found.
  • e-Commerce – Imagine going to Best Buy site, searching for TVs and your friends from Facebook populate the TV screens.  You would be more apt to take notice and spend time.
  • Website-optimization – Imagine once again that the first set of comments on that TV are that of your friends who have purchased that same TV.

This does not even mention customer service, marketing, advertising and running campaigns.  To cover this topic in more depth is Adam Cohen.  Adam is a partner at digital agency Rosetta.  He will tackle one of the bigger issues that we have had on this chat and is more than capable of doing so.  The topic and questions this week will be:

Topic: Weaving Social Throughout Your Digital Marketing

Q1) How should marketers approach weaving social media tactics into their marketing arsenal?
Q2) Why does blending social media improve the effectiveness of other tactics?
Q3) Which tactics have the most impact when combined with social media? (Think both digital and traditional)

Be sure to follow the conversation this Tuesday 7/20 at noon EST by tracking the #SM69 tag on Twitter or visit our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com.

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Posted in corporate, Mobile, Public Relations, SEO, social media, SocialCRM | 4 Comments »

How to Get Measureable Results From Your Facebook Presence

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

When it comes to social networks, Facebook is certainly the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  For this reason, Facebook is (or at least needs to be) a staple in most every company’s social media strategies.  While there are other social networks out there, none hold the attention or capture the market share of consumers especially in the US market.  In fact, here are a few stats from the Facebook stats page:

People on Facebook
  • More than 400 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
  • There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
  • Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
  • More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

As a marketer Facebook is one of those places you have to be in order to interact and engage with your customers and also as a way to be seen as relevant and impactful.  A marketer without a meaningful presence on Facebook for their company will not last long in that position.  Therein lies one of this era’s greatest challenges, making your Facebook presence work for you and not against you.  Anyone with 20 minutes can throw up a corporate page on Facebook and call it a presence.  Like anything else though, it pays to spend the time and resources to make your presence work for you. 

One of the key things to remember when considering your Facebook presence is how it will fit into your overall digital marketing strategy and what it will accomplish as part of it.  What are some other key take-aways you ask?  We decided to bring in the queen of Facebook marketing to help us answer that question.  Mari Smith will be hosting this week’s chat on the topic.  The coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, Mari brings a wealth of practical experience to us.  The topic and questions will be:

Topic: How to Get Measureable Results From Your Facebook Presence

Q1:   How do you gain momentum with a Facebook fan page?

Q2:   What should you be measuring on Facebook?

Q3:   How do you scale Facebook engagement?

Join us for this week’s chat Tuesday 7/6 at noon eastern.  To participate follow #sm67 from your favorite Twitter client or simply follow along from our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in ROI in Social Media, social media | Comments Off

Quick & Legal: How to Make Social Media Less Scary for the Legal Dept

Monday, May 24th, 2010

There’s a saying in software development that customers want to get their projects done:

Cheap, Fast and Good.

The typical IT joke is that you can have 2 but not all 3.  I have a feeling that’s where the legal department’s position is with the other departments who are deploying social and have a need to engage with their customers.  Where the CEO ideally wants the response to happen Quickly & Legally.  The joke here is that Legal departments say “Quick” OR ”Legal” but not both.  There have been a couple of big brands on the wrong end of that joke lately and therein lies the importance of incorporating the legal department as a founding partner of your social efforts in the beginning rather than trying to “bolt” them on afterwards.

To be fair, there are a lot of reasons that the Legal department should be a significant partner in your efforts.  This deck from Daliah Saper does a solid job identifying all the reasons that mitigating risk in social is important.  Here are just a few:

  • Privacy Laws – Like HIPPA in medical
  • Negligence – in assuming a duty and not following  through on it
  • Trademark – confusing a consumer about your Brand and it’s use
  • Copyright – using/sharing something that’s not yours
  • Discrimination – especially when used in the hiring process & checking up on current employees

The marketing reality though is that Brands simply don’t control their messaging the same way in which they used to.  Responses to outcries from promoters and detractors alike that are measured in days or worse yet weeks is simply unacceptable today.  Speed is of the essence and customers just want to hear the truth.  That puts legal departments, who are in place today to mitigate risk, in a precarious position.  Where their primary job is reviewing the actions of employees it typically takes longer to get tasks completed.  Much of the time now executives who take the time to run through legal are actually opening themselves and their companies up to increased risk of being perceived as non-responsive and contrived (or not authentic).  The damage from being too slow can sometimes be more than acting quickly and genuinely.

What are companies to do?  Our moderator this week, Lucretia Pruitt, has been working on answering this question as well.  A veteran of the digital space, she has had her share of run-ins with the legal debate and has agreed to help all of us work through this.  Following in our tradition of 3 questions spaced 20 mins apart, Lucretia will lead the chat starting at noon eastern with the following questions:

Topic: Quick & Legal: How to Make Social Media Less Scary for the Legal Dept

Q1: How can big companies advocate for less regulation to reflect realities of social media engagement?

Q2: Should you train legal in SM and what does it look like?

Q3: How do you create SM policies/strategies that legal will accept?

We invite you to join in the conversation to share or learn or both!  Follow along by using #sm61 on your favorite Twitter client or simply follow along on our LIVE page.

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