Posts Tagged ‘corporate’

Fear and Loathing in Content Creation

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Content is moving through a maturity of sorts within the enterprise.  Talking with a few colleagues some noticed that companies were putting out more content, some noticed that some companies placed less of a focus on content and I have yet to notice any sizable advances in companies developing relevant content (content specific to me when I need it and on the device I where I want it).

 On the surface there seems to be a dichotomy in how companies are utilizing content.  It doesn’t seem possible that companies are actually producing less content today than before.  What we found was that companies were blogging less which made it seem like they were de-emphasizing content.  Not the case at all.  Let’s look at what is different today than when companies started to blog.

 Blogging is simply a tool that enables you to self publish content on the web.  A few years ago, blogging was the only way that marketers could actually publish on the web unless they went through IT to have it published using the corporate content management systems.

 Fast forward to today.  Now content takes form in long form through blogging and short form through updates on walls, tweets, Posterous.  Content also takes the shape of video, audio, powerpoints, documents (Scribd), etc.  Content is not only produced by the public relations team or marketing team, content is being distributed by any employee who posts an answer on Quora or LinkedIn or who tweets or updates pictures from the company picnic on their own Facebook page.  Content simply takes so many shapes today that it is impossible for companies to actually control all of it. 

Controls of information within companies have been in step decline for 2-3 years and it’s having profound affects throughout the enterprise.  IT’s perimeter is no longer the walls of the building, the perimeter has become every employee who carries a mobile device or logs into the network in an airport.  Marketers must train employees on tactics once only used on the few people who spoke to the press.  Today everyone can have that voice.  Employees communicate differently today internally.  So what does all this mean?  The only way to find out is to employ the services of Toby Bloomberg for an hour during this week’s chat.  Toby returns to host another chat this time focused on the maturing nature of content within companies and what it means.  The topic this week and questions will be:

Topic: Fear and Loathing in Content Creation

Q1:  Where is the sweet spot these days, in content creation or distribution?

Q2:  How is blogging/content development changing or maturing for companies?

Q3:  How do companies need to adapt around content?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, August 30 at noon ET.  Follow #sm125 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 Content | 1 Comment »

Can a Personal Brand Coexist Within a Corporate Ecosystem

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Photo Credit: Barry Libert/John Spector - WeAreSmarter.org

Companies are in an interesting position.  Customers are demanding new forms of interactions through social tools, mobile, online and service.  Organizational designs are set up to manage external engagement in a couple of ways, Public Relations or Customer Service.  Both of which are highly trained and highly scripted.  Interacting with customers on their terms means lifting the corporate veil to reveal new corporate “voices”.  The new voices are typically experts in their respective fields or simply young enough to not be scared to interact via social media (think Interns).

Within industry though, there is something larger happening.  Something that is beyond havign to deal with new talking heads.  A new model is beginning to emerge that  places importance in knowledge process management.  In the 80′s we placed importance on Cost Arbitrage through IT management, in the 90′s focus shifted to Labor Arbitrage through Business Process Management.  Now we appear to be shifting into a stage of Intellectual Arbitrage placing importance around Knowledge Process Management (KPM).  This shift brings new challenges. 

As social communications proliferate, there is a stronger focus on content.  Content is an asset and should be able to be re-purposed or re-used across other parts of the enterprise to be most effective.  If we expect our employees to become advocates as knowledge managers of our Brand, then where does the corporate brand and the personal brand come together.  If an employee builds a following as a likeable, intelligent ambassador then who owns the intellectual property (IP) around the information?  Better yet, how do you transform the IP into reusable assets across the rest of the organization. 

With this shift into Knowledge Management, companies need to look at hiring practices, employee policies and begin to update.  Should companies look to hire people with strong personal brands or build them after hiring?  There’s not a consistent answer as it will depend company by company.  The real trick is to develop your organizational models on purpose rather than by accident.  So IP issues, strong personal brands, how does a company begin to tackle these new challenges?  This is certainly a conversation worth having and to help moderate, we brought in Daria Steigman to manage the discussion.  Daria has done a masterful job at developing her own personal brand that has become her company’s.  for the discussion, we will use the following topic and questions:

Topic: Can a Personal Brand Coexist Within a Corporate Ecosystem

Q1. Personal branding — good idea or bad idea?

Q2. Can a personal brand coexist within a corporate ecosystem? Can your stars be stars and keep your brand intact?

Q3. Is it okay for companies to ban their employees from blogging?

Q4. Should companies have a succession plan around star employees?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, August 9 at noon ET.  Follow #sm122 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 Branding | 2 Comments »

Love All Your Children The Same: Managing Multiple Social Brands

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Managing one of anything is difficult enough especially in social media.  Now though, you have to manage many social presences, monitor off-board media conversations and map it all back to meeting business objectives – and that is just for one single brand.  Companies today are global and have many brands to contend with.  Whether you are B2B or B2C the challenges are still there with differing levels of complexity.

Consider each brand.  It may be that all of your brand’s managers are completely aligned, have the same goals and working from the same strategy.  Not likely.  What’s more likely is that each brand has their own set of objectives, they have unique needs and they are at varying levels of maturity from a social media perspective.  The uniqueness is important to point out since some brands may need ties to CMS, CRM, active directory (or other single sign-on) and other legacy systems.  Their search strategies are going to be unique and if you want social to help drive your search agends, then care needs to be taken here.  This does not mention mobile needs and other marketing campaigns that need to string together.  Also, this assumes that each department within the Brand are aligned which is, again, a big assumption.

As a corporation with many Brands, what are the options to begin managing your social brand in the most effective, cost efficient and meaningful way?  Is there a separate team for each brand, then you have to manage training across teams and most importantly staying connected as a group.  If one team manages all the brands then you might have a highly skilled team in social but a lack of true Brand knowledge and skills.  The answer is not one way or the other.  It really depends on each company, how they are managed across the enterprise, the social maturity of each Brand, the objectives and how segmented the systems are that need connected into the social environment.  There is no right answer, but certainly some directional attributes that would help dictate a path for companies to follow.

The challenge comes when certain brands jump out ahead of the corporate zone and start socially enabling their own brand.  At that point you have Brand teams with very different skills and approaches that make it almost impossible to consildate even if it did make sense, which essentially limits choices going forward.  So what is the right approach, how do you create a blueprint when you are not sure what the product is supposed to look like? For this week’s discussion we have brought in the talents of Tamsen McMahon.  Tamsen is moving into a new role as VP Digital Strategy at Allen & Gerritsen out of Boston.  Tamsen is an accomplished digital marketer and adept at managing multiple brands for companies.  For this week’s chat, we will use the following topic and questions:

Topic: Love All Your Children The Same: Managing Multiple Social Brands

1.      What’s your biggest challenge/opportunity when managing multiple brands?

2.      Can you use the same team to manage multiple brands?

3.       How do you connect the team(s) to business objectives for different brands?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, June 14 at noon ET.  Follow #sm115 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 Branding, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Professionalization of the Social Media Industry

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

It’s interesting to look back over the last few years as it relates to social media in the enterprise.  Just consider the corporate process of buy in around social.  Initially, employees, detractors or zealots were jumping into social on behalf of the company.  Kicking and screaming, companies started to dip their own toe in the water by testing and piloting blogs, forums, communities, etc.  Recently, I have noticed companies beginning to get serious about social media.  One way to tell, look at the positions they are hiring for here and here.

Hiring a few of these positions myself, I am wondering what companies are looking for in candidates.  Social is a strange bird as no one company created it and no one technology runs it.  Therefore there are no processes, textbooks, online courses, etc that cover all the skills a “social” leader needs to have in order to be effective.  In fact, social media has become such a bucket term that anything that smells like an online interaction gets the label.  That includes search, CRM, community mgr, web architect, public relations (blogger), recruiting (HR) and others.  Companies can hire any of these positions with some proficiency.  Add the word “social” in front of it and it sends shivers of consternation through hiring managers.  Those managers don’t know how to differentiate a blogging skillset which is more journalistic in nature from a digital strategist from a community manager (think traffic cop).  To make sure you are getting the right person for the job, What keywords do you use to search? what questions do you interview with? what skills do you test for?

Companies are tentative now as they have gone after social skills that understood how to set up a blog but did not know how large corporations run in complex environments.  They understand how to get small groups of people interested in having online conversations but they don’t understand the pshychology or cultural elements that go into consumer marketing.  The other side is to take existing employees and train them to be social.  This helps align the needs of the business and the intricacies of getting things done but assumes a ramp up time to come up-to-speed on becoming social.

This approach to professionalizing your social efforts assumes that it is a personnel issue.  I’m not exactly sold on that either.  Socialmedia has effectively transformed the way we communicate in many ways, it did not invent it.  Companies who have never wanted to communicate with partners or customers before, simply don’t have the culture to do it today, whether they have a staffer who can blog or not.  So it becomes an organizational design issue not a staffing issue.  Companies who are set up in silos or independent operating groups or P&L’s are simply not designed to communicate across department whether you have the latest version of Jive or SharePoint or not.  There is something more fundamental to becoming a social business than a couple of trained people or a few new toys.

Another interesting point of view on this topic can be found here: http://healthissocial.com/process-improvement/professional-development-in-the-age-of-social-media/ ( a solid post by Phil Baumann)

So what is the best way to professionalize your company’s approach to social media?  How do you take it to the next level?  This week’s chat will take this discussion head on!  To facilitate the dialogue we have Chris Heuer, a proven innovator who has been able to re-invent himself many times over.  Chris is best known recently for co-founding the Social Media Club that has become the connecting point for the professionals in the social media industry.  there is no one better to help figure out how to professionalize the social media efforts of businesses.  This week’s topic and questions are:

Topic: Professionalization of the Social Media Industry

Q1: How do you determine a professional from a wanna be?

Q2: Does the bucket term “Social” need to be broken into specialties?

Q3: What pieces of social can you learn from books? From experience?

Join us this week 9/28/10 at noon eastern by following #sm79 from your favorite Twitter client or simply participate from our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in corporate, Human Resources | Comments Off

Sponsored Conversations & What It Means for Businesses

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Sponsored ConversationsThis has certainly been the year for discussions around sponsored conversations in social media.  The term of a sponsored conversation is mostly described as paid for blog posts.  While this is certainly one piece of it, it certainly is not the entire scope of paid-for PR/advertising and limiting the conversation to only bloggers does not provide for a well-educated perspective by which to make reasonable business decisions. 

So what does the scope of sponsored conversations look like? Jeremiah does a good job of referencing lists of sponsored initiatives and the companies doing them but still this list is mostly focused on bloggers either being paid or getting free products to “blog” (review, rate, create content, post, etc) about them.  What is often over-looked is when companies hire other companies to create content, product releases, buzz, etc on the client’s behalf.  Finally, out of all of this do we need regulations in the form of government intervention (ala FTC) or a governing body to be the gatekeepers?

For companies paying individuals, the discussion is quite mature but still scattered (IZEA sponsored a report from Forrester).  How much should companies be allowed to pay? Should bloggers be able to make money for producing quality content and garnering a faithful following?  What’s the difference between paying Cris Brogan to stay at your hotel chain and hiring Kevin Garnett to wear your shoes? Heck, I eat entire meals for free every time I hit Costco with the free samples there.

For companies paying other companies it seems that this is either completely acceptable or it simply is not talked about much.  Sure there are examples of some intermediary screw-ups like Edelman with Wal-mart but surely there is more than this re-hashed story from 3 years ago.  Right?  Of course, PR firms are hired all the time to create content on behalf of their client and ghost-write posts.  Interactive agencies are always “taking care” of the content needs of their clients and passing it off as the client’s work.  Then you have Analysts who create reports using paying clients (intentionally left un-hyperlinked ;-) and socially connected Lobbyists influencing entire governing bodies.  Think about the newspaper industry using expert opinions from companies who advertise with them.

This week’s moderator, Shannon Paul certainly has her hands full with this topic but also has the hands on experience to lead us through it.  Working on the corporate side with the Detroit RedWings and now with PEAK6, she has practical experience that is invaluable and being a social media Rock Star in her own right certainly doesn’t hurt either.  This week’s discussion will be:

Sponsored Conversations & What It Means for Businesses

Q:1  What are the challenges / benefits from paying individuals to create conversations?

Q2:  What are the challenges / benefits from paying other companies to create conversations?

Q3:  What type of disclosure is needed and does it require a governing body?

This chat will start Tuesday 12 noon EST and last for 1 hour.  To participate simply use the #socialmedia on Twitter from anywhere.  To follow along more easily simply goto our LIVE page.

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Posted in B2B, Content | Comments Off

The Role of Social Media and PR in Crisis Communications

Monday, April 27th, 2009

house-of-cardsThe first quarter of 2009 was riddled with vexing corporate issues.  Earnings are challenged along with everything else in this economy and Brands of all shapes are getting hammered for their mishaps.  Social media is exacerbating those mishaps and creating urgency in PR and communications departments worldwide. 

What to do? When it’s all said and done, what do companies really have…their actions and their reputation.  Regardless of meeting quotas or anything else, consumers hear about mis-intentioned videos that hit the news and breakdowns in what otherwise are flawless processes.  That’s what it’s about.  When things go south, what will you do? 

Danny Brown, a PR and communications pro will lead this week’s UnPanel discussion on the value of knowing what to do, when to do it and how to do get it done the right way. 

The questions Danny will cover over the hour long session will be:

Q1: What is a crisis communications plan and why do I need one?

Q2: Who needs to own the plan and who needs to be a part of it?

Q3: How do you put a Crisis Communications plan in place and what are the components that need to be considered?

The UnPanel event will challenge the status quo and uncover helpful tips for practitioners by practioners who have walked the walk.  Please join in the conversation Tuesday noon EST.  Follow along on the LIVE page and participate by adding a message via Twitter using the #socialmedia tag.  After the event a full catalogue of the discussion will be listed on the Events page. 

Help out Danny Brown and the rest of the industry.  Join in the conversation.

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Posted in corporate, Public Relations, social media | Comments Off