Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Your Company’s Social Network: How Do You Know If It’s Worth It

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Much like the corporate land grab for a website in the mid 1990’s, the late 2000’s saw a similar land grab around setting up online social networks.  Both were created initially “because everyone else has one” with little regard to what it could do (or should do for that matter).  The first iterations of the website were no more than online versions of a company’s marketing material.  Over time, as forward thinking marketers began to test the limits of being online and the sites began to morph into something useful.  Today, corporate social networks or communities (as they are sometimes referred) are just now beginning to test the limits of how they can add value back to the company beyond branding and product marketing.

Initial metrics included things like page views, time on site, # of likes, # of comments, # of shares all of which are valid for marketers when comparing investments in marketing mediums.  Smart companies however, are starting to look beyond impressions and explore other ways to leverage the investments in community including IT, headcount to manage the site and the opportunity cost of not doing something else with those resources.

If there is one consistent thing that companies get wrong initially, it’s trying to copy the wrong competitor’s community.  The truth is that there is no one “right” way to build, manage and measure a community because every company’s needs, skills and platforms are different.  Companies have to identify a business objective or issue that can be improved by interacting differently, then go execute better than anyone else.  Setting up a community is the easy part.  Having the fortitude to measure/test/learn/rinse/repeat over the long term is the hard part.

The opportunity is one like never before.  If a company can re-imagine their business with these new ways to communicate and interact, they will have a distinct advantage over their competitors who take a long time to figure this out.  To better understand how to build and measure a community successfully, we went to the front lines with Lauren Vargas, the community manager at Aetna.  Lauren’s expertise is shining through in this emerging field and we are happy to have her experience to lead this week’s discussion.  The topic and questions for #sm129 will be:

Topic: Your Company’s Social Network: How Do You Know If It’s Worth It

Q1:  How do you measure impact within your community?

Q2:  How do you differentiate and/or blend quantitative and qualitative metrics?

Q3:  How do you measure community efforts if management is outsourced?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, September 27 at noon ET.  Follow #sm129 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.

Trolls or Contrarians? The Food Chain of Social Media

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

 We all have people who love us and what we do and we all have people who have different opinions of what we are and what we do.  Companies and Brands are no different.  If you have customers, you likely have people who disagree with other competing Brands.  They purchase your products for a reason and not someone elses’.  The same for contrarians to your Brand.  Those contrarians buy other things for a reason and complain about the way you run your business or make your products.  Before, those contrarians simply did not come to your store and said un-appealling things just in a way that you could not hear them.  And here is where I question the mindset of many companies and brands.

On the social web, you get to listen to what is being said about you (right, wrong or indifferent).  You have an opportunity to connect with that person in a way that was not possible before.  Companies who chose to ignore what is happening in the social sphere are missing an opportunity to promote their side, correct anything that is not factual and simply engage.  Not engaging is quietly agreeing with whom ever is posting negative information.  To be fair, this is not an enviable position at many companies however it is much needed. 

So what to do and how to get started?  This is a vexing question and certainly a conversation worth having.  Let’s suffice to say this is one of those instances where experience matters.  On this topic you definately want to avoid making rookie mistakes so getting someone who has “walked in those shoes” before is important.  This week, we are doing just that.  Peggy Fitzpatrick is a very experienced social media manager and has moderated many communities.  She brings a great perspective to this conversation around the following topic and questions:

 Topic: Trolls or Contrarians? The Food Chain of Social Media

Q1)  How should we address a troll like or contrarian type action within the walls of social media? Acknowledge it? or Let it go?

Q2)  From a marketers standpoint, is there any value to a troll or a contrarian?

Q3)  Have you ever experienced any negative or aggressive behaviors within Social Media? What did you do about it?

Q4)  Has previous negative behavior stopped you from attending chats or any other online activities?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, August 2 at noon ET.  Follow #sm121 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.

 

Welcome to the Big Data Era, How do Marketers Cope?

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

You may have heard a term being thrown around referring to the significant amount of data that is being produced most often called “Big Data”.  Here is a loose excerpt from the recent Future of Digital conference that explains the concept of big data pretty well:

“The explosion of data or ‘Big Data’ will give marketers the potential to mine data, discover new trends and learn more about the behaviour in their target market. If you took all the data in the world, cut them onto DVDs and stacked them on top of each other, you could reach the moon and back. This storage capacity equates to 14 Exabytes, where if you captured all the words ever spoken and digitized them into text, this would only occupy 1 Exabyte!

Labels on products will soon be talking over the internet as more sophisticated labels are attached or embedded into products. This could give business more insight into how and where their products are consumed. Big Data is about to get even bigger.”

The days of marketing via web, mobile and social by “gut feel” is over.   It’s not a matter of what you think your customer might like, it has to be what your customer is telling you they want, individually.  To stay competitive, Marketers need to begin adapting their marketing systems and their departments to include marketing analytics across every aspect.  Consider this: in order to make an offer (web, mobile or social could be display, search or even your very own web page) to a prospect, a marketer would take into account previous web visits to my site, recent posts made socially, checkins via mobile social and recent web surfing patterns before they visited you site.  From all that activity plus appending demographic and geographic information based on the IP address that is attached to the digital prospect, the new digital marketer will determine within milli-seconds what you should see when you come to my website.  For instance: A web prospect visited the product pages of my site last week.  After leaving my site, they went to two other competitive sites to their product pages.  On Twitter, they ask they network which is the best stereo system (you sell stereo systems) and then they come back to your website again.  This time you recognize their IP address from last week, append their geographic information (Manhattan) and adjust your homepage on the fly that compares your stereo favorably to the industry and has a big buy button on right on the first page.  Conversion goes up 120% and you start to gain significant ground on the web compared to your comeptitors.

This scenario is not fictional.  It is happening everyday, in real-time.  It’s not happening a lot right now but it is happening and will happen much more in the near future.  How does your marketing stack up?  To learn more about this topic we brought in the VP, Group Director at Digitas, Ken Burbary to work through this conversation.  Ken is a long time industry expert  and thought leader in the emergence of marketing analytics.  The conversation this week will follow the following topic and related questions.

Topic: Welcome to the Big Data Era, How do Marketers Cope?

Q1:  What types of data (digital, social, mobile) do marketers need to capture, track and analyze to effectively understand consumers in this era?

Q2:  Who (which group/function) should be responsible for the planning, collection and analysis of consumer data?

Q3:  How long will companies and organizations have to wait for the “big data” phenomenon to kick in and realize the benefits?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, July 26 at noon ET.  Follow #sm120 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.

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.

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.

Does Public Relations Get The “Message” in Social Media

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Public Relations gets a bone as many PR professionals were the first in their companies to adopt social media.  Much like email, PR pros saw this as a great way to distribute messages to a larger audience at a cost that was next to nothing.  Social media became an instant hit in the PR circles for this reason.  For a long time and even still, PR managed much of what happened in companies that was centered in social media.  Now that social media is beginning to grow in importance within the enterprise many feel that social media should be controlled by marketing, CIO or controlled a bit by every department.  However, at a lot of companies, the PR professional is the only one with social media experience.

Here’s the rub, social media practictioners do not believe that social channels are best used for “pushing” messages.  Many marketers are trying to evolve to better “pull” messages from their audience and listen better.  These same practictioners argue that Public Relations does not have a strong history of evolving if you look at how little the Press Release of today has evolved since it appeared over a hundred years ago.  PR pros will argue they have started to evolve much of their work (and the forward thinking ones actually have IMO).  Examples like the new press release, HARO and #soloPR and #PRChat (weekly twitter chats) are helping to advance the ball, but is it fast enough?

Social media is evolving quickly within companies right now.  There are new advances almost daily and practitioners are trying to derive value across the board.  A bit of the issue is the notion of value.  Social media is too new to have a playbook or even a “right” way to do it and everyone has their own version of what value is.  For marketers it’s brand messaging and conversion, for PR pros, its creating and distributing corporate messages.  Therein lies the contention.  From my experience working within Fortune class companies, I’m not sure that social belongs housed in PR for many reasons.  I do, however believe there is value in PR having a social presence and I believe that value will continue to evolve for the better and could re-shape the entire industry as we know it today.

While marketing types whine for control, there is another issue.  Many top marketers do not have any experience in social media.  Some come out of the branding world, some the direct marketing side, others creative.  None of that experience qualifies you for understanding and evolving in social media.  What happens is you get marketers proclaming the best way to use social….who have never used social.  If you don’t understand the medium then it is hard to be as innovative and creative as your customers are being with social.  At that point, you lose relevance.

I think it’s well understood that relevance is key today. With customers, employees, partners and prospects you have to stay relevant.  The question is who is most qualified to run your company’s social strategy?  That is what we posed to Kellye Crane, an award winning, long admired PR professional.  Kellye brings a wealth of experience and is one of those PR innovators who agreed to moderate this discussion for us.  her perspective will be enlightening for sure.  The topic this week and questions will be:

Title: Does Public Relations Get The “Message” in Social Media

Q1:  Has PR become a dirty word in social media?

Q2:  Is there a place for “messaging” on social networks?

Q3:  Can a marketing exec have authority on social media topics without directly participating?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 24 at noon ET.  Follow #sm112 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.

Do Influencers Or Customers Buy Your Products?

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Image Credit: www.bagmadness.com

Social Media continues to wreak havoc on corporate marketers and will continue to do so for a long time.  The days of creating a message and buying a few strategic placements are long gone.  Today there are more cable channels than anyone can watch and the web web is so fragmented that it’s unrealistic to think that a well placed ad can garner even mild interest.  Along with fragmentation, there is an overwhelming amount of data that needs to be considered by marketers to do even the simplest tasks.  When things get out-of-control, we tend to go back to what we know and just put a different spin on it. 

Remember spokespeople?  That one iconic image that would transcend buyers and connect with the masses.  James Earl Jones had “the Voice”; the Beatles had “the Sound” and James Dean had “the Look”.  Connect any of these to your Brand and hold on tight.  Customers would forgive bad service or a little higher prices in exchange for pop-culture style influence.

Digital connectivity in general and Social Media specifically have changed those rules.  The idea of attracting an influencer remains however, in social media at least, the execution of that is entirely mis-aligned. 
There are really no iconic style influencers in social, it’s simply too new.  Most social influencers are early adopters who have gained social media status by being an outlier and who are now seen as having expertise.  These “experts” tend to exhibit influence based upon that expertise.  Take Mommy Bloggers, Social Media Mavens or any other industry.  These people were not even on the influence radar before social media.  Now marketers revere them due to their 30k followers.  The reality is they were early to adopt new technology and were seen as having unique perspective.  As those early adopters gain more status, their views and perspectives tend to become more mainstream and less from the fringe.  As their message becomes more mainstream, their expertise dwindles along with their status.  It’s usually about this time that marketers identify these individuals who have built status, as influencers.  Quick Question – Do these people who have accumulated status by being early adopters truly advocates of you products or just perceived as influencers by some staffer?  Matt Riding created a great dialogue recently around developing an influencer program rather than an advocate program.   The point is that influencer programs are pretty easy to execute, quick and easy to show improvements on certain KPIs (key performance indicators).  Advocacy programs though are much more difficult to execute, they take a longer time to grow and it’s more difficult to show progress on KPIs.  Spending time on advocates do prove very worthwhile.  these are your customers, they spend money regularly with you and you now have the ability to get to know these people better than you could have ever expected…you just have to want to.  Marketers still try to develop social influencer programs but are there really influencers that will get people to purchase your products? 

The next time you plan marketing activities and can choose the quick win Influencer program or the “better-for-the-business” advocacy program make sure you understand the difference to your company and your career.   If anyone understands the difference it is Matt Riding.  Matt is better know in the social sphere of Twitter as @techguerilla and will be leading our discussion this week.  Matt brings a wealth of experience with unique mix of technical, marketing and social know-how.  The topic and questions this week will be:

Topic: Do Influencers Or Customers Buy Your Products?

Q1. Can a ‘influencer’ with 500 followers be as influential as someone with 500,000?
Q2. If context is so critical to understanding influence, do tools such as Klout have value? To whom?
Q3. How can we migrate from ‘influencer’ programs to ‘advocate’ programs?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 17 at noon ET.  Follow #sm111 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.

Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

The face of customer service and customer satisfaction has changed in recent years.  It used to be that customer service was managed as an in-store experience, then telephone, then the web and now customers have experiences across thousands of touch points or more.  Social media has changed the way the customers want to interact and certainly the pace by which they expect to be interacted with.  The numbers are there, hundreds of millions of active blogs, over 175 million registered users on Twitter, Facebook gets over 600 million visits /month and media outlets like Huffington Post reach over 30 million people / month.  All of these sites offer the ability to easily post anything to entire networks of loosely coupled “friends” in a way that creates a permanent digital record that is easily accessed by any search engine.

If customer satisfaction is a result of the combined experiences that a customer has over time, then every touch point presents an opportunity to improve or diminish overall satisfaction.  The challenge is the daunting amout of new possible outlets that customers use for those experiences that companies have to contend with.  As noted above, the numbers of people using social media and the amount of new social media channels being rapidly adopted are simply impossible to keep up with.

Up to now, dozens of vendors in the space have customer satisfaction indexes, net promoter scores, customer service measurements, etc to help companies keep track of their progress with customer satisfaction.  They all use different techniques to measure and capture sentiment including “secret shoppers”, exit surveys, online questionnaires, complaint websites and even better business bureau scores that are reactive in nature.  In today’s ever connected world, companies cannot afford to measure their effectiveness quarterly or even monthly.  The social web never stops working and customer service departments need real-time or near real-time measurements to stay on top of emerging issues.

So what is a good customer satisfaction score?  Today companies throw parties if they reach the 90′s out of 100.  However, having just one un-satisfied customer can be REALLY bad like here and here.  With the rising level of engagement using social, is it even reasonable to strive for 100% satisfaction?  To answer that question, you would have to assume that every customer is equal.  With new ways for customers to publish content, there are also new ways of measuring the quality of a customer as well.  Should you treat customers with a high Klout score differently than customers with a lower one?  Does an unpopular tweet by a customer with 30k followers make them more right than an unpopular tweet posted by someone with 50 followers?

The social web has certainly changed the way that customers expect to be treated and, consequently, the way that companies now have to start to manage customer satisfaction efforts.  How this ultimately plays out is still unknown as companies are still at the very first stages of trying to solve this vexing challenge.  To help us better understand the issues and help us start to discover possible solutions is our host this week Meg Fowler.  Meg manages public relations/social strategy for @Sametz and is a treasure trove of great information.  She will moderate our topic today and questions:

Topic: Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Q1:  What is a good customer satisfaction score today — and why have/haven’t our goals changed?

Q2:  Is the customer always right in social media?

Q3:  How can companies shift to respond to the new reality of customer satisfaction?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 3 at noon ET.  Follow #sm109 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.

Frenemies: Can PR & Advertising Work Together On Social?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Social Media in many contexts is a bucket term that people use to define the digital unknown.  When marketers, IT and marketing communications come together it becomes difficult to split out social media jobs where they don’t overlap.  Since the digital world became social there has been a land grab of sorts to figure out who owns what when it comes to social media.  On one hand, content heavy side of blogging, tweeting, thought leadership would fall under public relations.  On the other hand, social is an easy bolt on to much of the work that traditional agencies provide their clients.  Agencies typically inlcude more of a technology component simply because they are more set up to do so.

Companies are caught in the middle.  Both pitches sound good.  Without more grounding both could be “right”.  So what is the right approach?  Can you split the duties between the two?  We asked these questions to public relations maven, Elizabeth Sosnow who is the Managing Director at BLISSPR. Elizabeth has a unique spin on this topic that will make for healthy discussion.  We welcome Elizabeth to our 100th week of hosting our weekly chat focused on the Business of Social Media.  Our topic this week and questions are below:

Frenemies: Can PR & Advertising Work together on social?

Q1: Is it realistic to think that Advertising and PR can collaborate on social and what roles should they “own” in a joint pitch?

Q2: Does PR over-rate its capabilities in SM or does it under-rate advertising’s SM potential?

Q3: How many of your current social media campaigns fall into the “promoter” vs. “brand builder” buckets?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, March 1 at noon ET.  Follow #sm100 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.

Government & Social Media: The Global & Local Impacts

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Civil and political unrest has erupted in parts of the Middle East.  Entire countries like Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt are dealing with protestors who are rising up in an attempt to affect change.  After seeing success in Egypt, other countries are encouraged with their chances of change and following much of the same course as those in Tunisia and Egypt started.

Along with other issues, Egypt’s youth has experienced significant unemployment for a long time.   This younger demographic led much of the uprising and used social media outlets to organize their revolt.  So as the string telephone goes, many who are less familiar with situations are wondering how social media caused these riots.  Social media, of course, did not cause the civil unrest, frustrated citizens and ineffective govenments caused the riots.  Social media simply fueled them.

In search of free political and/or free economic systems, citizens are using the ubiquitous channels that are social media (primarily Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube) to organize and communicate with each other and the rest of the world.  So effective are these tools that some governments are shutting down or severely throttling web access while other governments are encouraging its continued use.  Some Governments are so threatened by the power this new style of communication presents they are even prosecuting users for using it.

It seems very appropriate to discuss how Governments are treating social media here on this event.  To do so, we are employing the expert services of Alexander B. Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media.  Alexander’s take on the world’s governments use of social media will certainly enlighten whether you are interested in Gov2.0 or enterprise2.0 as citizen’s expectations will certainly be changed forever.  The topic and questions we will use are below:

Government & Social Media: The Global & Local Impacts

  1. How effective is own government using social media in the Middle East? (and how other governments are blocking, censoring or filtering it)
  2. How citizens are using social media at home?
  3. What privacy, security and identity issues are raised by those trends

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, February 22 at noon ET.  Follow #sm99 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.