We got a chance to take a look at the guide, which takes the form of a comic book but also includes narration from a speaker (in a cool Australian accent too). It starts with the very basics – like “what is Facebook?” – but eventually moves into much more complex issues like “what if my [personal] blog post is critical of Telstra?” To-date, the company says that 12,000 of its employees have completed the course. Here’s a quick introduction:
Speaking of the decision to publish it on the Web, Telstra says that “while this communications environment has risks for corporate entities and individuals alike, we believe that with the right training and policy support the potential benefits far outweigh the risks … We have decided to open up this course to the scrutiny and feedback of the ‘outside world’ as it may assist other organisations and help raise the level of awareness about social media with staff.”
There’s a blogger who has reported that a blog launched in his company for internal communication purposes is failing. “Too few posts, too few comments, people aren’t reading, there’s not enough content, too few employees use aggregators,” writes Fredrik Wacka on his CorporateBlogging site.
Wacka notes that comments aren’t necessarily a measure of success—“A blog can be an extremely powerful resource without ever being commented on. It all depends on what the purpose of the blog is”—and that the intranet makes it easy for employees to read an internal blog without using an aggregator.
I suspect, however, that there’s a deeper problem at work here. I’ve seen it in dozens of companies, not with blogs but other communication technologies running the gamut from e-mail to instant messaging. The launch of these technologies is left in the hands of IT. This isn’t a slam on IT, mind you. Most IT departments do a great job at what they’re supposed to do: get the technology working. It’s not—and shouldn’t be—IT’s job to establish policies for the use of technologies, to market the tool, or to drive a cultural change around how the tool should be used in a business context.
Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. “Here you go everybody. We’ve installed e-mail for you. Godspeed.” As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative. You wind up with some employees using e-mail for the same communications that lead others to reach for the phone. Some employees misuse the technology; how many companies have no guidelines for whether employees should “reply all,” cc everybody in the known universe, or quote all preceding messages in a reply e-mail?
Messaging is a problem of uncalculated proportion in most companies. I rarely talk to a knowledge worker who receives fewer than 100 e-mails each day, and that’s after the spam filter has done its job. Companies complain that employees engage in non-work-related conversations using company instant messaging tools. Employees send faxes to colleagues who are on the road and can’t receive them. Nobody has made an effort in these organizations to change the culture to support the appropriate, effective use of these new tools as they are introduced.
Every new communication technology is additive, not a replacement: IT didn’t remove your fax machine when they installed e-mail, did they? There are as many as 15 messaging tools at play in most organizations these days, ranging from interoffice mail to SMS text messaging. For some time now, I’ve been calling such an effort “Message Mission Control.” It belongs in the hands of Human Resources (for development of policy and alignment with reward and recognition processes) and Employee Communications (to reinforce desired behaviors).
When Bob Buckman launched message boards at his Memphis-based chemical company, Buckman Laboratories, he did it with a speech (printed and distributed to employees around the world) in which he articulated goals and expectations for the boards. Not to put too fine a point on it, he basically said that employees who didn’t share their knowledge with one another on the board in support of companies wouldn’t last long at the company. He followed up his words with action. The culture changed.
I suspect none of this happened at Tower, the company described in the blog. I don’t know it for a fact, but I’d be willing to bet the blog was opened with some remarks about a new tool for communication, and that was that. In the workplace, new communication technologies are an enabler only if employees know how they’re expected to use them. Imagine the productivity improvements that could be recorded if every organization established Message Mission Control.
These examples of styles, tone, personality, and delivery contribute to blogging voice. (Hint 5: Voice consists of more than just delivery.)
Take a look and hit on one that makes you nod your head. (Hint 6: Voice has a LOT to do with tonality.)
- Snark. Personal flair is sometimes snark. It works for some and not others. Davina Brewer is one of the best at this. She says, “When a smart blogger dares to challenge a ‘social media guru’ or marketing legend, hell hath no fury like fandoms irked when the wisdom of their ‘rock star’ is questioned. And FWIW I really ain’t sure if the ‘star’ status is anything more than a touch of echo chamber celebrity, cloaked in popularity, masked in a bestseller’s book jacket and next week’s speaking gig.”
- Grammarian Aristocrat. Shakirah Dawud at Deliberate Ink uses 50-cent words naturally, with flair, and perfect punctuation and grammar. She says, “The ‘green’ movement in English: Many common words are being reduced, reused, and recycled, as we’ve seen with ‘friend,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘action’ as the verb. There are familiar words transmogrified into new usages that, although subject to ridicule, are used more commonly than we like to admit in some circles, like ‘deliverables,’ ‘pushback,’ and the terrible-to-behold corporate verbs ‘incent’ and ‘action.’”
- Confident. Jack Steiner has been blogging for more than eight years. That experience exudes confidence nearly untouchable. If you try to pull this off without being time-tested (see hint 1 and 2 above), you’ll come across unnatural and arrogant. He says, “What I don’t know is if that skill translates into storytelling on the scale I am trying to do it. This project is officially bigger than any I have ever taken on before. People have told me they like it. Some have said they love it and a few have told me they really dislike it. That is all fine with me and something I expect. I am not trying to please everyone. At the moment the most important person in this equation is me.”
Among the recommendations to businesses when creating and distributing social media policies for employees are the following six points:
1. Know and follow the rules: All of your employees should be urged to read your social media policies and guidelines, and you should make it perfectly clear what is considered inappropriate, being assured that such acts will not be tolerated.
2. Be respectful: The board suggests that your policy explicitly state that employees should be “fair and courteous to fellow associates, customers, members, suppliers or people who work on behalf of the employer.”
Related: 5 Steps to Creating a Social Media Policy
3. Be honest and accurate: This includes never posting information or rumors that are known to be false.
4. Post only appropriate and respectful content: Specifically, maintain the confidentiality of company trade secrets and private or confidential information; express only personal opinions; don’t represent yourself as a company spokesperson without permission.
Now’s a good moment to define social business . Here is my definition. It’s simple and I think liberating. Social business is about what my colleague Nick Vitalari refers to as instantaneous connectivity. I prefer the term instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.
Social business is the discipline of working out all the societal and business impacts of instantaneous, ubiquitous communications.
Now that we can communicate with anyone at any time from anywhere, and we can communicate and create knowledge from communications between a growing array of devices we are liberated to do business much, much faster, to seek the most appropriate people to do business with, and to explore new limits in human potential.
All that starts with instantaneous, ubiquitous communications. If you want to develop a social business strategy you start there, not with a software platform and a vendor implementation plan.
Speed of communications has long been recognised for its economic potency. From canal to train, train to road, road to air, telegraph to telephone. Communications drives novelty and innovation. Now it is instant, so easy and it embraces a fast evolving global economy with a shared culture of entrepreneurism.
There are many many implications of this connectivity – and it might be your organization only needs the lightest possible touch of technology to reap the benefits. Essentially what you see before you in your workforce is a group of people who can communicate to anywhere in the world, develop relationships with people you had not imagined matter to your business, create new opportunities, accelerate new ideas to market, distill many global actions into succinct knowledge, spot new technologies and opportunities, partner, and generally act in a more entrepreneurial way either on your behalf or theirs.
If you want to give them badges, go ahead, watch them under-perform. If you want to impose one more software platform on them, that too is your right. But my advice is to spend some strategic time with what social business really is – instantaneous, ubiquitous communications, for everyone, all on the same terms.
What it is clearly also leading to is a change in societal values, a re-set of what we can expect of each other for our respective contributions at work and home. This is not an empowered workforce or a break for freedom but it is dramatic. It requires a new social contract.
Eric B. Meyer, a partner in the labor and employment group of the law firm Dilworth Paxson LLP, explains the report’s significance. “It provides a window into what the NLRB considers legal and illegal, not only with respect to employers who discipline employees based solely on social media content that employees publish, but also as to social media policies that employers implement.”
So the report isn’t exactly the law. But it is one of the first detailed explanations about how existing laws are applied to social media policies and practices at work. It gives specific examples of policies, statements and conduct that is and isn’t OK.
Heather Bussing, an independent employment attorney, outlines the advantage the NLRB report provides. “The law is statutes and published decisions by the courts. Agency decisions and regulations are also considered law as long as they’re consistent with the statutes and court decisions. An agency report explaining its thinking and how it has applied statutes and cases to specific situations is about as close to ‘the law’ as you can get. So having a bunch of examples issued lets us have a better picture of what will and won’t get us in trouble, and that is probably even more useful than the law.”
Defining Media and Social Media
One of the interesting aspects of the report is the mention of “employers’ social and general media policies.” Mark Neuberger, with Foley & Lardner LLP, a global law firm representing management in all aspects of labor and employment law, believes the report might suggest they are the same for the purposes of policy development. “The NLRB is concerned with protecting an employee’s right to engage in protected concerted activity, regardless of the medium in which that right is expressed. Before social media, Board case law dealt with expression in verbal speech, written speech and even symbolic speech — the use of inflatable rats being just one example of expressive speech.”
Bussing breaks down for us the definition of “protected concerted activity” and why we need to pay attention to it:
“Criticism of an employer’s practices about wages, hours and working conditions is protected no matter how it is expressed as long as it is ‘protected, concerted activity.’ ‘Protected’ is any statement about wages, hours or working conditions. ‘Concerted’ means the employee’s statements were ‘engaged in with or on the authority of other employees.’ So the statement has to be about working conditions — it can’t be a personal attack that is ‘so disloyal, reckless or maliciously untrue’ that it loses protected status. The statement also has to be directed to other employees or to the company on behalf of the employees — not just personal gripes, honking or wailing. But it doesn’t matter where or how the employee makes the statement if it is also ‘protected’ and ‘concerted.’”
And nowadays, that “where” includes Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Bussing notes, “The report focuses both on where, how and to whom the statements were made. It also explains the limits of the protections — offensive and critical statements that are personal attacks rather than criticism of the wages, hours or working conditions are generally not protected.”
When I decided to write this post I actually Google’d: ‘how to start an Army’, and to be honest, was a little scared of some of the things I found.
In America, forming your own army or militia is a constitutional right (2nd amendment), and is also protected by Federal law. Treason, however, is illegal. As I researched this topic, I discovered one of the main characteristics of starting an Army/Militia is to get them vetted, trained, paid and readied for action.
Much like an assembly of troops, loyal followers ‘pledge allegiance’ to you, only they do it by retweeting, reposting, and sending you shoutouts. Having an army of loyalists helps grow your influence over the products, services and activities they chose. Having a strong Social Media optimization plan supersizes that influence, and even carries to the people that your influencees influence.
We all want loyalists, but here’s the harsh truth: Loyalty is difficult to achieve! Many people try to build it with clever marketing campaigns and promotions. The reality is one-hit-marketing-wonders or a free ipad or tablet will create short term relationships. Superficial efforts don’t dig deep enough into their minds to make a difference.
So how do you build your own Social Media Army?
1.) Define Your Cause
Take a minute and really define what you are building. You might have read a book or two, worked with strategists, consultants or managers that helped you define your Marketing goals. Your Social Media goals should mirror and compliment your marketing plan, but they are different. I have yet to meet a client that doesn’t say, I need to be on (whatever platform) and when I say, “why or what are your goals?” I can almost hear the “dear in the headlights look’. It has to be clear in your mind what you are doing, that is how the mystery of Social Media is squashed. In addition, determining goals for any form of marketing and promotions will help you manage your expectations of any medium.
The most prevalent goals I have heard:
-Increase brand awareness using multiple media platforms
-Reputation management
-Improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
-Increase relevant visitor traffic to a website
-Improve sales for a product or service (itunes, concert tickets, merch sales)
-Gain personal connections (*hint* this should be everyone’s goal!)Written Goals = Success. Determine key metrics BEFORE you get started. You will want to pick solid metrics to track: Web or Blog Traffic, iTunes sales, creating traditional media awareness , SEO Ranking, mentions or amount of targeted fans/followers in certain time are common.
2.) Know Your Audience
Who are you trying to reach. Pinpoint the characteristics of the perfect listener or fan as it relates to your format or music genre. Understand how your target audience uses Social Media (gender, age, geography, etc.)
-Listen and then listen more.
-Ask yourself the following questions when you are designing Social Media campaigns/conversations:
What’s the point? What type of conversation is this? What’s the purpose? What does your audience know about you right now? When and where is your audience using Social Media?
-Who are you to this audience?
-Elevator pitch or 60 second commercials are obsolete how do you describe who you are or what you do in 140 characters or less?3.) Know Your Battle Field
Before you get started think about the tools last, not first – a solid Media optimization plan and Socialality will translate across any platform. Listen to the conversations people are having about you and your brand. This is where publicists, PR companies and market research come in really handy.
-Set the foundation that takes your cause/brand across all platforms
-Get fans/followers emotional about your brand. (make laugh, cry, angry)
-Connect with them by talking TO them not at them.
-YOU are NOT that important. It is very important in the beginning when you are new to follow people back and respond to them when they talk to you. Not communicating with fans/followers is a spoiled chance to take someone from being engaged to being invested in your brand. I work with a few celebrity/artist/radio station Twitter accounts and never get tired of hearing a fan we follow back spread the word and brag to their Followers that ‘so and so’ is following them. It is a really powerful, and often under used tool of Social Media by brands, but dang does it sure work!
-Create personality behind the story. Show them you are more than a logo or a photo. Help followers find common ground that lets them relate to you, ie your Morning Show host is a Dog person so connect to your Dog Lover followers on Social Media. It only takes a few posts and tweets to identify these people.
-Content is King! Make it matter to your identified target audience.
-ALWAYS make account open to public-It’s ‘Social Networking,’ Not ‘Anti-Social Networking’!
-I will say this one again speak WITH people not AT them, Social Media is a dialogue not a monologue!
-Forget ‘What am I doing?’ and ask your followers, ‘what are they doing?’
If you could do only three things for SEO, what would they be? This is a question encountered by many smaller businesses, and even somewhat larger companies, either due to not having enough people (time) and/or dollars available to invest in a big way.
If this is a scenario you’re facing, what follows are three minimal SEO tasks you must do.
Step 1: Check Your Indexing Status
The first step is to make sure that your site is getting found! The best way to do this is to check your indexing status in Google Webmaster Tools and see how many of your pages are indexed by Google. Once you’re logged in, click on “Health” and then “Index status” in the menu on the left.
I like to go a little further and click the “Advanced” button as well, which brings me to a screen like this:
The first thing to look at is the number of indexed pages, in this case, 887. How many did you expect? Obviously, if you think you have 1,000+ pages that you want Google to index and Google shows 10 indexed pages, you have a problem. In the case of this particular site, the problem looks to be the opposite of that – 887 pages indexed and 5,751 “Not Selected”?
This could be an indication of a lot of pages that are duplicates, near duplicates, pages with the noindex tag on them, or URLs that Google found that redirect to another page. Here is what Google says about this status:
Not Selected: URLs from your site that redirect to other pages or URLs whose contents are substantially similar to other pages.
To keep this simple, the bottom line here is to get a quick indication whether you have a problem. Too few pages being indexed? You have a problem. Too many, or too many that are “Not Selected”, that could be a problem too.
If you find you have a problem, what is the next step?
Unfortunately, that isn’t an easy one to take on by yourself, due to your time constraints. That means the next step is to get some help and to get your indexing problem diagnosed and fixed.
(Footnote to this diagnosis step: Some blog software packages, such as WordPress, create lots of category type pages, and these could explain why you have a lot of pages that were Not Selected, but you still need to determine how you want to address that, and expert advice on that topic is still something you should get).
(Footnote 2: Definitely check the indexing status in Google Webmaster Tools instead of using the “site:” query operator in a Google search, because the Webmaster Tools number is the “real number” and what you get from a site:query is not.)
Step 2: Focus Site on Target Keywords
The next step is to figure out whether you are effectively competing for keywords that users might enter into a search engine, which would indicate that they are a prospect for you.
If one of the products you offer is left-handed golf clubs as a product, for example, is there a page on your site focused on left-handed golf clubs? If this is one of your products, at a minimum, you need a page dedicated to left-handed golf clubs where the search phrase “left handed golf clubs” is featured in the title of the web page (this is the title tag in the head section of your web page source code), and in the content on the page.
Implement such pages for each major product/service you offer. Pay a lot of attention to your title tags, and they can help you understand how to focus your pages. I have two golden rules for title tags.
1. Assess
- Prioritize your business objectives by determining what it is you are trying to achieve: employee retention, boost collaboration, enhance executive visibility, increase speed to innovation or turn your employees into powerful brand ambassadors.
- Map your communication by analyzing your current information flow and determining how employees engage your intranet or social media tools.
- Determine what your ideal social media ecosystem would look like. What cultural differentiators are you hoping to foster?
2. Align for Design
- Assess your perceived issues and actual limitations by balancing potential risks against projected gains in productivity, collaboration and innovation.
- Develop solid company guidelines for social media use and use metrics to measure how well your engagement
tools are working.- Align and train your leadership and get senior management buy-in to create a social networking mindset across business functions.
3. Implement
- Identify the most effective tools for your needs—from wikis and microblogs to robust knowledge-sharing and innovation platforms.
- Work closely with your IT teams to ensure your efforts are compliant with all internal rules, standards and architectures.
4. Ensure Sustainability
- To harness the power of social media and ensure your networking investments are sustainable, it is essential that you implement replicable, enterprise-wide training so that you overcome capability gaps (e.g., generational, geographical) that are present within your company.
5. Measure and Adjust
- Let’s face it, judging social media ROI is difficult. But by establishing a benchmark and then conducting employee engagement focus groups and surveys, linkage analyses, social media diagnostics and business analytics, it is possible to see how you deliver against expectations.
- Keep what works, tweak what doesn’t. Troubleshoot your challenges and identify cost-effective ways to reactivate your underutilized social media channels.
At this point, a business without a mobile strategy is a business without a strategy at all.
Here are nine reasons why you need a mobile strategist:
- Business Moves at Mobile Speed
According to Cisco, by 2016, there will be 10 billion Internet-enabled devices globally and smartphone traffic will grow 50 times the size it is today. Mobility is no longer a nice to have — it’s a critical requirement of doing business and staying competitive. Enterprise mobile spending is higher than ever, and mobile projects now span every department and industry.
- BYOD is the New Reality
Apple has been a major force behind the BYOD movement and new findings show that globally, BYOD is catching on. Enterprises around the world are making the decision to support employee-selected devices. However, maintaining security, control and visibility into devices and data has become a primary concern for CIOs. According to Gartner, the BYOD movement is here to stay, but security and management of these devices will continue to be pressing concerns among enterprises.
- Multiple Mobile Initiatives Cause Major Fragmentation– Make it One Person’s Day Job
With enterprises currently managing multiple mobile projects and new ones being added at a rapid clip, mobile is too often put into silos at most organizations. This makes management and decision-making, as well as future proofing and budget management, incredibly complex and time-consuming for employees with other job functions.
- A Mobile Strategist is an Objective Voice of Reason for the Increasingly Mobile Business
Maintaining the delicate balance between addressing user needs and IT capabilities can be difficult for any company. Let your mobile strategist be a hub between all department spokes to ensure that mobile initiatives truly reflect business need – and the technology is in place to support it as well.
- Mobile is No Longer a “One and Done”
It used to be that enterprises designed and implemented a mobile app and called it a day. Today, a single mobile app alone cannot fulfill all business objectives and needs. Mobile initiatives today require strategic planning, budgeting, research, prototyping and testing, as well as consistent updating. Mobile undertakings need to be iterative and agile, rather than tactical one-off projects with a beginning and an end. Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research has some great advice on how to readjust your thinking this way in his recent report Take Advantage of the Mobile Shift.
- Time is of the Essence
Time to market for mobile initiatives is a top pain point for enterprises, as delays in deployment can cost major dollars. Every day a competitor has an engaging app on the market and your company does not is a day of lost revenue. Speed to market isn’t the only important factor when it comes to be able to do mobile fast – companies also have a need for speed in rapidly iterating and refining mobile initiatives to stay current, incorporate feedback from users, and make adjustments based on data from analytics.
Teachers can affect our eternity. In fact, it’s hard to tell where the influence stops, even after all these years. Not every teacher has a profound affect, but most of us remember what it was like in P.E. My teacher was a short, spunky lady named Mrs. Bruno. I was a cheerleader in high school (I know, you’d never guess it) and Mrs. Bruno’s leadership took us to many championships. The best teachers teach from the heart and these lessons continue to resonate in my world today.
Here are 7 things I learned from my P.E. Teacher that influence my actions today with Social marketing. See how many resonate with you:
1. “Failure is not fatal. But failure to change might be.” Marketing in the Social era is scary. Many dealers don’t know what to post on Facebook, or blog, or where to even start. The best thing to do is begin and fail until you succeed. Hire a mentor to guide you. Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. You need to be where your customer is, and that place is Social Media.
2. “If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” I hear many companies shouting, “Buy our product and Social Media will be a snap.” Don’t believe it. Social marketing takes hard work, commitment, talent and a budget. There are many obstacles but none that can’t be overcome. Once you’re on the right path, you’ll find your sweet spot.
3. “Enthusiasm is everything.” Social marketing succeeds because we are social animals. Sharing great information with other humans is part of our culture. How big a part does enthusiasm play in your overall business operation? Empower your staff to help create content for your Social channels. An enthusiastic team is contagious. Your customers will catch it and spread the awesome.
4. “Teachers teach more by what they are than but what they say.” The same is true for your store’s brand. It’s not enough to advertise what great prices you have or what awesome service you deliver. Others have to be saying it too. Utilize Social Media to communicate what it is about your store that makes it unique – why people buy from you. Enlist customers and employees to tell your story.
5. “Never mind what others do. Do better than yourself, beat your own record from day to day, and you’re a success.” I see many businesses who put a lot of weight on how many Facebook fans others have and they judge themselves by that. What matters in Social is to have a highly-engaged audience who want to talk about you to their friends. Keep score on yourself. Set goals and measure your progress. That’s how you succeed in Social marketing.
If you’re the sole champion of social business in your organization, it can be a daunting place to stand.
Where should you focus your time and energy? What should your priorities be? How do you keep your programs moving forward while building a business case for carrying those initiatives deeper into the company? What things can you focus on that are always necessary and can help you stay on track?
We’ve got a few ideas. Six, to be exact.
1. Vision/Goals
It might seem obvious, but having clear vision and goals for social business becomes your anchor. That’s the stuff you come back to when things get off track or seem like they’re not aligned.
The most important element here is not to build the goals for social business itself. First, work with leadership to outline and understand the business-level goals for revenue, market growth, research and development, culture and talent retention, partnerships. What is the C-level committed to in terms of the company overall? Once you understand that, build your social business goals so that each one can be tied to the larger goals of the organization.
Consider what social business practices will enable, make possible, or accelerate? Speak in terms of business outcomes, not social media program objectives. If you can speak to people about the things they will always want to achieve and how social supports those objectives, you’ll always have a strong foundation for support and forward momentum.
And all of that together helps you illustrate a very important picture: the one that describes what your organization will look like 6 months, 12 months, 3 years from now. The picture of your company as a social business.
2. Finding Champions
You can’t do this yourself forever.
While you’re the lone solider leading the charge, you’ve got to find the people in your organization that believe as you do or at least have a curiosity and an interest in learning how to build social programs within the company. They don’t have to be seasoned social professionals. They can come from anywhere in the organization, and they can be at pretty much any level of responsibility. The key factor is their desire to help establish roots for social business practices because they can help them do their jobs better, further their department goals, build a better business in which to work, or all of the above.
Finding internal advocates is the first step to establishing things like social business councils or building a Center of Gravity. The more invested people are in social’s potential in the organization, the more they’re willing to lend their time and expertise to the cause and eventually help build a case for more devoted staff. Plus, the volunteer/unofficial approach to finding social advocates across the organization time and again proves itself as a strong foundation for collaborative work that transcends hierarchies and silos. It just works.
3. Education
Education is perhaps the most critical piece is socializing knowledge about social, the context for your initiatives, and your intent with the programs you hope to build around the organization. Over time, methodical outreach and education is is how you build a case for additional budget and resources and create enthusiasm and curiosity around this “whole social business thing”. That’s what creates upward momentum among the people in your company, and grabs the attention of the decision-makers.
What about convincing the skeptics?
If you address them openly, honestly, and patiently (including admitting what you don’t know yet), they’re much more likely to support your approach, which is what you need at first. The goal isn’t necessarily to convince them immediately that you’re right. Your job is to instill enough confidence that you’ve thought things through and have a plan. Because leadership doesn’t really shy away from risk; most of them have become leaders because they understand the inherent value of taking risks.
What they shy away from is risk without a plan that addresses it realistically. That’s the difference between calculated risk and unmitigated, messy risk. Illustrate that your approach to social is well-reasoned, and you’ll buy yourself enough breathing room and support to execute on the plan and be accountable for it (more on that in a moment). That should be your goal. Not to convince the people that don’t yet buy what you’re selling, but to earn the chance to prove it to them.
- Highlight how not to do things; attacking ideas, not people.
- Create a video blog post by interviewing a successful client – this can a powerful providing authentic evidence of authority and credibility for both you and the client.
- Write articles for the different types of customers that are relevant for each of your vertical markets.
- Brainstorm blog post topics with colleagues and management and create a list for future reference and planning.
- Subscribe to the top industry blogs in your market, both company blogs and personal blogs for ideas.
- Look through your latest news releases for ideas.
- Enlist your colleagues to write on topics in your industry or market that they are passionate about.
- Develop a series of “how-to” blog posts.
- Turn the “how to” blog posts into short videos.
- When you have a great idea, go straight to your “add new” button and write the headline and save it as a draft or write it down before you forget it.
- Include a great iconic image at the start of the blog that catches the eye.
- Place Powerpoint presentations on your blog by embedding links from Slideshare.
You don’t have to be in the market for a Super Bowl ad to learn who the world’s biggest marketers are. In fact, as a quick visit to Facebook illustrates, social media has a leveling effect: Whether you’re Coca-Cola or Jones Soda, your Facebook page looks pretty much the same. Coke’s billions won’t buy a dedicated wing on Twitter, either.
With this in mind, the following social media campaigns from marketers big and small are designed to be idea generators. This isn’t a ranking of the most effective social media campaigns of the year, but rather the ones that have the most to offer a small-business owner with big ideas and a not-so-big marketing budget.
1. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese’s Jinx
Last March, the venerable Kraft brand launched an interesting campaign on Twitter: Whenever two people individually used the phrase “mac & cheese” in a tweet, Kraft sent both a link pointing out the “Mac & Jinx” (as in the childhood game Jinx.) The first one to reply back got five free boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese and a t-shirt.
What you can learn from this: This is a very low-cost way to track down potential fans on Twitter. All you have to do is search a given term and identify two people who tweet the same phrase at (roughly) the same time. In return, you’ll gain goodwill, a likely follower and probably some good word-of-mouth buzz on the social network.
Keeping content fresh and interesting is key to capturing an audience for your company’s blog, but it’s easy to fall into a rut when it comes to generating new posts. Janet Aronica offers a sampling of excellent ideas for creating interesting new content from the ebook 100 Content Ideas for Community Managers at oneforty.com to get those blogging juices flowing and keep your clients coming back for more.
Are you skeptical about using digital and social media in business marketing? Think it’s only for consumers, and that business customers don’t have time for it? Your competitors don’t think so. And they are gaining competitive advantage by embracing new digital and social methods of connecting with their customers.
Those tools are fast becoming the single most important way to attract new business customers and sustain old ones. Search has become one of the most efficient ways to create and optimize leads. Customers are hungry for more and different kinds of digital content, and new ways to network and engage online.
Increasingly, business customers create great content and experiences to market to their own customers, so they know what they want from suppliers when they themselves are the potential buyers. That doesn’t mean Procter & Gamble expects to see the Old Spice guy selling enterprise software (although maybe it couldn’t hurt). Business customers do expect to see the same unique and effective tools they use: from how-to videos on YouTube, to personalization tools, to employees as customer service reps, to intuitive design that rewards past activity and predictive data analytics.
At the heart of successful digital marketing to business customers are three core qualities: Radical Transparency, Micro-Relevancy and Open Collaboration.
Number 1. Special Offers
We live in a society that is as distracted as it is informed. People are making decisions on what to read, view, purchase, visit, and sample based on the information that filters through their attention dashboards. At best, even the most qualified information sourced from the most trusted contacts will receive only a cursory overview. The trick is to concisely introduce the value up front. If the offer is compelling and affiliated with their interests, the consumer will make the connection to personal value and benefits and click-through to redeem the special or coupon when ready or so inclined.
For example, @delloutlet uses Twitter and Facebook to send coupons to customers. In just one year, Dell recorded upward of $3 million in sales directly sourced from Twitter.
California Tortilla (@caltort), a chain of 39 casual Mexican restaurants based in Rockville, MD, sends coupon passwords via Twitter, which customers must say at checkout to redeem the offer.
Number 2. Ordering
While the distance between introduction and action is only separated by a link, many businesses are using Twitter to log orders. Coffee Groundz (@coffeegroundz) uses the direct message channel on Twitter to receive and prepare orders. Using Twitter as a promotion and marketing channel, Coffee Groundz reports 20 to 30% increased sales and market share.
As an aside, Pizza Hut offers an iPhone and Facebook application that allow hungry patrons to order pizza directly from Facebook and their mobile phone.
Number 3. Word of Mouth Marketing
Moonfruit offered 11 Macbook Pros and 10 iPod Touches to celebrate its 10th anniversary. In order to qualify, contestants had to send a tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit. One month following the completion of the contest, Moonfruit site traffic was up 300% and sales also increased by 20%–and all because of a meager investment of $15,000. The company also realized SEO benefits, by landing on the first results page on Google for “free Web site builder.”
Wendy White, Moonfruit’s CEO, realizes that there’s a fine line between effective and destructive #tweetowin campaigns: “Such campaigns must be courteous and fit with a company’s brand, lest you draw the ire of the Twitter-sphere.”
You must decide – as an organization and as an individual team leader – what spirit you intend to convey with the participation of your employees in social media.
If your intention is for them to be simply mechanical amplification vehicles for a very carefully crafted marketing message, that can work. You’ll likely see some results in terms of absolute reach and volume of short-term message resonance. You will sacrifice a degree of credibility on behalf of your individual representatives and personality and genuineness on behalf of your brand in favor of a consistent, safe(-r) message. You will also likely sacrifice culturally, since your employees will realize they’re part of a marketing machine, not someone who is entrusted to help build and shape a brand.
If your intention is for employees to become individual voices for your organization and unique representatives of your company’s values, personality and diversity, that can work too. You’ll likely see results in terms of trust and affinity for your brand as well as better identification of your advocates, both internal and external. You will sacrifice a certain amount of stability and potential consistency of message in favor of communicat
How should employees behave as company representatives on social media platforms?
- Transparency. Should employees acting as company agents identify themselves? Should they use their own names? Should they list their job title? Should there be specific rules that apply their use of photographs or avatars?
- Confidentiality. What information are employees allowed to disclose? Is this information already public? If not, does it require specific approvals? Who gives permission for release of non-public information? Is the information of competitive value?
- Financials. How should employees discuss corporate results or financial situation? This is particularly important for publically traded companies where regulatory agencies are involved.
- Copyright. How are intellectual property (aka IP) issues to be handled? What are the internal procedures? To whom should employees address their questions?
- Competitors. Since social media forums tend to be open to the public, how should employees treat competitors and their representatives? Are there specific procedures that they should follow?
Starting now and lasting … well … forever, technology and empathy are now part of your business strategy. To what extent disruptive technology impacts your markets, will depend on your industry and the rate of adoption within it.
Your priority areas include understanding these 10 trends:
- Social Networks from Facebook to Twitter to Google+ and how they’re connecting to influencers and businesses.
- Geolocation check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook location updates to share locations and earn rewards or opportunities for discounts.
- Crowdsourced discounts and deals including Groupon and LivingSocial and what’s valued and why.
- Social commerce services like Shopkick and Armadealo and how they create personalized experiences that are worth sharing.
- Referral based solutions like Yelp, Service Magic, and Angie’s List to make informed decisions and how shared experiences can improve your business, products, and services.
