Note: This fantastic post was thought up by our Director of PR, Allan Gates. Enjoy!

As we near the dawn of 2011, it is a time for introspection and reflection. New Year’s Resolutions will be made: pledges to lose weight, go to the gym, clean out the inbox, and write the great American novel.

2010 was a great year for the social web and 2011 looks even better. So, as we prepare to get back to work, renewed and refreshed, a few social media New Years’ Resolutions are in order. Might we suggest:

So, what are your social media New Year’s resolutions?

Influence is a gut feeling. You can tell that’s true by the lack of consistent definitions or research on the subject. As individuals, we just seem to understand inherently what influence means, how it impacts us, and what to do with it — sometimes to such a degree that we don’t always know when we’re influencing someone or being influenced by another.

But now, as we’re encouraging brands to find their “influencers” and build relationships with those people to gain the greater trust of their communities, it’s important we find the right words to describe just what influence is, how it’s different (if at all) in the world of social media, and how businesses can use and measure influence to best connect with their markets.

Influence Is…

Human influence, as a verb, is defined most often as an ability to impact the actions of others. There are quite a few derivatives, but that’s the gist of the term. Influence falls directly in the category of “Cause and Effect”, with influence — that quiet impact a person has, or the cause — creating an effect.

Okay, that seems pretty simple. But what is influence, as a noun, comprised of? Why are we affected by influence? What is it about influence that makes us act? In many circumstances, we are influenced by those whose personalities, missions, and characters align with ours. So influence is really made up of a complementary belief system, as well as similar wants, needs, and interests (on both shallow and very deep levels).

We are moved to action by those people and entities who have voices that resonate with us and are perceived to have an M.O. similar to ours. Influence is what moves us to call certain people for a quick pep talk, participate in certain causes, and turn to certain brands to fulfill our material needs. Mind you, within this discussion of influence we must recognize that brands don’t only fulfill material needs — the mission and causes they put forth are what draw us in, and are in some instances what keep us returning.

So what’s the difference between social influence and social media influence? Is there a difference at all? Or is influence just a bit more nuanced around these parts?

Social media and business aficionado Brian Solis has, over the past year, dug extensively into the concept of social media influence and has come up with a working definition of the term:

Influence is the ability to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes.

Unlike the more generalized definition mentioned above, this definition incorporates the line of thought that we can consciously influence things and people. As businesses, this definition of influence seems well suited to apply.

How do you feel influence is defined in the social media realm? What examples have you seen of companies tapping into their “influencers” to impact their larger market? We’ll be writing about this more in the future and are interested in hearing your thoughts!

Are the kids jingle-belling?

And everyone telling you, be of good cheer?

Have you had great happy meetings and friends come to call?

We are celebrating the most wonderful time of the year with some ideas (outside of the Christmas box) about how Santa employs social media. Enjoy!

Track Santa’s Journey Through Social Media – Now you can follow Santa on the radars of Google Maps, Google Earth, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and TroopTube. Now that is what I call coverage!

9 Ways to Connect With Santa on the Web – Oops, did you forget to drop the Christmas list in the mail? No worries, because now Santa and his elves are digitally ready to receive and respond in a flash.

10 Ways You’ll Know Santa’s Embraced Social Media - Now, I realize this was published last year, but David Alston has such a way with words…it deserved another read in 2010.

As 2010 comes to a close we’d be remiss not to look back and recognize just how much the social media listening space has matured this year. It’s incredibly rewarding for us as a company to see the widespread adoption and acceptance of social media listening and engagement in so many organizations. And seeing those that are really building social media communication into the foundations of their businesses makes us even more proud of the work we and you have been doing, and excited for what’s next.

We’ve achieved quite a bit this year at Radian6 and we wanted to share some of the highlights with you all.

• Radian6’s revenue in 2010 tripled over that of 2009.
• More than 1,000 new customers representing thousands of brands adopted the Radian6 solution in 2010.
• More than half of the Fortune: 100 are now using Radian6 to reach their social media listening, measurement, and engagement goals, including Dell, Microsoft, and PepsiCo.
• Our employee base grew by 150% to 220 employees in 2010, and we’ve got plans to double that in 2011.
• We were named a “leader” in independent research firm Forrester, Inc.’s “The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3, 2010” report.

None of what we accomplished this past year could’ve been done without the unwavering support of our customers and community. We are beyond grateful for the loyalty, feedback, and engagement of everyone who’s invested a piece of their business and/or themselves into Radian6 — this success of ours shows just how powerful social media can be, and just how important strong, reciprocal relationships are to the success of a company.

We have some incredible things planned for 2011 and can’t wait to share them with you. But for now, let us take a minute to say a heartfelt and humble “THANK YOU!” to all our customers, fans, and the greater social media listening and engagement community for putting your faith in us as we uncover new ground. 2010 has been an incredible one thanks to you all, and we’re looking forward to making 2011 even better.

Cheers, and happy holidays!

It’s been a quiet week over here on the blog, but we can’t wrap this one up without sharing some of the best links from around the social web with you. Let’s get to it.

Dell’s Social Engagement Journey, by Jackie Huba

Last week we shared the news of Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center with you, but a project of that size cannot come together with out loads of time investment and hard work beforehand. Jackie Huba, Principal of Ant’s Eye View, plotted out in detail the journey Dell’s taken to reach this point of high, successful engagement, and as you’ll see, it wasn’t always “roses and buttercups” for this tech giant.

11 Predictions for B2B Social Media in 2011, by Jeffrey L. Cohen

Again, we can’t help ourselves with these end-of-year lists and predictions, and the list of predictions Jeffrey L. Cohen created over at Social Media B2B made us a bit giddy. You B2Bers out there should take a read through the list and catch up on some of the predicted trends in the B2B social media realm for next year — it’ll be interesting to see how many of them come true.

How Much Money Do Community Managers Make?, by Jason Keath

Jason Keath, founder of Social Fresh, a social media education company, has created an intriguing infographic lending some insight into the world of community management. Jason’s research shows the very real truth that community management as a general job category is growing up, but it’s still a fairly tailored, individualized role that’s tied to the goals of each company that employs it. You’ll see what we mean when you go check out the image and some of the details Jason’s shared in this post.

Blogging Seems to Have Peaked, Says Pew Report, by Audrey Watters at Read Write Web

Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its research report detailing how different generations use the Internet. Unsurprisingly, across all the generations, Internet use and online activity have increased. But, as the title of the article says, blogging among teens and even among the 18-33 demographic has declined. Reading blogs, however, is a different story. Why the decline? Is the concept of “blogging” changing? What say you?

Line of sight digital marketing framework, by Chris Penn

In this brilliant post, Chris Penn, Vice President, Strategy & Innovation, at Blue Sky Factory, outlines his marketing framework that “[explains] what’s broken in your company, how to find it, and how to make things better.” Chris posits, and rightfully so, that everything we do in business must lead back to net profit, and he’s built a no-nonsense framework around that position to help marketers and business people gain a direct line of sight from their efforts to net profit. Now would be a perfect time for you to test out this framework and identify where your business can improve — we are wrapping up another year gone by, after all.

Have additional links to share? Please feel free to do so in the comments!

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

Many of you know that Radian6 has a fairly heavy event presence — we speak and attend numerous industry conferences each year, and we appreciate the exposure and opportunity for connection that attendance brings us. Being at these events also gives us a chance to talk one-on-one with the folks leading the charge (or hoping to) with social media use and integration in their respective companies.

Quite often, when we get to enjoy those face-to-face moments, we hear, “You’ve given us some great theoretical and strategic ideas around social media use, but how do we do it?”

Here’s where the tough love comes in. We’re not going to give you all the answers. It’s your job to come up with the specific steps you must take to get from Point A to Point B (or it’s the job of your agency).

The frequency of this question begs a larger one, though: How can we help bridge that gap between strategy and execution to help organizations understand what they need to do to either get their social media programs up and running or make critical changes to their current strategies to continue down a successful path? What is that bridge of understanding comprised of?

Appealing to Human Nature

Our inimitable Director of Community, Lauren Vargas, wrote just last month about the various characters within a business team that might have great intent but struggle with program execution. Identifying which of these characters live within your team and appealing to their nature is a step in the right direction to getting a social media strategy executed.

For example, in dealing with The Overthinker type, managers must work with these people to push them through that analysis paralysis, or keep them from getting to that point through regular affirmation and a system of accountability.

Now, we’re not saying coddle these characters, but it’s important for any manager to learn about their team members’ idiosyncrasies and stalling points so he or she can devise a means of helping those folks past their hurdles. That, essentially, is what a manager is tasked to do — help his or her employees get their work done to meet strategic team goals and objectives.

Turning Fear Into Curiosity

It’s a “universal” truth that getting started is almost always the hardest part in performing any task. We fear what we don’t know, and even if we know what we’re up against, our minds can play some pretty devilish tricks on convincing us that this time we’ll fail.

Getting past that fear to taking the first step is an exercise in mind games. One of the ways to view stepping into social media is as an experiment of sorts; create your hypothesis for your experiment (e.g., set your goals for your program) then start moving through process iterations and tweaking things as necessary to get closer to proving your hypothesis (e.g., achieving your goal).

Here’s the thing — you will fail. Parts of your social media program will fail, because that’s the nature of life. When was the last time you achieved a goal by following the very first strategy you created for reaching it? Has that ever happened? Probably not. Too many external factors change for that to be possible. Life and business are made to be successful through experimentation and iteration.

Develop a culture within your team that supports effort, insight and learning, and curiosity to allay the fears your team members will inevitably face stepping into unchartered territory.

What else can we do to close the gap between social media strategy development and execution? Hopefully these couple suggestions got your wheels turning a bit, as we’re hoping you’ll share your ideas in the comments.

Another week has come and gone, and it’s time for us to wrap it up by sharing some great links with you guys from around our very own social networks and the social media space.

How the World Googled in 2010, by Mashable author Lauren Indvik

Our penchant for retrospectives over here (okay, maybe my penchant for retrospectives) made this link a must-share. Google announced the results of its annual Zeitgeist report, sharing the most popular search terms of 2010 from all over the globe. The results are interesting on a cultural, sociological level. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Q&A With PepsiCo: Immersion Is Key To Digital Savvy, by Mediapost reporter Karl Greenberg

We’ll be talking more and more about the concept of digital immersion as companies move past the initial adoption phase of social media and work toward integrating social communication tools and practices throughout their organizations. This interview over at Mediapost with B. Bonin Bough, Global Director of Digital & Social Media for PepsiCo., shows how the folks at PepsiCo are working to immerse their employees in digital experiences to help them develop that “gut feeling” about the online social space.

11 Best Practices to Building an Effective Blogger Outreach Program, by Arik Hanson

Companies with blogs that feel stale can be rid of that staleness by inviting new voices to contribute. But creating a blogger outreach program that works is an exercise in skilled targeting and relationship development. Arik Hanson, digital PR consultant and Principal of ACH Communications, has created a concise list of tacks we should all be taking to develop solid blogger outreach programs, to get the right voices sharing their thoughts with our audiences.

How to manage an enterprise Twitter presence: Avatars, account structure, and basic response methodology, by Olivier Blanchard

If you have any questions about how to structure an enterprise Twitter response team, you can bet at least 90% of those questions are answered in this post by marketing strategist Olivier Blanchard. The title says it all, and we highly recommend you take a read through this one. Even if your company isn’t enterprise-sized, the principles Olivier shares about Twitter response are worth reviewing.

The iPad And The Marketing Professional, by Mitch Joel

Still searching for Christmas gifts for your digitally inclined family members? Yeah, so are we, so don’t worry. But we stumbled upon this great post by Mitch Joel, President of Twist Image (a leading digital marketing agency), that not only offers up a few gift ideas, but also shares some of Mitch’s thoughts on the developing trend of virtual gift giving and the app economy.

Have additional reading recommendations to share with us and your fellow readers? Please do so in the comments!

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

At our recent event Customer Service 2.0 | Proactive and Social, we highlighted and explored the principles behind the move towards social customer services and the impact this is having on engagement and business strategy across multiple industries. We also explored the idea that social media is less about the form of technology utilised and more about the interactions between individuals in this medium.

As the event clearly highlighted, effective communication in any medium (be it social media or otherwise) is multi-faceted and involves using facts, insight and feedback to inform on-going strategy. As such, we wanted to share with you some feedback from the event. We feel this feedback gives a valuable insight into important issues within social media customer service and the varied aims our delegates have, when embarking on their own enterprise-wide social media strategies.

(more…)

Many of you heard about the launch of Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, which happened yesterday at the global technology company’s Austin headquarters. For those of you who didn’t hear, go ahead and click on that link up there to get the scoop — go ahead, we’ll wait — and/or take a peek at the video above.

Dell‘s Social Media Listening Command Center is not the first of its kind — Gatorade’s Mission Control Center kicked off the development of these enterprise-wide-yet-centralized social media listening stations. For organizations the size and caliber of Gatorade and Dell, social media listening centers make absolute sense, and we’ll see them continue to pop up in the future as more companies adapt their internal cultures to really embrace listening.

These command centers are living, breathing listening grids and they’re vital to the health of the brands that install them. Why? Because social media adoption, on both individual and organizational levels, is fundamentally changing the way we share our thoughts and opinions with each other, and companies must adapt to that change.

Dell and Gatorade have tangibly demonstrated that they understand online social communication channels are here to stay, and that those channels will only become more engrained in our day-to-day lives as technology continues to develop. Their adaptation to people’s growing propensity for digital sharing and chat is to develop enterprise-wide workflow systems to harness that chatter, put it in the hands of the right internal stakeholders, and use it to improve products, customer service, and even entire business models.

This is where social media — and social business — is headed. The depth of web-based listening necessary to improve the global marketplace will only increase as more people lean on their social networks and online communities to connect, share ideas and feedback, and, essentially, live their lives. And it will be imperative that organizations of every size integrate social media listening into their business strategies, create efficient workflows to process social media data, and develop strategies for company-wide engagement.

We’re proud to be working with such forward-thinking companies as Dell and PepsiCo (owner of Gatorade) to help them weave social media into the fibers of their businesses, and we’d like to congratulate them on leading the way with social innovation. Keep an eye out for more social media listening command centers in the months to come, as we’re sure we’ll be seeing more of them.

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on another year gone by, look at what we’ve improved and what could use improvement, and prep for the upcoming year. The reflective process is a natural part of life and a requisite for business, and we’d like to help you along with that process with our December eBook.

In it, we’ve included nine major “rules” for social media use that have developed over this last year, which are grouped into the categories of listening, measurement, and engagement (so you get three “rules” per category).

Why the quotation marks around “rules”? The applicability of any rule is always relative to a situation, and there’s a slight chance that one of these rules won’t be appropriate for your work with social media (we’re talking really slight chance here). We believe these will all apply, though, and hope that they inspire you to review your current social media programs to make sure you’re employing some (if not all) of them.

The rules in this eBook are fairly timeless and broad reaching, but we’ve provided some solid ideas and recommendations to help you apply them directly to your social media efforts.

As 2010 comes to a close, set aside enough time to thoroughly review all you’ve done with social media this year and prep yourself for the year ahead. As fast moving as this space is, and with the ground the concept social business is poised to cover, it’s essential we all hit the ground of 2011 running.

When we as businesses start or continue the discussion around the value of social media, inevitably the question comes up about sales. Can we sell in social media? Can the value in social media be translated to the cash register or the actual bottom line?

The simple answer is yes.

The more nuanced – and more important – answer is yes…but.

Sales and social media can work together. You can find prospects, talk with prospects, provide information.

The trick is that social media is rarely, if ever, the direct sales channel itself. Social media can increase the likelihood of sales through better targeting, more consistent touchpoints and availability of information, establishing affinities and relationships and all of the things that support the eventual transaction. Those are the same things we would want to do offline to nurture our prospects, but now we have more online channels to bridge those connections in both places.

Yet we’re so impatient to take the platforms social media provides and make them the direct marketing and revenue channel. But it’s not so easy.

Take something like Dell Outlet (disclosure: they’re a customer)? That’s an oft-cited example of empirical proof that social media can be a sales channel since the company reports millions of dollars in sales through that Twitter channel alone. But here’s an important qualification for that.

Dell spent not just months but years building their reputation, addressing customer concerns, offering up feedback channels, listening, participating, and contributing long before they ever made social media channels into a sales vehicle. They invested in their social media presence for a great deal of time – likely without much in the way of easily quantifiable dollar return – and saw the value in all of that first. They not only addressed the concerns and conversations happening within their community, but they spent time shoring up their website and e-commerce experience, providing lots of channels for discussion and feedback, listening and responding, all designed to enhance the journey toward the transaction rather than trying to be the destination.

Dell Outlet works because it’s been and continues to be buttressed by countless people, resources, and information that make it a single trusted channel among an ecosystem of investment in a community. But it’s really unlikely that you can replicate that singular piece with any success until you’re willing to methodically and patiently invest in the rest.

Instead, consider social media as the supporting cast for the sales process, and a way to enhance your prospects’ experience with your company so that the eventual sale feels like a natural, even welcome culmination to the relationship. Here’s a few ideas:

Finding the Point of Need: Listening carefully for when people are asking the right kinds of questions or seeking the sort of information that you can helpfully provide, which turns you into a problem solver instead of a pitch artist. It’s the difference between having your response or comment be an ill-timed interruption or a perfectly timed contribution. Not every mention of your company or competitor is the same as an expressed need, so study the difference and handle with care.

Being Responsive: Few things raise the hackles of people as much as the feeling of being ignored. Be there when someone is asking for you, answer inquiries in a timely fashion (on the web that usually means minutes and hours, not days), and you’ll already be ahead of the game. We don’t ever scold businesses for being too responsive when we’ve asked for their attention, so it’s a worthy goal to aim for. The web moves fast, so we as businesses need to be prepared for new notions of speed.

Availability (and Ease) of Information: Take care to make your website and social destinations user friendly and a fluid experience that reflects the focused needs and attention of social consumers. Have lots of resources front and center, and easy to find, whether it’s on your website or elsewhere. Make them easy to consume, download, and share (from file formats to concise writing and simple visuals). Focus on providing the information that your prospects want and are asking for (even if you didn’t create it!) not just the information you’re wanting them to see.

Being friendly: Amazing as it may seem, politeness, enthusiasm, and manners are not as ubiquitous as we’d like them to be. Teach your front line staff how to be gracious, helpful, and friendly on the web, even in the most trying of circumstances or in the presence of criticism or competition. Help them stay approachable and accessible in the places and ways that your customers are reaching out to you. And if you can’t teach them to do that, it’s time to get different staff to work the front lines of social media. It’s that important.

Focus on the In-Between: As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close. But what we forget too often is that the sale is a momentary, and temporary point in time. It’s an important one, but the sustainability of a sale and a customer is only as good as the experiences between the transactions. Before the sale and after the sale. We spend most of our time as customers in the moments outside of the sale itself, yet we often treat those moments as merely the means to an end through our business lens. Shaping and nurturing the entire customer lifecycle is important, and the interactivity and pervasiveness of social media makes it beautifully suited for the task.

So can sales and social media co exist and even work together? Absolutely. But it requires all of us to remember that a sale is a multi-faceted thing with many variables along the way. And when we start seeing our sales as living, breathing cycles instead of instances that stop and start, we can start understanding and investing in all of the moments and experiences that make a sale a success.

What’s your experience with selling and social media? How are you seeing it done well, and what turns you off? Would you buy from you and why? I’d love to hear more of your take in the comments.

The question of how to get the C-suite supporting the use of social media is still a fairly common one, and it’s no surprise, really — while adoption rates are ever increasing, many organizations are still in the early phases of social media integration, and executive teams aren’t yet convinced of the benefits of these platforms.

Before you go any further with your social media program, make sure you’ve got these pieces in place to ensure your C-Suite is clearly seeing the impact social media is having on your internal teams and on your brand. Without them, you’ll be hard pressed to get continued support of your work.

1. Clear Goals We continue to drive this point home because too few folks get started in social media with any end-goal and reason for (social media) being in place. Why do you need to start a blog? Why do you need a branded community? Why do you need a Facebook page? State as concisely as possible why your organization needs to get involved in social media, set reasonable goals to reach, and amend those as necessary.
2. Allocated Resources One of the hurdles of social media adoption is the belief that if employees are given the chance to access social networks, they’ll abuse their privileges and spend all day on them. To allay that fear, provide a thorough list of who will be participating in social media on your company’s behalf and the hours they’ll be spending doing so to your executive team. Include in that list steps you will be taking to streamline your social media processes and draw timelines to those steps so executives will know when to expect budget requests for platform implementation or changes to team tasks.
3. Timeframes In some instances, you’ll have to test the social media waters and prove their value to your executives before going full steam ahead with a fully integrated social media plan. Create a short-term plan and set a timeframe around it in which you’ll show your executive team specific goals reached, additional findings that could be capitalized on in the future, and any drawbacks that might have shown up in your efforts. Essentially, you’ll be doing a timed experiment, so develop your hypotheses and timeframes, and deliver an experiment analysis at the end.
4. Exit Door Have a plan developed and ready to show your executives for gracefully exiting the social media space if necessary. People inherently don’t like feeling locked into a project or plan, so give them a way out. You can exit social media without a ruckus if you do it gracefully and with candor, and your executives will want to see that’s possible. Give them your clear and detailed plan for doing so.
5. Tailored Reports Rarely will there be a situation in which your executives will want to see the results of every single thing you’re tracking. Establish early on what, exactly, your C-Suite needs to see, and keep it fairly short. In your report, give them a glimpse of what is working, some of the challenges your facing, and how you’ll be handling the positive and negative results moving forward. Also identify a reporting schedule that works for them. The key is to not overwhelm them with data; show them what matters and move on.
6. Tailored Listening Dashboard Sometimes your executives will want to peek into the stream, but if they’re not totally familiar with social media, that peek could be overwhelming and time intensive at best. If possible, create a “personalized” listening dashboard for your C-Suite that offers them a chance to see what’s happening around your brand and industry on the social web without bogging them down.
7. Encouragement Sound fluffy? Human nature indicates that the best way people understand and “buy into” something is by experiencing it themselves. Encourage your executive team to participate in social media, at first on a personal level. In time, if they show the desire to interact on the social web on behalf of your brand, work with them to create a general plan for interaction. Provide training if needed, and be available to answer any questions.

Like with any new platform, adoption and support of social media takes some coaching. What else would you add to this list? Would you amend or take any of these suggestions off the list? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

When: Wednesday, December 15th
Time: 2pm EST/11am PST
Click here to register.

We’re interrupting our regularly scheduled Fantastic Friday (Social Media) Reading series to let you folks know about our next webinar! In just a couple weeks, Radian6′s Lauren Vargas will be hosting CRM expert Brent Leary to discuss how social CRM has developed into the budding industry it is today, and where it’s headed in the months to come.

The integration of social media-based communication into business has created a need for organizations to capture and use the information and commentary their customers, prospects, and brand-focused communities share across the social web. Social CRM as a practice has developed as a solution to that need, and will only grow in importance as more companies weave social media into their business models.

Brent is well known in the CRM and social CRM communities and is a co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials, LLC, a CRM advisory/consulting firm; an award-winning blogger; and the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business. Lauren is our in-house CRM authority, so this webinar should be filled with some great insights and conversation around the evolution of social CRM.

The webinar will include a short presentation from Brent and will be followed up with a Q&A that Lauren will host. As always, we’ll be taking audience questions for Brent throughout the webinar, and for our Twitter-using audience members, feel free to use the #radian6 hashtag during the webinar to share soundbites and ask questions.

Have the time to listen in? Please do! Click on the link above to register, and we look forward to having you join us. If you have any questions beforehand, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Last Tuesday marked the first of a series of thematic half day seminars that 6Consulting will be hosting on a quarterly basis. Customer Service 2.0 Proactive and Social looked at what impact social media was having on the customer service landscape and how perceptions around service related interactions were fundamentally changing.

“Social Customer Service is generating considerable interest across major businesses in the UK. 6Consulting’s Customer Service 2.0 event provided a rounded picture of the tools that help facilitate online engagement, the business impact to anticipate customer needs, as well as best practise models and the importance of understanding the enterprise-wide implications and benefits of doing so.“

– Guy Stephens, Senior Consultant at Foviance and guest speaker at Customer Service 2.0 (more…)

“Mundane” is such a strong word, isn’t it? We hold it in a bit of contempt at first thought, despite the fact that our day-to-day lives are really pretty mundane. Much of what we do to keep our health and sanity is considered mundane, but these “bland” moments flow through our days in a steady stream and build the foundation of our lives. Maybe we don’t think those moments are worth talking about, but it turns out that, when given the opportunity, we will talk about them, and with fervor. Even more amazing is the fact that we often connect with others over these simple moments.

This not-so-phenomenal phenomenon is something marketers are beginning to take note of and tap into, as was shared in this AdAge article about what type of conversational content is truly relevant to people these days.

In the article, author Matthew Creamer shares a couple anecdotes about BlackBerry and the company’s penchant for simple conversation. Essentially, BlackBerry has made a few “mundane” references and asked some simple, non-brand questions of its followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, and has received much stronger response to those comments and questions than was expected.

While the monetary result of this type of conversation is up for debate, the truth is that there is value in simple conversation. Where brands need to be strategic with this simplistic style, though, is in making informed decisions as to where it makes the most sense to invite those conversations, and what “simple” conversation is within the context of the brand.

Some additional questions you need to ask when considering the value of online conversation to your brand (and the type of conversational style you might want to adopt) include:

1. What is your brand personality? In the article, Creamer offers up another example of a simple conversational style, sharing how Oreo uses it to connect with its fans on Facebook. For Oreo, a fun and lively, yet light conversational tone matches its brand personality, making it easy for fans to hop into the fray of cookie chatter without having to make a large mental leap from brand personality to execution. Oreo poses questions that match its brand personality and let fans share a bit of themselves and their experiences with Oreo products.
2. What are your goals for online engagement? Yes, we’re hammering the goal setting principle home here. What the heck are you trying to achieve by talking to your customers online? Are you engaging with them to provide customer service? Are you aiming to improve the recognition and reputation of your brand? The type of conversation you inspire ties directly to your goals for engagement, which means this type of light-hearted, “mundane” conversation really might not be a good tack for your brand. Explore what it is you’re trying to do, in detail, to see if this conversational style is truly right for your company.
3. Who will be creating and managing these conversations? If you read through the Oreo cookie example, you’ll see that, despite the free-flowing feel of their conversations, their chatter is planned carefully and executed by a group of folks skilled in connecting brands with people. To get the voice and conversation where you want it to be, you’ll need to have the right people in place.

There’s so much more to this conversation than what fits in a single blog post. Keep it going in the comments, please? Tell me what you think — is conversational, “stream marketing” the way of the future? Where does it fit?

This week may have been short for some (US holiday), but all of you kept cranking out though-provoking content. We wanted to share some of our best reads of the week.

Managing your word of mouth influencers – it isn’t all about social media by Steven Van Beleghem – Influencers are closer than you think…try searching amongst your workforce.

5 Steps to Thinking More Socially About Communications by Dave Fleet – Shift your thinking from traditional to social communications. What would you add?

Why Amazon Doesn’t Understand Social Commerce by Leigh Duncan Durst – No matter how big an organization you may be, never underestimate the voice of the customer.

Budget for Content not Distribution by Ron Ploof – A must-read for those preparing for 2011 goal and strategy planning.

Study: NASA, White House are social media savvy by Lance Whitney – Gloves off! There are no more excuses. If government can harness the power of social media, every organization can do the same.

Reaching for social CRM success (or failure) by Michael Kringsman – Positive change begins with the planting of a seed.

Social CRM FTW: How Real Companies are Going Social and Winning by Lauren Carlson – Great inspiration from some familiar names.

Looking back at 2010 – In 2010 by Paul Greenberg – Paul has the pulse on changes happening at lightening speed in the social CRM industry…are you up to date?

Happy reading! If you have any submissions for next week, please let us know.

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

If you work in the social media space you will be well aware that much of the conversation in recent years has revolved around Return on Investment (ROI). The initial excitement and novelty of corporate social media has worn off and the need to prove success and measure impact has moved front and centre. While those that manage online communities agree that measuring social media is essential, the metrics used track and report on ROI will differ amongst peers. We were particularly interested in understanding, through the use of a Poll, what metrics specifically were most important to those in the industry?

Engagement

When asked whether Sentiment, Leads, Sales, Reach or Engagement was most important, the majority answered with Engagement followed by Leads/Sales. This is an encouraging result because striking a balance can be difficult. While quantitative measurements such as leads and sales derived from social media are important, value should also be placed on soft metrics like engagement levels and popularity of content because ultimately they work in tandem.

Answers will greatly depend on who you speak to and where along the social media journey they might be as the emphasis on any one of these metrics will change over time. In most cases the beginning of a social media strategy is marked by a predominant view to engage online and foster a community.  Following on, as the community develops, the focus will tend to shift to tracking social media leads through to conversion or customer retention. This can be a daunting task but with the right social media and CRM tools in place it is achievable.

What Matters to Me?

So how do you assess which one of these metrics, amongst others, you should pay most attention to? Generally, this will depend on a number of factors but first and foremost this will be reliant on your goals and intention. If social media use within an organisation is centred on providing quick and effective customer service then sentiment and engagement might demand a primary focus. Alternatively however, if a community is already present and they are discussing your industry or services as a matter of course then sales and leads might be more relevant.

In the end, for a comprehensive view on corporate social media there needs to be a balance of all four metrics listed in our poll as well as other metrics as they apply to the business. Undeniably all of these tie in closely together and influence each other.  Ultimately, focusing on only one would be to the detriment of any social media strategy. Moreover, by placing equal value on these returns you will find that the social media stakeholders are present throughout the business, not just in marketing, PR or customer services. Connecting the business is the key to becoming a social business which can ultimately deliver ROI across departments and be recognised throughout the organisation.

What metrics do you use to track your social media success?

The Radian6 Community team is delighted to welcome our newest member, Cory Hartlen, as community manager. Of course, some of you may already be familiar with Cory in his former Radian6 role as an agency strategist. Cory has an energy that cannot be matched and will be teaming up with me, Teresa Basich, and Genevieve Coates, to not only communicate with all of you and help create helpful content, but our entire team will be working together in 2011 to build out a dedicated Radian6 community for our users, and the social media community at large (more news on that in future months). So, please drop by and leave a note of support for Cory. And because he is already part of the Radian6 team, please allow me to let Cory tell you a bit about his dynamic character. – Lauren Vargas

Change can happen fast, and in the land of social media, exponentially so.  When I applied to Radian6 in November of 2008, the timing was perfect. At that time, I had been in the financial industry for three years and let’s just say, the fall of 2008 made my decision for a career change easy. Not having a technical background, the learning curve at Radian6 in the first few months looked much like the end of a hockey stick, straight up!  But being in a room with ten other people all walking and talking this new lingo, I quickly got my feet under me, thanks to Tom, Andy, Craig, Mark and Rich. In the early days, being stuck in the same room all day listening to sometimes all ten of us on the phones at once was the perfect learning environment-no break in the fire hose of information being shared.

Very early on I got to work on the front lines with some of world’s largest agencies.  I quickly learned the ropes of the agency lifecycle-quick and fast being the mantra.  I loved working with our agency teams. No other group is looking to push the boundaries of social media to provide and prove value to their clients quite like them. The creativity, energy, and desire to collaborate kept me on the edge of my seat wanting to contribute further.  Whether it was speaking publicly, or sharing ideas about a client pitch, I took the challenge to go above and beyond every chance I had; something I will continue to do in my new role.

Enter, the opportunity to join the Radian6 Community team and take a chance on something that I’d never have the guts to do on my own-share my thoughts through writing. After spending time touring our country as a stand-up comedian, public speaking is my first love.  With the support I’ve been given on the writing side of things from this Community team and their willingness to help me in this new role, I knew I could not pass up this chance.

I’m greatly looking forward to sharing as much information about our platform and industry through collaborative posts, ebooks, and webinars. Please connect when you have a chance, @CoryHartlen or send me an email with thoughts you’d like to share, cory.hartlen@radian6.com. Looking forward to it and have a great week!

Cheers,

Cory Hartlen

For those of you who know me, I am incredibly organized in my professional life. With the addition of a second child, my personal calendar is more like daily juggling practice-training for the circus. However, one thing I get right every year, is holiday gift giving…if all my shopping is done in August of that year. (There is always a caveat.) Post August, unless I buy the gift while the thought is fresh in my mind, it is very difficult to guarantee I will deliver the card or gift. The intent for gift giving is genuine, but sometime execution is lacking. I am sure some of you could relate, no?

The intent versus execution struggle is also familiar to those of us in the B2B area. Each time we release an eBook, present a webinar, or speak at an event, we are always asked about the difference B2B organizations face executing social media strategies. (The difference between B2B and B2C is not as broad as you may think.) As the results of a recent study show, the differentiating factor is intent versus execution. Not so different from the gift giving dilemma some of us face year after year. Inspired by the article, Gift givers: How they vary in intent and execution, I decided to break down the social business character-types.

The Stockpiler has been known to hoard case studies and research reports. They are quite knowledgeable of social media theory, but have not had any practice in execution of said theories. They do not know the motivation for entering social media for their own organization and are overly concerned about keeping up with the Jones.’

The Organizer tends to draft a social media strategy complete with actionable tactics, yet does not connect the dots of how the strategy and tactics will affect other departments across the organization.

The OverThinker agonizes over the research phase of the strategy and is often left in the state of analysis paralysis or finds self meandering down a hole in search of the White Rabbit. They tend to remember everything that went wrong or could have gone wrong in past projects.

The Last-Minuter deliberately leaves the strategy creation until the last-minute and does not get the essential buy-in needed from organization critics. They are often seen scrambling at the last-minute and putting everything into their plan regardless of applicability or research.

The Forgetful One understands the need for a social media strategy and execution plan, yet is often seen scrambling at the eleventh-hour putting emphasis on shiny new toys and one-size-fits-all tools instead of sound strategies and tactics tailored to their organization.

The Crafter doesn’t believe in third-party solutions and spends most of their time piecing together research, tactics and tools instead of focusing on strategic execution, actionable insights, and solution-based platforms.

The Delegator knows the need for a social media strategy, but has no interest other than checking the box of completion. They pass the critical research and decision making to a person or team ultimately not responsible for the execution.

Do you see the actions of your organization in any of those character-types? How do you push beyond intent and execute?

It’s that time again—time to share some great thoughts from around the social web about the social web. We’ve got some cool stuff for you today, so rather than keep you waiting we’ll just get to it. (If you’d like a quick explanation of the basis for our Friday link sharing, feel free to check out last week’s inaugural post.)

The Social CRM Fallacy That Could Kill Your Business, by Christopher J. Bucholtz

This one is for our social CRM (SCRM) community. Well, really, it’s for anyone looking into implementing SCRM into their customer relationship processes. The truth is that most folks considering the benefits of SCRM are waiting for “best practices” before moving forward with their plans. In this article, Christopher discusses why waiting for someone else’s SCRM successes might just hurt your business.

The CRM Watchlist 2011 Preseason: Who’s Gonna Make the Team, by Paul Greenberg

In the spirit of community and crowdsourcing, one of SCRM’s foremost thought leaders, Paul Greenberg, is compiling his annual CRM Watchlist with your help. In Paul’s post he outlines the CRM categories he’ll be looking at, the criteria he uses to rank players, and the list of companies he’s been watching throughout 2010. Want to toss your thoughts into the ring? He’s hoping you do, so head on over and speak up.

The Three Essential Processes of Marketing, by Tom Webster

Every single marketer out there should read this post. Tom asserts the most important processes that comprise any marketing program and asks if your program has all three in place. We highly recommend you take a read through and review the foundations of your marketing efforts afterward.

Getting Good Buy-in on Web Projects, by Anne Caborn

While the management of your brand’s website is usually left in the hands of a few people, multiple people from a variety of business functions should be closely involved in its development to ensure that the final product truly represents the organization behind it. In this article, Anne shares some strong approaches for getting the buy-in you need around your company to create a great branded website.

Facebook Messages: Email Marketing Analysis, by DJ Waldow

The big news this week, aside from The Beatles catalog being available on iTunes, is the launch of Facebook Messages. In this post DJ Waldow, email marketer and community manager extraordinaire, dives into the specifics of Facebook Messages and provides great insight and recommendations for those running email marketing campaigns. The main point? The advent of the social inbox means that providing solid, useful, interesting content is more important than ever before.

These are our picks for the week! Have more to add? Please share in the comments!

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

Definitions.

Labels.

Buckets.

All of these descriptors help us feel more comfortable in wading the sometimes perilous waters of business. The familiarity of “chunking” our thoughts and business processes form a protective life raft. Unfortunately, dependence on this comfort mechanism, limits our ability to learn how to swim and explore the contents below the surface. We create silos within our thinking processes, just as we form silos in our organization when something transformative rises up from the depths. Is it by nature we form these factions? Even if it is determined by nature or nurture, how can we identify, understand, and breakdown these silos?

Just the other day, as I was walking, I was knocked on the head by an acorn. No, I did not have any revolutionary ideas about Newton’s Law, but I was struck (literally) by the social nature of plants. A recent article in the November issue of Discover magazine, discussed the secret social nature of plants. Author, Valerie Ross, shares the results of recent studies observing plant life and the proliferation of their species. In one study, it was found that some plants find mechanisms to distribute their seedlings away from the parent because of microbial enemies living in the soil around the parent plant. Another study found plants like the Sagebrush, survived because of the close proximity to their own kind. In contrast, the Sagebrush plants worked together through airborne chemical cues to protect against insect attack. Ross summarized the findings of the related studies, “If the plants recognize each other’s alarm systems, having relatives nearby may help them keep safe.”

Analysis.

Listening.

Engagement.

How does this relate to social media? Well, how often do we see social media directorates rising up in organizations to embrace the changing forces of social? Quite often. Just like trees or plants releasing their seedlings, many organizations have found that for their social media strategy to gain legs, it must be separated from the rest of the organization and habitual thought processes to survive and thrive. However, the separation cannot be permanent.

Like the sagebrush, organizations have to find a way to integrate the transformative throughout all business functions for sustainability. We have to bring the new into the fold and work together to promote a unified front. What has traditionally been one department’s expertise and kept solely under one domain, must now be shared across the organization. Understanding our processes, observations, and weaknesses-this knowledge-will allow organizations to be unified and stronger, to support their internal and external communities.

Social media accountability is a hot button for discussion, and rightfully so.

Companies and businesses want to be able to accurately and consistently track specific metrics that can point to their success or failure in social media. They want to be able to justify continued investment in listening and engagement efforts. They want to be able to show the leadership that they’re getting back something of value for the effort and resources they’re putting in.

All of those things are absolutely valid, as they are with any other area of business.

But the challenge that’s emerged in regard to social media measurement specifically has everything to do with our sense of urgency.

The speed of the social web is forcing us to stand up and take note. We know we need to respond quickly. We know that a crisis can boil over in minutes and hours, not days or weeks. We know that expectations are for more, faster, now.

But measurement, collection of data, development of proof points; all of those take time. Sometimes a great deal of time. Gathering enough bits of information in order to draw conclusions, derive insights, spot trends over time that can inform decisions and process about future investment? That requires the patience to collect. To put the processes and platforms in place to capture that information, tie it together. To allocate human resources that can not just aggregate the data, but spend time evaluating it, asking questions, extract not just insights but recommendations.

The very nature of quality analysis runs counter to the immediacy of interaction on the web. We can collect information quickly, but making sense of it takes time, and adjusting our processes and plans to react to what we learn takes longer still.

It’s always been that way. Once upon a time we had to launch an email campaign before we knew if it would work. We build websites before we were sure that they’d pay off in the long run. We wrote sales strategies based on the information we had available, we tracked the ensuing sales, and we adjusted accordingly.

In short, we need make the investment in the efforts first – based on the best information we have and a well-thought hypothesis – knowing that proving out our hypothesis is going to take consistent execution over time in order to have any usable or informative data upon which to assess our efforts.

The real trouble is that we don’t have precedent. What we’re struggling with is not the measurement and analysis, nor even the gathering of the data. (In fact, we could argue that we’ve almost got too much information and knowing which are the valuable bits is the trick, but that for another post).

We’re struggling with creating our hypotheses in the first place, and creating a plan that we have confidence in because it’s based on what we know might be working for others. Hence, our hunger for case studies and examples, as imperfect as they may be today. For all of us, it’s some reassurance that we’re not the only ones taking these risks, and that there are some glimmers of at least superficial success that we can draw from in order to design our own plans and approach.

We’ve shortened that cycle in other areas because we can build our plans and strategies based on whatever we’d like to call “best practices”. We’ve invested the years, the trials and errors, and the fits and starts of nascent measurement there, too, while we were getting our footing. Only now can we look back and say we “know” how to measure success in these areas (though that in itself I’d debate, too).

But regardless, the realization we have to come to is that valuable measurement and accountability analysis for social media takes time and investment in proportion to the value we’re hoping to extract from it. The social web is fluid, rapid, and real-time. Sound measurement and analysis of what we find there is not. And if we’re to succeed in this evolution toward more social business, we have to find a way to reconcile both.

One of the major tenets of social media engagement is showing the folks in and around your network some love for the great things they create and share. Heck, that’s really an important foundation of any healthy relationship. It’s a bit like the Golden Rule, and while it sometimes seems like we can never do enough to show the people in our network just how much we appreciate and value their contributions to our lives, it’s amazing what even the little things can do.

So, in the spirit of showing some love, we’ve aggregated a few recent pieces of great content from inside our social networks to share with you. This isn’t only to show love, though; this is also to provide you with great reading and ideas to chew on as you move forward and continue developing your social media programs. You’ll see pragmatic how-to articles as well as some forward-thinking content on social business, and much more.

We also encourage you to share some of the best stuff you’ve read recently in the comments, and give us an idea of why you got so much out of that blog post or those articles, too. And if you like this concept of regular link sharing, let us know. The more you tell us, the more we can provide the content you want to see.

Okay. Without further ado, onto the meaty stuff.

3 Myths That Prevent Regulated Industries from Embracing Social Media, by Shannon Paul.

We, as people and organizations, often make assumptions about why we can’t do something before we do any research or deep thinking into how we might actually do it. At some point, we have to give up this method of jumping to conclusions and start seeing the possibilities, and a place to start with that is in finding out the truth about our assumptions. In this article, Shannon debunks three myths (read: assumptions) that have been keeping regulated organizations from jumping on board with social media. Note that this myth stuff doesn’t just apply to regulated industries, though. What myth is your company succumbing to that keep them from social media integration?

Content Strategy and the Dying Art of Execution, by Joe Pulizzi.

Content strategy as a practice is still catching on, but if you’ve already gotten started with yours, or are in the planning stages, this post is for you. Even if you’re unsure about content strategy, though, take a read through this one. In it, Joe shares multiple reasons why a content strategy could fail, but if you take a look at his reasons you’ll see they reach far past the bounds of content. As he asks at the end, “Where is your ‘lack of’?”

Our Corporate Brand is Cramping My Personal Brand, by Todd Defren

Early on in the social media revolution, companies had the upper hand in evaluating potential and current employees via social networks. Nowadays, people are working diligently to craft and manage their online “brand”, and are turning the tables. In this piece, Todd discusses how the tables are being turned and what we can do to adjust to it.

Six Best Practices to Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment, by Laura Patterson on MarketingProfs

Sales and Marketing should work together as well as peanut butter and jelly, but often that’s just not the case. In this article, Laura offers directly applicable suggestions for better aligning your Sales and Marketing teams and efforts around opportunity management. Note: You’ll need to subscribe to MarketingProfs to read this one (a basic subscription is free).

Social CRM Strategies for Business — Day 1 and Social CRM Strategies for Business — Day 2, by Emanuele Quintarelli

A couple weeks ago, we attended the Social CRM Strategies for Business seminar in London, and, while there, were exposed to some fantastic thoughts around social CRM from some of the best in the business. In these posts, Emanuele puts the meat of each day into an easily digestible format for readers to absorb and think upon. These are strong summaries of the event and we recommend a read.

Okay, now it’s your turn! What have you read recently that’s got your gears turning? Share in the comments!

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

The Fall event circuit is winding down and will take a brief break as we approach the holidays. Throughout the last couple of months, I have been on a whirlwind tour of social media related events as both an attendee and a speaker. As someone who has been on both sides of the stage, I want to share what I have observed and experienced and let all of you weigh in on what you find valuable.

After all, we are at a crucial point in the social media maturity and adoption curve. Organizations are clamoring for examples of successful business function integrations and we have a responsibility to provide accurate, actionable and inspirational information to and from the people.

Here are some quick tips and resources to make sure your session rocks as a presenter or an attendee:

Presenter

1. Reflection: It is always great to hear from the horse’s mouth, how companies are succeeding and the growing pains that occurred to get to that state. Don’t feel pressured to talk exclusively about the various examples that have bounced around through the social media bubble. Be your own case study. Establish a rapport with attendees by demonstrating the human side of your organization.
2. Assess: Do a quick gut check before launching into your presentation. Ask the attendees why they are there, what the hope to get out of your session, and their familiarity of the topics you will be discussing. Ensure your presentation is flexible and attuned for the skill level of the attendees. (Side note: if you are presenting outside of your home state/country, be prepared with examples and case studies that are familiar to your audience.)
3. Excitement: No one will be pumped about your session if you are not. Great content will be lost with a monotone delivery. Share your passion with the crowd. Why are you on the stage? Then feed off their response. If you smile, listen to their needs, and excite them, the crowd will not let you down.

Panel

1. Diversity: Avoid having all likeminded individuals and organization representatives, add diversity of thought and business structure (i.e., B2B, B2C, and Agency)
2. Preparation: Winging it is not the best approach…not for the comfort level of the panelists or the attendees. Establish your session theme and have all panelists contribute to the content and structure of the panel. Have prepared questions and answers and discuss as a group prior to your session. Have a couple of practice sessions. Just because there is more than one speaker and, perhaps the added dimension of informality with a question/answer structure, does not mean that is an excuse for not being well rehearsed (prepared, not canned).
3. Resources: As my esteemed colleague, Amber Naslund, wrote, give your presentation legs. Many presentations are extremely visual and not heavy in content. Crwodsource your panel for resources they will mention during presentation and aggregate these links/resources into one location easily accessible at the end of your session.

Attendee

1. Speak Up: I know, there are times when the session falls before the first cup of morning coffee or after the midday meal and you are feeling less than perky. When the presenter asks a question, answer. This is the only way you can communicate your expectations of the session. If you do not speak up, don’t expect the presenter to read your mind.
2. Look Up: Social media channels have given us an avenue to share content and lessons learned with those who could not attend the session, but don’t forget you are sitting in the room. The speaker needs to know your expectations and be able to read facial expressions to gauge if the content is being received well. (Granted, I know some will argue that the presenter should pay attention to the back channel, but it is difficult to do both live.) Be courteous and let the presenter know they have your attention. If you have questions, ask. Don’t agree, that is fine too. If appropriate, express those concerns at the end of the presentation in front of the audience or one-on-one with presenter.
3. Reflection: This step is a bit different than the one listed for a presenter. Hopefully, the content expressed in the presentation made you think about your past, present or future actions. Express what you have learned and share with others and the presenters after the session. How has what was communicated inspired you to think or act differently? Was the content actionable upon your return to your organization? This feedback is valuable and needed for any presenter/panel to hone their future subject and content.

Let’s work together to make sure the remainder of the Fall conference season is beneficial to all…and let’s take a step back and reflect on how we can make the 2011 season even better.

What are you looking for as a presenter, panelist or conference attendee? What conferences or unconferences have rocked for you and why?

It’s of utmost importance to us as a company to provide the best and most comprehensive information we can about social media listening, measurement, and engagement. That information often takes the form of blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and more. And while we’re thrilled to be able to provide those resources to you, many of our customers and folks in the greater marketplace have asked for more content about the Radian6 platform and its application.

To those of you who’ve asked, we’ve heard you and this is our answer. The new Radian6 Platform Blog we’re launching today has been a long time coming, and if you swing by as it develops, you’ll notice that it’s a culmination of a few different kinds of topic coverage.

You’ll see that we talk directly to key specifics of the Radian6 platform, but also spend a good chunk of our word count on demonstrating how it’s applied in countless business scenarios. We’ll be sharing details about some of the most often asked-about features in the Radian6 dashboard, and you’ll also see some stuff from our awesome Customer Support and Product teams.

So, is your interest piqued? Well, if it isn’t piqued yet, the announcements we’ve posted over there regarding our newest product updates to the dashboard and Engagement Console might get you clicking through.

Some of these new features in the Radian6 dashboard include a Google Analytics integration, enhanced query support, expanded account management capabilities, and increased platform security. And the Engagement Console now features functions like Macro sorting and sharing, multiple Topic Profile support, and enterprise extensibiity.

Rather than keep you waiting any longer, we’re just going to stop here and let you go check out the new blog and the details on our newest platform features. We’ll see you over there!

Successful corporate blogging walks a fine line between art and science. On one side of the coin, a corporate blog needs to communicate clearly to a wide variety of readers, and reach them on a deep enough emotional level that they’re motivated to act. On the other side, it needs to be crafted and carefully maintained to positively impact a business’ bottom line, which requires a bit of science and analysis.

Those of you who’ve started and/or are maintaining a corporate blog understand the effort it takes to make that blog work for your company, but those of you who are just beginning to explore the idea of launching a business blog might be totally overwhelmed at the thought.

If you’ve wanted to start blogging for your business, or already are and aren’t seeing the results you want, the ebook we’ve put together for November is a great resource to help get you on track.

In this ebook we cover everything from figuring out exactly why you (or your superiors) want to start a corporate blog to handling some of the challenges you might face after it’s up and running. And yes, there’s a whole section dedicated to setting goals and objectives and selecting the right metrics to properly measure your blog’s progress.

And while we’re on the subject, you’ll be seeing some changes from us on the blogging front throughout November. We’re not going to spill all the beans here, but you can expect more content from us that covers a wider array of topics surrounding social media use.

We’re looking forward to bringing you more and better, and we hope you are, too. And if you’re in need of some help on the blog front, download November’s ebook and give us a holler. We’d be happy to chat.

If you’re getting your feet wet with social media, you’ve probably considered or hired a social media manager, community manager, or other person on your team that can lead the charge and help become the voice and face for your brand. Maybe you have several.

You’ll spend a great deal of time empowering them to speak for you, to raise awareness for your brand, to get out there in the community and build the all-important relationships that are so key in this and any other business. You’ll send them to events to speak. You’ll give them the keys to the kingdom and charge them with building your presence, enhancing your reputation, making your brand and your company more human and accessible through their interactions with past, present and future customers.

But what’s inevitably on your mind – and the minds of many who are adding this kind of talent to their teams – is:

What happens when they leave?

Empowerment

In order for your social media team to really be able to do its best for you, you have to be willing to give them the freedom to make decisions for themselves, and to infuse their unique self and personality into their work.

After all, part of what makes social media so special is that it peels back the curtain a bit on logos and corporate mission statements, and instead shows the people and the personalities behind a brand. It makes those people real instead of imagined, and gives your customers the sense that Bob or Susan are really there to take care of them instead of some nameless, faceless someone in a call center.

So to make sure those people can react and respond nimbly, to ensure that they can make a call on the fly that will create an outstanding experience for your customer or community, you have to let them run with it a little bit. And if you can’t trust the employees you have to do so with good judgment and in a way that’s appropriate to their work and the company, you have a hiring problem, not a social media one.

Like any other pivotal role in your company, it can be a little uncomfortable to make someone indispensable. But in order for you to really take advantage of the power of individual connections, that’s exactly what you need to do.

Individual Reputation

Whether you call it “personal brand” or something different, the reputation and character of the individuals you put in these highly visible roles is going to bleed into their work. And it should! That’s what you want it to do. Demanding that individuals in social media adhere to a rigid set of rules, conformed standards and overly groomed “brand voices” takes away the very individuality that can make them successful in the first place.

The relationship you have with your engaged individuals ought to be a symbiotic one. They’re investing in you, the company, their networks and their ability to forge strong, trust-based ties with individuals on a one-to-one basis that would be really hard to pull off as The Brand. (This isn’t entirely unlike the rockstar sales reps we used to admire in the day for their ability to build a rolodex that was spilling out of the plastic cover, but perhaps with a little less polyester).

In exchange for that, they’re drawing from your company’s professional reputation, recognition, and industry standing. As individuals, they’ll benefit from the platform you provide for them in ways that go beyond the day to day functions of their role and job. And increasingly, individuals seeking these kinds of roles will want to align their reputation with a company that both understands the value they bring, and to whom they would feel passionate and enthusiastic about lending their own abilities.

The Solution

There is one solid way to be sure that the investment you make in these individuals is something that’s sustainable and that will provide resonant benefits on both sides of the equation even after individuals move on from the company:

Build a Bench.

By that, I mean that you need to be cultivating a mentality and a culture that promotes this kind of relationship between the company and all of its employees. Your social media team may be the obvious ones because they’re the most obvious right now, but it won’t always be so. The more pervasive social becomes in business, the more of your team members will have the opportunity to be visible as it relates to their work with your company.

So it’s to your benefit to never stake your wishes for your business’ social media success on the head of one particular superstar. Instead, look for superstars throughout the company, in lots of different roles. Find them and empower them. Create a superstar culture, and the inevitable departure won’t upset the entire apple cart, because there will be lots of people willing and able to step into those pivotal roles.

And as an added benefit? Building that kind of culture makes your business an inspiring place to work. Which means you might just find less turnover in the first place.

What Are You Contemplating?

As you consider or are building social media teams, does this discussion concern you at all? Do you feel nervous about this evolving dynamic between employees and companies, and what discussions do you have about it internally? Or are you energized and empowered about the potential for all of this?

Would love to discuss more with you in the comments.

image credit: Ctd 2005

At Radian6 we live and breathe social media. Online interaction and sharing are a part of our daily lives. We share stuff related to our hobbies and personal passions, but it’s part of our role here to share as much, if not more, business-related content and connect with folks who are interested in social media monitoring and engagement and/or our platform.

When it comes to online engagement, we have loose guidelines and policies in place that we follow while we’re “on duty”, but since the social web never turns off, those guiding principles follow us even when the work day is done. All this is to say that, in our world, our social media engagement is significantly impacted and driven by our work.

The thing to recognize here is that we’ve consciously chosen this path early in the game. But, as time goes on and social media becomes deeply engrained in more corporate cultures, will the integration of these highly open communication channels take the fun out of it all, so to speak? Will we see a forced openness from widespread corporate social media adoption that (ironically) pushes us to be more private with our lives and controlled with our outreach?

If you’ve heard Radian6′s CEO Marcel Lebrun speak, you know that he often likens social media to email. When email first appeared on the scene the business world was in an uproar over how to integrate it into their processes and what it would do to business communication. Obviously, we can now confidently say that email is so deeply rooted in business communication that many of us wouldn’t know how to work without it. As a company, we strongly believe that social media will eventually become so much a part of business communication and collaboration that, much like email, we won’t know how to work without it.

The inherent difference between email and social media, though, is that email is relatively private by default. Okay, so maybe we accidentally hit the “Reply All” button once in awhile, which never feels good, but the very home email lives in is secure, whereas social is significantly open. With email, you can’t passively observe what your friends and acquaintances are doing this weekend; you have to actively be invited into that conversation.

Right now, for most of us, all these factors play into how we communicate on fairly separate personal and business levels. But as more of us are asked to engage in social media on behalf of our companies, or, at the very least, be aware that we’re representatives of the businesses we work for, these factors will play into how we communicate on every level, and the lines between personal social media engagement and professional social media engagement will blur.

This begs the question: Will we start to pull back as we’re asked to speak more? And if so, what will that mean for our quest for transparency? How will that impact the work we’re doing to better reach our customers and garner their attention? What say you?

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

What we have collectively learned from social media interaction is that not every issue can be treated or responded to in the same way. Traditional marketing execution and monologue do not work in the online space. The hammer may have worked in the beginning, but as organizations mature with their social media thought and execution, one method or tool does not suffice. As organizations become more aware of social media opportunity and how it aligns with overall business objectives, we will begin to see a shift from singular tool focus to platform solution thinking.

Tools vs. Platforms

Oh, the number of choices can be agonizing! There are shiny, new tools coming on the market daily, but it does not have to be confusing to wade through the number of tool versus platform options available, if you understand your motivation for use and evaluation. Before entering into the difference between a tool and platform, it is helpful to understand how your organization is currently engaging (or not) across the social web and how this function will evolve.

While a tool or combination thereof may solve your immediate needs, determine the investment of time, solutions, and human capital that may be spent and lost without taking the future into consideration. Getting your feet wet in social media is inevitable, avoid sacrificing future gains, by evaluating the needs of other departments across your organization (i.e., call centers, business intelligence, sales and human resources, just to name a few).

Utility, a Means to an End

Stop for a second and take a look around you. The mouse you are using to scroll though this post. It is a tool. Your computer is functioning with the support of an operating system – this is a platform. You see, Most tools are created with a singular purpose. When an indirect issue arises or need to scale response across the organization, this tool or combination of tools may be used to provide an adhoc response and analysis, but with some manual work and effort required.

Of course, you may argue the existence of a multi-purpose tool…like a Swiss Army knife. But have you ever tried to use any of the other tools besides the knife? Do any of them work well or for long periods of time? Unlikely. This tool is awesome for an annual camping trip, but if you tried to use the tool daily for several functions, you would become very frustrated very fast.

Graduating to a Solution

A platform is a foundational, multi-pronged and solution based. It should be permeable and evolve as your strategy shifts and the need arises to collaborate across the organization.

Features you want to look for in a platform:

• Depth and Breadth of Coverage: ensure you’re capturing all relevant conversation from across the social web
• Analytics and Metrics: Determine the specific media metrics you can track, filter and analyze via report
• Collaboration and Workflow: As your social media strategy matures, you’ll want the option to share data among your team
• Engagement: Determine if you are able to coordinate, track, and measure all outreach from within the platform (avoid wasting time jumping back and forth from inside and outside a tool to capture valuable information)
• Scalability: Check the availability of integrating your social media monitoring across other areas of your organization
• Provider Growth and Longevity: Determine how the provider will grow and improve with your needs; how the platform will deliver on long term solutions and/or if the provider will require resources from your organization to upgrade

Monitoring, observing and actively listening takes time. As you build traction in social media, the time it takes to listen well and execute actionable insights found in observation, is going to increase. Ideally, you want to spend your time acting on the gold nuggets you find instead of manually gathering information across various ad hoc tools. If you are spending more time gathering and analyzing results than acting on community feedback, you may be ready to graduate to a platform solution.

Stop looking at every challenge as a nail. Unless, of course, it is a nail.

What would you add to the distinction between a tool and a platform?

If you were to walk around our offices today, you’d see our Radian6 guys sporting some clean shaven, boyish faces. While this is nothing new for some of them, for others, it’s the first time their skin has seen the light of day in years . So what brought on this change? A new trend? HR guidelines? Multiple, horrible freak barbecue accidents? No! It’s all for the great charity known as Movember.

Movember is a charity event that runs throughout the entire month of November. It gets its name from the very unique fundraising effort that consists of male participants (known as Mo Bros) starting with a clean shaven face and growing a moustache (a “Mo”) over the month while fundraising. Women supporting the cause (known as Mo Sistas) also help raise funds and support their Mo Bros. All donations from this mass Mo-growing effort go toward finding a cure for male-related cancers. You can find out more about Movember right here.

It’s a cruel reality nowadays that most of us can vividly picture a moment in our lives when we found out someone we care for was diagnosed with cancer. Often times we’re left feeling like there’s nothing we can do but watch as our loved ones fight for their lives. This month we have a chance to stop watching and act. Radian6 is proud to support Movember as part of its Community Giving Back Program for non-profits. We’re even prouder to do our part to help raise funds for this great cause as a team (and grow some great mo’s, as well).

Clicking here will take you to the Radian6 team donation page. Also, pay attention to our Facebook fan page photo album and our Twitter account for update photos of our male employees and their mo’s throughout the month. But don’t just watch us; ACT! Create a team, donate, and grow a Mo! This is a month for us to not be affected by cancer but to be the affect that helps to positively change the future.

The world of Social CRM is rapidly evolving, and it’s a term than many businesses are latching onto as the social media space evolves.

In many ways, I have a feeling we’re doing that because “social business” might feel too lofty or abstract, and things like “social media marketing” don’t really express our desire to wire the implications of social into our companies or the business relationships we have. CRM is at least a somewhat familiar construct, something that many businesses have spent the last decade or two coming to understand, and it’s a great bridge from our existing understanding of customer relationships to learning how they’re changing in front of our eyes (and what we must do in response).

All aspects of today’s social web – from marketing to relationships and the very culture of business – are all related to one another if we’re ever to truly realize the potential of This Thing Called Social. And as we continue to look at Social CRM’s place in the world and its evolution in business, we have to consider some key aspects of it:

1. Social CRM as a Mindset

Social CRM as a concept is complex, and is really at the heart of today’s business shift. It begins with the intent to develop more nuanced and personalized relationships with past, present, and future customers. That comes with it not just the technologies, but the culture shift. The idea that as businesses, we can and should be doing more to bring the voice of the customer into our organization and incorporate it into every aspect of the company, and that we should let it drive both why and how we do what we do. It’s the philosophy that underpins the practice. And it’s really where the work is, because for many companies, this is a gigantic, seismic shift in the way they’ve ever approached customer relationships before.

2. Social CRM as a Mechanism

Much like social media, social CRM is a term you can apply to the mechanics, platforms and systems that provide its infrastructure. So in some moments, when we discuss social CRM, we’re addressing the need for the technologies to adapt and include dimensions of social relationships in the data itself, to integrate that data into other key business systems, and to improve and enhance how that data is delivered back to the people who need and use it. Simply put, one part of social CRM is about evolving the tools we use and know in order to incorporate these new interactions and touchpoints across the web. We need that for the active cultivation of the relationships themselves, and so that we can do detailed analysis at all stages of a customer’s lifecycle with our company.

3. Social CRM as a Strategy

Building a pervasive social CRM strategy will mean it touches many areas of the organization, from sales to marketing to product management to customer service. But in order to do that effectively, both the Mindset and the Mechanisms need to be in place. I’d argue that mindset and philosophy have to come first, or the deployment of all of the best processes, tools, and systems will forever struggle for a foothold. But if a business first wants to build more dynamic customer relationships and then will support that shift by empowering both people and systems, then and only then can an effective strategy follow, from goals through the tactical execution. It’s the equivalent of building a house once the foundation and the frame are actually in place.

Social CRM has massive potential in all three areas, but they’re inextricably linked to one another. One can’t really survive long term unless the others are in play, and over the course of the next several years for most businesses, they’re going to need to shift and evolve in parallel. I’d actually go so far as to say that social CRM can be a significant pivot point for much of social media’s future in business, as the relationships between us and our past, present, and future customers are really the center of it all.

But we cannot talk about social CRM as a blanket term unless we understand which aspect we’re addressing, and how it impacts the others. Much like social media and social communications. Are we talking the intent? The strategy? The execution?

They’re all intertwined, and they all have importance. But as we continue to discuss where the varying applications of social sit inside our companies and our industry, it does us all well to be specific about our discussions so that we can understand where we have to begin to build.

Have you been chewing on social CRM? What does it mean to your business, and what about it do you feel is getting too much emphasis or not enough? Would love to hear your thoughts and discussion in the comments.

When: Tuesday, November 9th
Time: 10am PST/1pm EST
Click here to register.

It’s been some time since we’ve hosted a webinar, hasn’t it? The summer has flown by and we’re seemingly well into fall (if the weather has anything to say about it, some of us are already experiencing winter). Now that the vacations, quick beach trips, and impromptu short days in the office are out of the way, it’s time we hop back on the webinar wagon and share some smart stuff with you to wrap up 2010. That’s why, in just a couple weeks, Radian6′s EVP of Business Development, Chris Ramsey, will be chatting with Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall about the state of the social media listening platform industry.

Zach is a leading expert on a variety of aspects of Social Intelligence, including the technologies, services, and overarching strategy of using social media data to inform business insights, and the author of Forrester Research, Inc.’s Forrester Wave Listening Platforms, Q3, 2010 report.

On November 9th, Chris and Zach will sit down for an hour-long webinar to share their thoughts on how things are currently looking for the social media listening platform space, some of the emerging trends in the industry, top enterprise needs for listening platforms, and they’ll also share some current best practices for social media listening and engagement.

Toward the end of their chat, we’ll open up the conversation to our audience so Zach and Chris can answer your questions and address your comments. As always, those following along can share those meaty webinar bits on Twitter, and also ask questions via tweet, by using the #Radian6 hashtag.

The social media listening platform industry is growing and changing at an unimaginably fast pace, and we’re looking forward to hosting this webinar to give you all a chance to see where this space is headed. If you’ve got any questions now that you’d like answered, please share them in the comments! And join us on November 9th for what is sure to be an interesting chat.

Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the hottest topics of conversation around social media, and an increasingly important part of social media in business.

A couple of years ago, it was an upstart social network for college students. Then it was the everyman’s social network, spreading like wildfire to teenagers and grandparents alike. And today, Facebook has taken hold as a significant and important player not just for individuals, but for companies who are looking to interact and engage with their customers online.

As a social media company, we absolutely understand the importance and significance of Facebook for our customers as well as the social media industry as a whole. So we wanted to talk with you a bit about how Radian6 approaches Facebook, and a few things you should know and keep in mind when including it in your listening and engagement strategy.

What We Cover

Radian6′s coverage of Facebook is built on Facebook’s Graph API. In clear terms, what that means is that Facebook provides us with a data stream of:

• public wall posts or status updates
• wall posts on Facebook Pages (or Fan Pages, as they’re commonly known)
• wall posts on Facebook Community Pages.

Also, a cool new feature: Facebook “likes” (from the Facebook Likes “plugin”) are now included in the “Votes and Likes” metrics on your Radian6 dashboard. Our current support is for the Like Plugin embedded on websites external to Facebook.

So if 20 people Like an on-topic piece of content where you’ve got the plugin installed, we’ll count it in the Votes and Likes metric in your dashboard.

(Note: while you’ll see Facebook posts in your search results, Facebook still requires you to log in to be able to view the public individual profile wall posts on Facebook itself.)

As it stands right now, the Facebook Graph API doesn’t include comments on wall posts. So, for instance, if someone posts a link on your Facebook wall and 10 people comment underneath that, those comments won’t be included in your Radian6 search results (even if they include keywords from your Topic Profile). It’s a current limitation, but we’re actively working on adding this capability.

As Facebook continues to build out their Graph API, we’ll continue to expand and refine the coverage that we can provide via Radian6. We’re going to continue carrying out coverage checks and enhancements on an ongoing basis, and we’ll keep you updated on how that coverage evolves.

Measuring Facebook

It’s important to note that comparing exact metrics of brand mentions on Twitter versus Facebook can be misleading, because conversations in open-access areas of Facebook only represent a snapshot of the potential total brand mentions. If a mention is posted in a closed or private area of Facebook, we won’t be able to include it in your results. As a business, it’s important to keep this distinction in mind, because it will impact the way you can measure and account for Facebook results in your monitoring and measurement activities.

A Note About Privacy

Something that’s very important to make clear: if your individual Facebook profile privacy settings are set to anything other than being viewable by “Everyone”, or if your Group is set to Closed/Secret, neither we nor any other search or monitoring provider will be able to see or find anything posted there.

Facebook is only a partially open network by design, which means that what’s visible to the outside world is dictated by the users themselves, and controllable via profile settings and preferences. For individuals, you can find those settings on your profile under Account > Privacy Settings. For Page administrators, you can adjust who can post to your page Wall your admin section, but wall posts on Pages are, by design, public. Facebook Groups can be made Open (completely public), Closed, or Secret, the last two only being visible to group members (and controllable by the administrator).

If your individual profile is private but you post to the Wall of a Facebook Page or public Group for a company or brand, that post will be publicly visible and available to Radian6 and other monitoring or search tools via the Social Graph API.

In short, Radian6 can and will only ever cover items that are classified as public, or that are posted in Facebook’s public areas.

What’s Next

We know how important it is to you that we stay on top of what’s happening in social media, and how important Facebook is to you. We’re listening, and we’re continuing to build out our coverage capabilities daily so that you never miss a relevant post.
Facebook presents a unique challenge in the social space, but we’re up for it. And we’ll continue to keep you posted as our coverage and capabilities for Facebook grow.

Have any questions about what you can and can’t do with Facebook data, or what you’re able to find via listening? Let us know. We’ll do our best to answer.

How many folks were able to attend BlogWorld this year? I had the privilege of participating on a panel with Bill Johnston of Dell and Suzanne Marlatt of Edelman Digital and moderated by Bryan Person of LiveWorld. We discussed the elements of community management basics, including the need for dynamic content. Here are the key factors we outlined to master the art and science of dynamic content and expand on the lead generation strategy tips we shared on this blog last month.

Dynamic content is:

1. Practical: Thought leadership is about providing and fostering actionable, relevant, and realistic ideas and discussions specific to your community.
2. Immediately Applicable: Organizations are hungry for ideas they can execute today. Embrace the idea of sharing ideas and case studies from resources within your community and not exclusive to your organization. Get a pulse of what levels of content your community is acting on and desires.
3. Strong in Brand Voice: Craft your content with a distinguishable organization voice and personality.
4. Varied in Format: The new, shiny tool may not be the method your community wants to receive content. Ask them. You may be surprised at how your community digests and discusses organization provides ideas and research.
5. Solution Based: Determine what the point of need is within your community. Craft content to address and solve pain points they have directly expressed or may not have directly linked to your brand or organization.

Do not dismiss the power of the feedback you are already capturing in your CRM platform and/or call centers through email, phone or IM conversations. There is a wealth of data already available to help nourish a budding content strategy, including understanding how your social conversations are influencing your website traffic. Think of your website as your social hub and discover why and how people are interacting with your organization. If you have the science to back up your content creation, your organization will be more informed of how to meet creation expectations and be more free to explore the art of crafting dynamic content.

On Friday we took a look at the parallels to successful parent-adolescent communications. We reviewed how many brands might be stuck in a rut, using old methods and getting little in return. So if the parallels run true then what’s next? Here is Part 2 of that post.

Maybe it’s Just a Phase?

For many brands the emergence of social media feels like a phase. It isn’t. In most cases the market stopped listening to them long before social media came along–it’s only much more obvious now. The consumer now has a stronger voice, and it’s not afraid to use it. It’s also networked in a way that amplifies that voice and gives it more confidence. It simply will not tolerate being ‘parented’.

So What’s a Brand to Do?

If the market has changed, then so must the brand. Fortunately, there is a growing list of brands that realize it’s up to them to evolve their approach if they want to continue to maintain and grow their customer base. So what can a brand do? Here are 6 ways that help brands better relate:

1. Start by listening. To borrow from Stephen Covey, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.” What does the market like about you and what do you need to improve? How do they want you to help them? Listening is the first step in building a relationship.
2. Share content of value. Share content that lets the market decide on it’s own as to what it’s going to do. Also, share what others are creating. Chances are your market will trust content from friends before you have a chance to build a solid relationship with them. And remember, a consumer knows when they are being ‘promoted’ to so it’s not content about how great you are.
3. Line up for them. Meet them on their turf and stop making them fit into your schedule and processes. They will tell you when they need something, so be attentive and listen for the cues to show up, and then help.
4. Collaborate. Stop assuming you have all the answers. You most likely don’t, and your market doesn’t like the attitude that comes with anyone who thinks they do. Slow down, stop trying to convince, and work with your market to innovate and test assumptions.
5. Get to know friends of friends. Constantly be looking to develop more relationships. Consumers look to each other for advice so aim to build friendships with the friends of your market. Who knows, they may end up being potential customers or advocates themselves.
6. Be willing to make mistakes and own up to them. Behind every brand are human beings, and human beings are far from perfect. Let your personalities shine through and be willing to attempt to change. Yes, you will most definitely stumble, but if you are honest in your attempts and quick to apologize, then your market will give you kudos for trying. While they are allowed to be demanding, they are also human themselves and they will cut you slack if you are trying your best to improve.

As marketers, what other things can we learn from this analogy?

The increasing popularity of social media means that a greater portion of the business is becoming affected by it. Involvement through Twitter, blogs and social networks is no longer restricted to the realm of marketing, as customer services especially is now using social media to reach out to their customer base.

This November 30th we will be hosting an afternoon event for customer service professionals in order to discuss how using social media and monitoring software can help customer service departments improve:

• Customer service response rates
• Customer satisfaction
• Online sentiment
• Service issues

We will be sharing case examples highlighting how we’ve worked with companies to implement enterprise wide listening initiative, how we’ve worked with companies to action key insights gained as well as showcasing our software. In addition to this we will be sharing our most recent Industry Insight Report on how leading brands and their customer services are performing within social media.

We’re extremely pleased to have Guy Stephens, Senior Consultant at Foviance with us for this event. Guy will share his experience in using social media for engagement through his work with The Carphone Warehouse and other major brands and customer service departments.

For more details or to join just email Marketing (at) 6Consulting.co.uk

Currently sharing a household with an adolescent or remember being one? Have you lived through this phase and have the battle scars to prove it?

Being a parent is not easy. We have no instruction book and we often learn the hard way through trial and error. One of the biggest challenges is knowing when to adapt communications styles as children grow into adults. So, I got to wondering, as marketers can we learn from the lessons of finding a successful parent-adolescent style of communication? Please take a read and let me know if we can.

One-way Communication Works Early On

As a parent you have a number jobs to do including looking out for what’s best for your kids. You have a lot of experience to draw on and often use your unquestioned authority to dole out commands on just about everything.

For the most part, this one-way delivery works pretty well for most day-to-day tasks for both you and your child. It’s a pretty efficient system–your child trusts you to do what’s best for them and, unless they are tired, hungry, or just in one of those moods, he or she accepts the unidirectional communication style without too much fuss.

Adolescent years? Think again

Then come the adolescent years and that one-way stuff communication style goes right out the window. As your teen starts the process of becoming an adult they begin to make their own decisions on what’s best for them. They start listening to their friends for input more than they listen to you. They expect to be asked to do things, not told, and even when asked they are pretty good at sniffing out if a request is actually a command cloaked as a question. They have their own opinions and expect to have those opinions respected and listened to. They have finely tuned hearing and have no problem ignoring anything they don’t believe to be valuable to them at that moment.

What you discover as a parent, and usually through painful trial and error, is if you want to engage your teen, you need to stop talking and start listening. You need to adjust your approach. It’s best to make suggestions and to collaborate with your child, and do this with no predetermined expectations of any particular outcome.

Relationships count more than ever.

Traditional Marketing First Evolved When Consumers Trusted Institutions

For the most part, traditional marketing approaches today were born out of an era of mass marketing developed in the 50′s and 60′s. During this post-war period institutions were trusted and always seen as having our best interests in mind. Brand X dictated, “You need this product,” and we went out and bought it in droves.

This command-and-control method was efficient and effective, and it seemed to benefit both the brand and the consumer. The traditional marketing industry blossomed into the multi-billion-dollar play that it is today.

The Consumer Matured

Then something changed along the way. Consumers matured. They stopped trusting institutions. They stopped listening to those one-way commands unless, on a rare occasion, it met their demands at the moment. They started looking to their friends as trusted advisors when they needed recommendations.

Consumers found their voice and with the advent of social media it was as powerful, or even more powerful, than any brand’s.

Oblivious and Acting as “Parental Units”

Unfortunately, like many parents, some brands still cling to the old methods of command and control when communicating with their marketplace or community. They still shell out one-way commands: “I’m the boss, listen to me. I know what’s best for you.” They rarely really listen, and relationships are only a focus when they need something from the prospective customer. Sure, they try to act cool and to entertain in order to get attention of the market, but for the most part they are ignored. Ironically, while avoiding changing their communication style, brands have become used to this extremely low feedback and often get very excited when a response rate breaks into double digits.

To their prospective market they have sadly become ‘parental units‘–to be tolerated and used only when the market feels they’re worthy. This is not a fun place to be no matter if you are a parent or a brand.

Have some thoughts to share on these parallel relationships between parents and their children and brands and their customers? Do so in the comments, and come back on Monday for the wrap-up!

Yes, indeed, it’s holiday time again, and I just couldn’t pass up another opportunity to do a top 10 post. Here are 10 signs you know that Halloween has gone social this year:

10. Grave Digging leads to top stories on graves.

9. Transparency guidelines require removal of all masks at the door.

8. Extra bag of chips given only with a check-in on Foursquare.

7. Candy count is replaced by total number of reTwicks.

6. Visits are up at houses with the most Likes.

5. It’s dark and scary outside – low follower count is good.

4. A TripIt email informs me half my friends are about to depart to my street.

3. The Halloween party host asks me for my Eventbrite ticket.

2. The Eerie glow of hundreds of faces is backlit by tweeting smart phones.

1. Blogging about treats is only allowed with proper disclaimers.

Have a happy and safe Halloween, everyone!

The breadth and depth of your social media program (and, ultimately, its success) is directly proportional to how well you’ve assessed what your team is capable of handling with the tools and training you’ll provide them. As much as we all wish social media was as cheap and easy to execute as many have led us to believe, the truth is it’s just not that simple; like any other business initiative, you’ll have to pour some well-chosen resources into making this social media thing work for you.

But, it might not be totally clear to you yet what you’ll need to make your social media program go. Before you get overwhelmed by the seeming monstrosity of this task, start here with a few ideas as to what you’ll need to assess and map internally to get moving.

Necessary Resources

This piece should be included in your strategy document and regularly reviewed and updated as your social media efforts grow and change. For example, if you’re ready for active engagement, at minimum, you will need:

1. People to tweet/blog/post to Facebook/comment/generally engage on behalf of your brand.
2. Technology platforms to execute on that engagement you’re planning (whether that be a variety of third-party platforms or an all-encompassing platform is up to you).
3. Training to get your engagement folks up to speed with the technology you’ve chosen for engagement and with your policies and guidelines.
4. If you’re doing any sort of monitoring/measurement (this shouldn’t even be a question), you’ll need to identify the technology you’d like to use to do that monitoring, and training to go along with these technologies, too.
5. More people to do the back-end listening, monitoring, and data analysis.

Again, this is the minimum for a company that’s ready to engage. Depending on your plans and goals, your list for resources might be double this size, or it might only include a couple things. As a rule, you’ll need to define human capital, time investment, and technology needs/requirements.

Educated Assumptions

At first, you’ll have to make some educated guesses as to how many people, how much time, and what kind of budget you’ll need to get your social media program off the ground. This is where preliminary research comes in–you’ll need to seek out information from other cases to support the hypotheses you make around your resource needs. We’ll give you some ideas of what you’ll need here, but do your own research that’s mapped to your plans for social media to ensure that where you start is fairly close to where you want to be.

Human Capital and Time Allocation

Taking the active engagement example above a bit further, you’ll need at least a small team of people to execute on that engagement plan of yours. Again, you’ve probably heard that engagement is something that can be done an hour a day by one person, but if you’ve matured enough in your social media path to have a fleshed-out engagement plan, you’ll need more time and people than that.

We break down the human resources that both small business and larger enterprises will need to create a fully functional social media team in our Social Media Time Management ebook, but in short:

Small Business (integrated social media):

• 1 team member dedicating 10-15 hours per week to social media listening
• 1-3 team members dedicating 1-3 hours per day to engaging, initiating, and creating
• 1 team member dedicating 5-10 hours per week to measuring your social media efforts

Small Business (exclusive social media) and Large Enterprise:

• 2-3 full time employees dedicated to listening
• 2-4 full time employees dedicated to engaging, initiating, and creating
• 1-2 full time employees dedicated to measuring your social media efforts

Technology

The platforms you choose to do social media listening, measuring, and engagement can vary widely in cost and functionality, but you must consider that variances in cost are often inverse to the quality of data pulled and the time needed to configure and work with those platforms, e.g., the higher the cost, the more turnkey solution you’ll get for your money.

Monitoring and Measurement

The social media monitoring and measurement landscape is a pretty vast one and can be overwhelming at first glance. Take these few steps to create a short list of platforms to review:

• Ask your industry peers what they’re using to listen, monitor, and measure their social media efforts; pose the question to your online and offline business networks.
• Find out what your budget is for this line item; quite often, budget dictates that initial technology investment.
• Sign up for demos and free trials of the platforms you’re reviewing to get a feel for their features and map those features to your social media goals.

Costs for monitoring platforms range anywhere from free to tens of thousands of dollars per month. Again, review your options with an eye toward your goals and objectives for social media–which platform best fits with what you’re trying to achieve? Can that solution grow and adapt with you to accommodate changes and scaling of your social media program?

This is just the tip of the resource assessment iceberg. What other considerations should you take into account during your planning phase? If you’re already in the social media mix, share your stories and tips for folks just getting started–in terms of resource planning and allocation, what’s worked for you, and what do you wish you’d done differently? The comments are yours.

So you’ve looked at social media, you know there’s value, and now you want to get your business involved. Where do you start and how do you do it?

Listen – Engage – Measure

If you’re thinking of getting your business involved in social media make sure you have a plan. In most cases your plan will include three key dimensions; Listening, Engaging and Measuring.

In the first instance your initial listening or buzz monitoring initiatives will be pivotal in clarifying how your business will benefit and what value you will add when engaging. In addition to this, having an understanding of current conversations will help you to create clear-cut goals which will ultimately feed into how and why you engage online as well as how you will go about measuring your success.

Listening 2.0

There is always a lot of chatter surrounding why companies should listen, but how does it actually create value. This is where engagement comes in and where listening goes beyond simply tracking a campaign, sentiment or ReTweets. Make engagement a natural part of the process as it will allow you to:

1. Understand industry discussion and be a leader in your space.

Knowing how your competitors are engaging and what your customers, prospects or supporters want will help you reach out online to the right person at the right time and in the right place. Beyond the online space, managing buzz effectively can not only help feed into your social media strategy, but can also have enterprise-wide repercussions, helping you to understand your product, your customers needs and the way your brand is received, with much more clarity

2. Engage at a point where you can create value.

This might mean helping your customers with problems, being a thought leader and contributing to the industry discussion while sharing content from others that might be of value. Demonstrate the fact that you are listening and paying attention but be more than just reactive and stay ahead of the curve.

Trial and Error

If you listen first you’re already a step ahead. However, you’re not always going to get it right. As with any new idea, product or initiative you will learn from your mistakes and develop your social media strategy on an on-going basis. Social media is constantly evolving, at a fast pace, so cut yourself some slack and do it better next time.

Shout About Your Achievements

Ensuring that your social media presence is paying off is much more than just getting the reporting right for your superiors. The metrics will help but it’s really about company buy-in, from the new intern to the COO but this is only going to happen if you’ve got a story to tell. Make sure that you shout about your achievements across the organisation, differentiate yourself from your competitors and be an ambassador for your team, your business or your industry. By using the numbers and KPIs to your advantage you will make the most out your social media engagement and even eventually find your niche within this space.

A strategy is only as good as its execution. No, really. If you’ve come around here a few times before, you’ve probably noticed that we’re huge proponents of social media strategy development, program planning, and regular reassessment and tweaking of those things. But none of that matters if you can’t actually execute on the plans you’ve made. And, despite what you hear out there on the Internet, truly successful social media listening, measurement, and engagement takes time and resources; the good stuff is neither free nor easy.

So, in October, we’re heeding the message of this post’s first line and sharing all sorts of information with you about how to actually move from planning to doing. And we’re starting with the October eBook.

Since summer is so fresh in everyone’s mind, why not take one more quick trip before the warm weather disappears for the year and travel down the route of social media execution? Following the analogy of the great summer family road trip, in this eBook we take you through all the steps you need to do this social media thing, all the pit stops you’ll need to account for and unexpected flat tires you can’t plan for, to get you set up for success.

And throughout October we’ll be giving you practical information that clarifies what it takes to execute a social media program, what sorts of resource assessments you’ll need to do to map properly to your plans, guidelines and recommendations for ensuring employee engagement aligns with your vision, and much more. We’ll get grittier than that, of course, but we can’t give away the farm here.

Come back as needed in October and take in all you can about what it takes to act on the social media plan you’ve developed. And if you’ve got questions, we want to hear them. Share your concerns in the comments of our posts or send us an email and let us know in detail what you’d like to know more about. We’ll answer as best we can, and hopefully equip you with some great tips and tactics for getting your social media program up and running. Cheers to October!

Thinking of following in the footsteps of some of the world’s most successful companies by implementing a social media strategy? One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to being social so we’ve taken the time to draw up a few pointers that should help you along the way.

1.        How will you listen?

Listening is an integral part of any conversation and plays a crucial role in ensuring your social media strategy succeeds, but how can you listen effectively if all your customers are talking at once? After all, a large company or brand could have hundreds of mentions every hour.

Monitoring is imperative for all organisations in order to identify and respond to feedback. For a small organisation, hiring a media analyst to trawl the web might be sufficient, but larger organisations may need to use a tool in order to gather all of the conversations about them in one place. This makes it easier to know where to engage. Using a social media monitoring platform can help ensure that you are always abreast of conversation and inform your engagement strategy appropriately. (more…)

Theory. We love theory. And I mean “we” in the global sense of the word here. We love to theorize as to how things should be and why things are the way they are, and we like to create frameworks and ideal processes that support how we’d like to see our endeavors unfold.

Theory is great because it gives us a starting point and some boundaries to live within. But quite often, we talk extensively about the theory of getting something done, but we don’t talk much about actually doing that something. Rarely do you read about the nitty gritty of doing.

We’re working on fixing that imbalance between theory and execution this month by covering the details of social media program execution on the Radian6 blog.

So you’ve got your strategy in hand and are ready to get moving? We’ll help you identify the resources you’ll need to do that. We’ll share with you the types of training you’ll need to bring in house to get your employees listening and engaging. We’ll teach you how to learn from missteps and apply those lessons to your future efforts.

And our October ebook will be available for download next week, with all sorts of supporting information that will help you do, rather than just plan.

We heartily believe in the value of program planning, especially for programs that are new in so many ways. But it’s easy to get tangled in the ruts of planning, to overthink and overanalyze every little detail, and ultimately put off making things happen.

Expect to make mistakes, face unpredicted outcomes, and adapt accordingly; that is all part of the game. But if lack of knowledge as to just how you’re going to get things done is getting in the way of you executing, just come back here, pose your questions to us, and let us help you.

Hopefully the information and insights we share in October will get you on your way to doing, but if you want to hear our take on a topic we haven’t covered, please let us know. You can send us an email [link] or leave your questions and thoughts in the comments. No matter what, come back throughout October and join in the conversation. And cheers to you for doing!

EVP of Customer Success, Daniella Degrace, to lead Customer Success & Professional Services teams. Amber Naslund appointed VP of Social Strategy.

The adoption of social media is growing rapidly, and the social evolution of today’s business is undeniable.

As we’ve seen over the last few years, a sound listening and engagement strategy really forms the backbone of a company’s success in the social media space. What started as a space that helped answer “What are they saying about my brand?” has evolved into a more strategic and robust framework of brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, proactive outreach and community building, and the integration of social media activity into other key business functions like analytics, CRM, and customer support.

Companies have shifted from asking “Do we need to be doing social media?” to “How do we make social media strategic, operational, and integrated?”, as well as working hard to marry business goals and objectives with social media programs and derive actionable insights from the analysis they do.

At Radian6, our customers are forging new paths in social media, from sophisticated listening command centers to finding applications for social media in marketing, consumer affairs, product management, and customer support. The use of listening and engagement platforms like Radian6 have significantly expanded beyond their initial roots as a vertical application for brand monitoring. Companies are now deploying listening platforms as a hub for all social media activity across the enterprise, bringing social media data, insights, and engagement to every business function throughout organizations.

We’ve always looked at it as putting the “social phone” on the desk of each person in the company. As the importance of social media grows, more of our customers are looking for help with their social strategy and looking for best practices. As such, we’ve added two new business areas designed to support their adoption and implementation of successful listening, engagement, and measurement.

Customer Success
We’re delighted Daniella Degrace has joined Radian6 as Executive Vice President of Customer Success and will be leading this new area of the business.

The role of Customer Success will be to help Radian6 customers make the very most of their work with Radian6. Customer success managers will be working with all of our customers in the future, helping them deploy Radian6 as a listening platform inside their organizations. From implementation plans to strategic account milestones and measurement, the customer success program will support Radian6 customers’ adoption of the platform in whatever way suits their organization best. Our customer success program will be supported by available professional services, including turnkey system setup and configuration, the design of social media playbooks, and more.

Daniella has a deep background in building customer success programs and teams in the software and technology space, specifically in customer solutions and support leadership roles for companies like Network General, IBM, iMagicTV, and Q1 Labs. She’s put in place comprehensive and successful programs that add value to customers by helping them not just buy and use software, but use it to achieve their business goals. That makes her the perfect person to head up these new initiatives for us.

Here’s a bit of what Daniella had to say about joining Radian6:
“I was so excited about this opportunity to join Radian6, especially knowing the creative, energetic, and experienced management team we have in place. From an industry perspective, Radian6 is the clear market leader in both product and thought leadership, and has a wonderful opportunity to further its leadership by adding customer success and professional services. We’re looking forward to helping our customers excel in social media listening and engagement, to create a sustainable industry around enterprise social media.”

As for the importance of the Customer Success program, Daniella shares our passion for creating success for the companies we work with.

“I’ve seen, first hand, the direct benefit of customer success programs and frameworks for businesses. We know how well it can work, especially in a new market where companies are looking for guidance mapping out a path for social media adoption and optimization. As we work with them, we’ll be able to help them combine their strategy with our expertise around social media best practices to create a complete picture that’s not only scalable and valuable, but that delivers real, tangible results.”

Social Strategy
Amber Naslund has been our Director of Community for the past two years, working with that team to listen to and engage with the Radian6 community. You’ve likely seen or worked with Amber and our community team online as well as at industry conferences throughout the year.

We’re pleased to share that she’ll be taking on an expanded role as our new Vice President of Social Strategy. In this capacity, she’ll be working to develop Radian6 methodologies and best practices, and continue to understand how our customers’ needs line up with the complete capabilities of the Radian6 platform.

“Our customers have been asking us to help guide them along an adoption and maturity path for listening and engagement in social media,” she says. “Companies and agencies are looking for input and direction for everything from building listening models to mapping engagement strategies, understanding how to organize and staff their teams, ways to measure their success, and overall best practices for Radian6 adoption. We want to help.”

Amber will be continuing to work with the community team, but will also be working with Daniella’s success management team and with our customers to develop and illustrate comprehensive listening, engagement, and measurement models that they can adapt. She’ll be working to build frameworks for enterprise social media that will support and drive the success strategies for Radian6 customers.

What’s Next?
We’ll be sharing more with you about how these divisions of Radian6 will take shape over the coming weeks, and what it means specifically to our customers and community. Stay tuned to the blog and our website for more details about the program, complimentary professional services offerings, and how we’ll be bringing deeper value to our corporate and agency customers.

In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Daniella and Amber to their new roles at Radian6.

October is a wonderful time of year. The leaves are changing colors to vibrant hues of red and yellow. Woodland creatures are scourging the forest for food to last through the winter. And the crew at Radian6? Well, we are busy on the conference circuit. Hopefully, along the way, we will see and talk with you at one of the many events this month.This is where will be, will we get to see you too?

• Marketing Sherpa B2B West Coast Marketing Summit – 4-5 Oct, San Francisco
• Monitoring Social Media – 5 Oct, Boston
• Inbound Marketing Summit – 6-7 Oct, Boston
• Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010 – 13-14 Oct, Chicago
• Blogworld & New Media Expo – 14-16 Oct, Las Vegas
• SOCAP Annual Conference – 17-20 Oct, San Francisco
• Monitoring Social Media – 21 Oct, San Francisco
• Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp – 22 Oct, San Francisco
• Marketing Sherpa B2B East Coast Marketing Summit – 25-26 Oct, Boston
• Social Tech 2010: Marketing Profs – 26 Oct, San Jose
• Advanced New Media Strategies for Federal Government – 27-29 Oct, Alexandria

So, if you happen to be at one of these events or in the area, please stop by and say hello!

This month we worked on providing you some much-needed information about how social media and the B2B world fit so well together. We wrote an entire ebook on the subject, in fact, in hopes that you’d see the spots in which these online social channels can open up communication between your business and its customers in some big ways.

Social media is a form of communication, pure and simple, and it can be leveraged in countless ways to support the goals of your company. Maybe the ways in which you use those channels will be different from that of your B2C brethren, but the process for planning your social media strategy is similar to that of B2C. Very simply, you are catering to a different customer base with different needs and motivations behind those needs, and those motivating factors are what will fuel your process development and execution.

Of course, a month is never enough time to cover the entirety of one single topic in this space, and we know there must be questions still sticking in your brain that need answering. What’s on your mind? What can we help answer and clarify for you? And more importantly, what can our community help clarify for you? If you’ve got a question, or an answer to a question you see here, please chime in!

We talk a lot about the importance of relationship building in social media. To be true, that’s what these mediums allow us to excel at. But there are nuances of relationship building, especially when it comes to that of businesses and their customers, that impact how we all approach our social media program strategy development and execution, and many of those nuances are directly influenced by buyers’ varying needs.

There are some fundamental differences between the needs of B2B buyers and that of B2C buyers that impact how businesses should interact with their customers, and we’re breaking three of those differences down here for you today.

Simple vs. Complex

This is probably the most obvious difference between B2B and B2C needs. For the most part, B2C buyers have a fairly simple purchasing needs that don’t demand extended support from or relationships with a brand. Even in instances in which people stick to a particular brand to fulfill a specific need—say Levi jeans for all their jeans needs—the direct interactions between those folks and brands are quick and shallow.

In the world of B2B, needs are more complex, have an extended life cycle, and generally are those of not just the buyer but also the buyer’s customers. These facets of a B2B buyer’s needs make it imperative that vendors provide extensive, valuable information about their products and services at the very beginning of the buying cycle and remain open to contact from prospective buyers throughout the buying process to answer questions. Post purchase, B2Bs inevitably need to continue customer relationships to assist with product implementation, offer training, and provide customer support.

The complexity of a B2B buyer’s needs demand a higher level of touch with vendors, and thus a higher level of trust. That trust is built through regular contact, valuable information sharing, honesty, and a level of humanness that can only be shown through simple, unscripted interaction.

Emotional vs. Professional

B2C purchases are generally fueled by emotion and basic human needs such as sustenance, shelter, and comfort. Even those basic needs are powered by our emotions and general belief system, which means our buying habits are influenced by brands that resonate with who we are and give us feelings of security and satisfaction.

B2B purchases, on the other hand, are motivated by things like business goals, budgets, and, you guessed it, vendor relationships. To a large extent, there’s still emotion based in that last one, the vendor relationship, but the emotions are driven less by personal security and satisfaction than trust that a particular vendor and its products are best suited to help us reach our business goals.

To that end, B2C companies are tasked with creating a brand and supporting marketing and branding campaigns that reach folks on a personal, emotional level, while B2B companies must create a brand and supporting campaigns and outposts that reach people on a level of competence, expertise, and problem-solving abilities.

General vs. Niche

Tied right in to the emotional and simplistic aspects of B2C buyer needs is the generality of those needs. Personal, emotional needs are rarely obscure — they’re part of the human condition and all of us encounter them. That means the marketplace that appeals to those needs is large and generalized. Sure, there are sub-categories within those markets, but even the most generalized products tend to do the trick, and sometimes we’ll even take those over the more tailored versions because they satisfy more than one need.

On the other side of the spectrum, business goals are often so individualized and specific that the various products needed to help organizations reach those goals need to be just as tailored. That fact means that many B2B vendors exist in a small, incredibly niche marketplace.

While B2C companies have to work hard to stand out in their saturated markets, B2B companies don’t necessarily have that same pressure, and can focus on emphasizing their area of expertise and answering questions within the various social media outposts they own and the communities they’ve sought out and gotten involved in.

These are just a few of the differentiating factors that impact B2B social media outreach. What others can you think of and add here?

As we’ve said before, social media for the B2B world is absolutely doable; identifying how you, as a B2B organization, differ from B2Cs will help you hone in on exactly how you want to use social media to reach your customer and prospective customer base to achieve your goals.