Janet has generously offered to share some great information on creating a corporate policy — so much great info, in fact, that we’ve split it into two parts. You can find Part I of this series right here.

Last week we introduced you to some of the early places to start crafting a solid corporate social media policy, from how to get started with your own internal team to encouraging employee transparency and individuality online. This week we’ll wrap up the series and get you on your way to creating a comprehensive social media policy that takes into account your company’s goals, your audience’s needs, and your employee’s concerns.

Decide how people are allowed to represent the company
News agencies like the CBC direct their journalists to avoid friending their news sources on their Facebook page. It may seem silly that they even think of doing so, but it’s happened. It’s also important not to list private information that could potentially put home and family at risk in the case of a political or criminal story, like home address and family data.

The BBC differentiates how their staff responds to a post on a BBC-owned site. “It should be clear to users whether the site they are interacting with is a BBC page run by the BBC for BBC purposes or whether this is a personal page run by an individual for their own purposes.” In fact, they strongly recommend that BBC blogs should be published on BBC Online and kept under the purview of “Divisional Social Media Representatives”.

But on third party sites they say: “For example, we should respect the fact that users on site X are not our users; they are not bound by the same Terms of Use and House Rules as we apply on BBC Online. Attempts to enforce our standard community rules on third party sites may lead to resentment, criticism and in some cases outright hostility to the BBC’s presence.”

Dealing with negativity
You are bound to see a negative comment or two at some point. How you deal with these is crucial to your success in the social circle you are engaging in. Sticking your head in the sand only allows the problem to persist until it’s too big to ignore. Getting defensive and striking back is also a bad way of handling negativity. Look at the recent palm oil incident with Nestlé on Facebook. People actually boycotted Nestlé for the Easter holiday season, and a good number of the “fans” on their fan page signed up just to castigate them for destroying the rain forest!

Don’t let things get out of hand. Imagine that the person who is being negative is standing at your customer service counter with a complaint. What would you do? Turn them away without helping them? Or try to calmly and rationally explain the issue and correct the situation?

Create use policies for your forums, groups or blogs that state clearly and simply the rules for moderation. Something like, “We encourage you to comment and we welcome all viewpoints, but please be constructive. We reserve the right to moderate comments and posts and remove statements of hate or vulgarity.”

On the other hand, just because a comment is negative doesn’t mean it should be deleted. Is the comment valid? If so, perhaps it would be appropriate to thank them for bringing an issue to your attention and report back on how it was resolved. When you listen to and engage your customers like this they may become the best evangelists you’ve ever had. They’ll tell everybody that you responded politely and helped them when they didn’t expect it.

Copyrights and attribution
Before using any images, video, music, or documents found on the Internet, make sure you’ve looked for and understand the copyrights on that piece of work. Look for images that are under a creative commons license, purchase stock photos with limited use rights, or request permission from the copyright holder.

The digital rights management issues of the music and film industries is particularly controversial and has led to a number of high-profile lawsuits and fines. Best to avoid that potential nightmare by using only legally obtained and approved files.

In addition, it’s important to understand the rights of online written content. Just because you found it on Google does not make it free. Using short excerpts of content with a link to the original piece is generally accepted, but it’s a good idea to get permission for long quotes or excerpts.

Encourage user participation
One of the goals here is, of course, to encourage your clients and online connections to engage and help you spread the word about what you do. This engagement may take the form of user-groups, forums, blog comments, or even blogging for the company. One example of this is the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The hospital encourages parents and family members of patients to share the story of their child’s experience, the care they were given, or or even give kudos to a staff member who went out of his or her way. These stories humanize the hospital and allow the parents to help spread the word about their experiences.

Corporate strategies are not just for big corporations. Take the Fellowship Church, which has maintained a blog since 2004, and Brian Bailey, who wrote a book called “The Blogging Church” and crafted the blogging policy for church staff. They recommend the following disclaimer on the staff’s personal blogs: “I work at Fellowship Church. Everything here, however, is my personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. Opinions, conclusions and other information expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Fellowship Church.”

Relax already
All this sounds like work, and it is, but once this work is done you can kick back and have fun with it. Sending out stuffy announcements and press releases is not going to engage people and get them to want more. Have fun with your posts and show your passion. Set up a series of themes, maybe even an editorial calendar to keep things rolling and the ideas flowing. Don’t sell. Inform, entertain, and engage.

Don’t forget to tell people
Take the time to have a meeting with your staff and go over your policies. Better yet, have them help you create them. They’re much more likely to buy into something they helped craft, and a little outside perspective from them will add value. Talk to your staff and listen to their input. Fine tune if you need to based on their feedback. When you have a new hire, take a few minutes to discuss any questions and concerns they have.

Re-evaluate
Periodically take a step back to look at what you’ve been doing and the effect it’s had on your company and the public perception of it. Review how others are transmitting your message on their own networks. Does it sound like you’re communicating successfully? Look at your benchmarks frequently to see how your policy is doing and where you need to do more or less. It’s natural for this kind of campaign to need tweaking now and again, and it’s important you regularly revisit both your guidelines and strategy.

Janet Fouts is a social media coach, author, trainer, and frequent speaker on social media and online marketing.

We’re thrilled that Jim Sterne could join us today to share some of his expertise and knowledge about Web analytics, social media analytics, and how the two intersect. In his presentation, Jim focused on detailing how the two types of metrics don’t compete with one another but tie together to ultimately impact the value a business is able to create for itself by, in turn, providing real value to customers.

As always, I highly recommend you take advantage of the recording linked at the bottom of this post (audio and presentation), as Jim shares incredibly valuable insight into the world of eMetrics. For more details about his presentation, here’s a short recap of the points Jim covered:

• The key to creating a valuable, holistic marketing picture is finding out as much as we can about our customers. That requires tracking what they say and share online (social metrics) and how those behaviors impact and drive how they interact with our Website (Web metrics).
• The real question we want answered is: What’s the best way to divide my marketing and advertising dollars? Which of these channels really pays off? To decide that, we need to take the viewpoint of the customer. Companies — and relationships — are successful when they’re empathetic.
• The customer perspective is a buying perspective, not a selling perspective. They might not even know your product could help them; they might not even know they’re suffering at all. They key is to be aware of this buying perspective so when they’ve identified their pain point and start researching you can be there to offer solutions. When a company approaches business from a buyer’s perspective it has a better chance of aligning how it approaches the marketplace with how the marketplace wants to be approached.
• The company-to-customer relationship is about getting people’s attention (via advertising), educating them on the value of your product or service (via marketing), selling them the product (via sales), helping them when necessary (via customer service), and maintaining that relationship by relating to them (via face-to-face meetings, phone, or email). Companies can now relate to their customers and prospects via social media channels, as well. As a business, you win by making communication with you as easy as possible.
• All this is geared to generate value back to the company, and that is gauged by measuring awareness, attitude, influence, competition, outcomes, and value.

Jim goes into much greater detail about the metrics mentioned in that last bullet, and explains which ones live in social channels and how you can track them. The follow-up questions from our audience were fantastic, too, and are included in the recording. Because the file size is fairly large, it’s going to remain hosted on our Web events site (we’ll do our best to cut it down next time). To listen, click on the link below, then navigate to and click on the upper-right-hand tab that says “View Event Recordings”. Click the playback button to the far right and you’re good to go. Take a listen (and watch) and let us know what you think!

Click here to listen to and watch Jim’s presentation.

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There is no one-size-fits-all approach to change management. To successfully integrate social media into your business processes, you must begin by identifying the root causes of resistance and then determine a plan to address those factors while maintaining optimal speed of change. Combat resistance to change by creating an environment where people feel safe to learn and evolve.

1. Awareness: Go beyond idealistic visions and unseen promises of reward when addressing change management processes. Use hard numbers and examples to address the risk of standing still is greater than change. How it fits into your plan: Be open about why this change is taking place and transparent in the plans your company is implementing. Have an internal location available for your workforce to track benchmarks and participate in execution.
2. Connectivity: People identify with others who continue to operate in the old way – their comfort zone. This behavior is hardwired into a company. Do not underestimate the power of observational learning. How it fits into your plan: Introduce these people in the organization to those at every level of the company who are spearheading the change efforts.
3. Skepticism: Change in the workplace triggers an emotional response of fear. People fear change because they believe that with change comes additional work. Remove barriers obstrucing criticism. How it fits into your plan: Give your workforce a safe environment to express their feelings and ideas. Do not ignore this forum because golden nuggets of inspiration are buried here that will assist you in making your new processes stick.
4. Competence: The lack of competence to change is a roadblock that exists, but people feel it is difficult to admit this fear. Training can be an effective motivator. Demonstrate how people will be brought to competence throughout the change process. How it fits into your plan: Develop training programs from entry level to advanced. Go beyond the formal training and invite your departments to participate in webinars and brown bag lunch and learn sessions.
5. Overload: Even with the best plans, change management fails because the workforce is overloaded and overwhelmed. The fatigue that comes from a work environment bombarded with economic crisis or other internal issues may kill your project. Timing is everything for successful change management. Go back to the first step and determine the risk of standing still versus changing. How it fits into your plan: Be generous with praise and do not hinder people from venting. Show good diplomacy and take time to honor those who have accomplished success in the past. Doing something new and different does not mean the old way was wrong at the time and their efforts should npt be recognized.

How is your company combatting resistance to change? Please share your lessons learned and how your organization has adapted social media.

Janet has generously offered to share some great information on creating a corporate policy — so much great info, in fact, that we’ve split it into two parts. Check back here next Friday for Part II.

Some of the most vehement arguments I hear against social media are from PR and marketing people. They say they don’t trust it because they can’t control what people are saying about them or the spin that may be put on their message once they release it to the webverse.

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter. Odds are very good that people are out there right now talking about you, your brand, your product to, at the very least, the market you operate in.

If you’re not part of the conversation, not only are you missing the opportunity to engage in the discussion, but you are completely unable to manage an emerging situation until it escalates to a point you can see it from afar. If, however, you’ve got your ear to the ground and you see some mixed messages, conflict, or bad image out there cropping up, you have the potential to contain it or even turn it around with some well-timed conversations with the people you’ve developed a relationship with.

Often times, simply creating a corporate social media strategy helps people get over the initial fear of losing control. Sometimes it even helps with existing media campaigns by focusing the messaging even more clearly and allowing the team to step back and make sure they have all the tools they need to successfully communicate and monitor the messaging they distribute in all of their media channels.

So. Let’s lay out the basics of a good corporate social media plan and how to build it.

Start with your team
How many people can actively work on this and what are their time commitments and resources? Identify the lead for each area of your strategy and make sure everybody knows who those people are.

Create clear rules for use so people start to relax. Especially if they are uncomfortable with the format, they’ll use the guidelines you give them until the get used to how it all works and they see those first results. They are also less likely to make mistakes. State clearly what standards of performance you expect. A little personal responsibility and some common sense goes a long way.

Document
What existing messaging do you have right now? Is it in a format that everyone who will participate has access to and clearly understands? Do you have a branding policy? Are logos, color, and font standards clearly defined and available to the team at any time? Are corporate backgrounders, CXO bios, whitepapers, and other important data easily accessible?

Identify the dos and don’ts
Is there specific terminology or imagery that you want associated with your brand? How about the terms and graphics you don’t want associated? Clearly identify these and talk it over with the team. Are there certain topics that must have sign-off from a senior member to even talk about? Identify the go-to person to either direct outside questions to or run sensitive statements by before posting.

I’m not saying you should strangle your team in what they can and cannot say. This is very hard to understand for many larger corporations where the legal department approves every press release and the PR department approves every statement on the website before it goes live. Social media doesn’t work like this. If your statements appear to be canned or professionally produced, they’re bound to fall flat. Let the team know the facts when a new product comes out or when you reach a noteworthy milestone. Then trust them to put it in their own words.

How will you measure success?
ROI or ROE (Return on Engagement) are often hotly debated topics. How do you measure the value of a long-term relationship? The value of a member of an extended network creating a new opportunity for you? Evangelists blossoming in places you never expected?

That said, you need to have some expectations for what you are going to do, how much funding and energy you’re going to expend to do it, and how you will know if you’ve been successful or not.

I can’t go deeply into the ROI/ROE discussion here, but let me just say it’s like any other marketing or sales campaign. Success rarely happens overnight or without considerable advance planning. Taking the time to think about it and plan sets you up for a better chance of success. Whatever you are going to measure, take some benchmarks before you start so you can clearly see if progress has been made.

Identify your best platforms and tools
Do some listening to find the networks and platforms you need to be present on and figure out who will communicate on each one(s). I always believe it’s better to start small and expand your social media presence as you become comfortable with the networks and the process. It’s also easier for you to manage and monitor your team.

Separate personal and professional
Keep in mind that your employer is probably listening for mentions of the brand online. If you choose to talk about company business while in your personal account on a social network, make sure it stays within the corporate guidelines. If you wouldn’t say it in front of your boss, why would you say it in front of thousands of people? The same thing goes for when you’re participating in a network as part of your business. You wouldn’t bring up deeply personal things in a board meeting, so why would you say them online?

Encourage transparency
If you have a number of people blogging or posting for your company, figure out a way for each person to identify themselves. The team at Dell each use a variation on their own name on Twitter followed by Dell (@RichardatDell, @DellServerGeek, etc), while Coca Cola uses a simple initial for each person at the end of their post (jf).

Janet Fouts is a social media coach, author, trainer, and frequent speaker on social media and online marketing.

Clegg fever seems to have gripped social media over the last week following his performance in the leaders’ debates. There is no doubt that his profile has been lifted within the online community. As a result Nick Clegg is enjoying a trending status on Twitter, which leads one to wonder how much of a social media profile Mr Clegg had before the leaders’ debate relative to his competitors, and how this has developed. Using Radian6 to do some social media research we can analyse the level of Clegg’s increase in popularity and also uncover where he is being talked about.

Gordon Brown was the most discussed leader running up to the first debate. The share of voice pie chart below shows he had a 48% share of the conversation. At this point, Nick Clegg had the lowest at just over 22%.

Figure 1: Share of voice between the party leaders in social media prior to the first debate

Gordon Brown was the most talked about leader over these three days. Given his current position as PM this is not surprising.

However, following the first debate the data shows a total shift in this landscape of mentions.

Figure 2: Share of voice between the party leaders in social media following the first debate

The shift is quite dramatic; there were over twice as many mentions of Clegg than the Prime Minister. Clearly, the leaders’ debate encouraged social media discussion.

Nick Clegg’s social media mentions rose astronomically. But social media is a large umbrella term for a variety of locations, including:

• blogs
• forums
• video and image sharing sites
• mainstream media
• social networks
• micro media

Where was Nick Clegg being discussed?

Figure 3 : Social media locations of Nick Clegg mentions 15th-17th April

Micro media dominates as the prime location of Nick Clegg conversation. Micro media is primarily Twitter, suggesting that Clegg is the Twitter champion of the debates.

The share of voice landscape the day of the second leaders’ debate put Clegg in an even better position, with a 52.6% share of the conversation, and this is excluding mentions of #nickcleggsfault on Twitter!

Fig 4: The leaders' share of voice in social media on the 22nd April

6Consulting also carried out manual sentiment analysis on a representative sample of the posts before and after the first debate. The results can be found here in an article produced for the Financial Times.

Social media is an important aspect of the general election; it is the hot topic of a wide variety of informative articles by mainstream journalists and bloggers. However, the final assessment of its impact can only be made once we know the result in May.

David Barber

Data Analyst at 6Consulting

Twitter: @davidbarber6c

For the second post in our series on community modeling, we’re going to look at how the team at Radian6 is structured, in hopes that it gives you an idea or three about how you might integrate these roles and responsibilities in your organization.

The Front Lines – 1

We currently have a full-time role dedicated to manning our main monitoring post for the Radian6 brand, and ensuring that those posts get to the right members of the team for engagement and response. This person’s job is to filter the posts as they come in using the Radian6 engagement console and workflow, properly tag, classify, and assign them according to our engagement playbook (which they also maintain and keep up to date to ensure consistent practices among our team).

This role also includes analysis of activity in the form of reports on team activities and trends, and some direct engagement for specific types of requests for information that come in. It’s a pivotal role on our team, and ensures that we are always timely and present with our responses.

The Engagement Team – 5 (soon to be 6)

Our community managers, Katie Morse and Lauren Vargas, are our primary online engagement folks, and stewards of the Radian6 brand and community. As our coordinator assigns posts to each of them, part of their job is to ensure that we’re responding in an active, accessible, and timely fashion to commentary around the Radian6 brand. They answer questions, contribute to the larger dialogue through blog comments, and participate in our outpost communities (mainly Twitter, blogs, and LinkedIn).

Both Katie and Lauren also track and participate in industry conversations relative to their area of expertise (and that aren’t directly related to Radian6). Katie is dedicated to supporting and participating in the corporate and brand communities, and Lauren focuses mainly on higher ed and the analytics and CRM spaces. They help us understand the needs and pulse of the community overall, and how the social media and business communities are colliding. They’re both avid content contributors as well, sharing their expertise in social media through our blog, speaking, webinars, you name it. We’ll also be hiring a community manager to support our agency-side clients.

Ali Lee is our User Community Manager, and her main focus is building training and education programs specifically for Radian6 users. While she’s out there attending events and meeting new people all the time, Ali is dedicated to building and refining the user community experience as it relates to the Radian6 platform itself, so her role works directly with our support, product, and training teams.

David Alston (VP Marketing and Community) and I (Director of Community) get involved in many of our larger accounts across all verticals, and help guide our overall engagement and community strategy and best practices for anything community related as well as how community integrates with the rest of our company.

It’s worth noting, too, that several members of our executive, management, and sales teams are active in our communities as well, and sometimes get post assignments or participate in broader discussions. We’re dedicated to making sure that we have as many present, accessible, and engaged people on our team as possible based on their interest and abilities.

The Bridge Team – 3

We have a dedicated slate of community specialists that help act as liaisons from the community side to the sales and business development side. They help funnel leads, conduct follow up on demo requests, and get folks from the community connected to the sales team when the time is right.

You might recognize Steve Robinson, Mike Huggard, or Jana Miller on that front, as they’re out there chatting with and engaging with the community, too, when those inquiries come in. They also help do analysis on the lead pipeline and help the sales, marketing, and community teams understand what’s working to move people from interest to demo to sale.

Content and Product Marketing – 4

Our content and product marketing teams are part of the backbone of our community intiatives, as they’re responsible for spearheading compelling thought leadership content, and making sure that we’re always getting the word out about what we’re up to.

Rob Begg is our Director of Marketing, and he’s focused on generating visibility and brand awareness for Radian6. His team of Gwen McIntyre and Dave Clark help build out those strategies and execute, everything from our event presence to email marketing, SEO and SEM, to keeping our website relevant and ensuring that our digital marketing efforts are up to snuff. And while Rob and his team aren’t sporting “community” titles, the work that they do is inextricably tied to the community work, so I absolutely consider us all part of the same big team.

Teresa Basich is our Content Marketing manager, and it’s her job to steward any content that’s thought-leadership and social media industry related. She oversees the blog, webinars, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, client profiles – anything that helps contribute valuable, educational content to our community and customers around the social media space. She does plenty of participation in the community herself to understand what questions and issues folks are talking about around social media, and she both writes herself and manages content contributors on our team to ensure that we’ve always got a library of stuff that’s helpful and useful.

Pivotal Connections

It’s fair to say that while the community team might be on the front lines, we work closely and frequently with all different departments in our organization, because community touches just about everything. From our partnership team to our support, training, professional services, development, product management, executive and sales and account management teams, we have reason and need to interact with and support all of them at one point or another.

Our community team isn’t meant to be on an island somewhere operating independently, but rather touching and supporting many of the other areas of the organization to deliver content, provide insights and feedback, deliver subject matter expertise, and act as a bridge both inside and outside the organization. The way we’re structured, the community team really is the home for everything communications related (rather than having separate marketing, PR, and comms departments).

For more discussion on that, stay tuned for our next post in this series on Monday, where we’ll discuss a bit about our engagement and listening approach, and some of the key projects and initiatives that fall in the community wheelhouse as well as how we work with other teams.

Questions? Comments? Let us hear from you below.

Social Media for Your Organization:
“Conversations, Connections & Opportunities”
Toronto, ON
May 27th, 2010

Please come out and join Radian6 CMO David Alston along with Community Manager Katie Morse as they each present their ideas on community and making the case for social media in your organization on May 27th in Toronto. 

About this event:
“Developed by Visability – a new Marketing Optimization group within IT World Canada – this single-day Social Media educational program is designed for marketers as well as non-marketing audiences, including Public Relations practitioners, group managers and media strategists and also IT leaders tasked with implementing Social Media solutions.  Attendees of Social Media For Your Organization will gain valuable insights and practical how-to steps for getting started in Social Media Marketing. This event is targeted to anyone interested in leveraging Social Media activity to benefit their organization.”

To register or for more information please visit: http://www.visability.ca

How do you cure social media culture shock and be a better participant within the social web? Teach your team the tools they need to communicate and succeed in the confines of a safe internal environment before making them accountable for external engagement. While every culture is ethnocentric, thinking “we do it right,” it’s important for people new to social media to understand that most solutions to the online interaction are neither right nor wrong. Every individual, company and community have their own way of doing things. Immerse your team in the social media culture so they understand not just which tools to employ, but how and when they should be used.

• Internal Community/Portal: Develop goals and objectives specific to your team that will assist your organization in achieving overall process change. Share this roadmap with your department/company. Keep your plan flexible to adjust to lessons learned and mature and adapt to new tools.
• Team/Company Wiki: Learn as much as you can about online culture. Share tribal knowledge, lessons learned and examples with members of your team. Assume “strange” habits in this “strange” social media space are logical. Think of these habits as clever solutions to some of your organization’s communication and customer service problems.
• Instant Message Client: Connect your team with others in your company who are passionate about interacting in social media so they have someone they can confide in and learn from. Be militantly positive. Avoid the temptation to commiserate with the naysayers of your immersion. Don’t joke disapprovingly about a culture you’re trying to understand.
• Collaborative Project Management Software: Get busy! Begin collaborating on shared documents that will spur along social media adaption, such as Engagement Guidelines. Remember that different people find different truths to be “self-evident.” Things work best if we give everybody a little wiggle room.

How is your company fostering social media adaption from the inside-out? Please share your lessons learned and how your organization has adapted social media.

Looking UP: Lessons and Conversations to Move Your Business Forward
Asheville, NC
May 21st-23rd, 2010

“Discover ways to grow your business, increase profitability and network in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains at the 2010 Counselors Academy Conference in Asheville, NC. Thirty of the top counselors and thought leaders from around the nation will conduct workshops and roundtable discussions, with lessons in leadership, business management and social media.”

Come and meet Amber Naslund and Craig Comeau from Radian6 as they attend the 2010 Counselors Academy Spring Conference in Asheville, North Carolina.  We’ll have a tabletop there ready to demo our stuff and answer your questions.  As well, Amber will also be speaking at the event on Community Management during Sunday’s roundtable discussions.         

To find our more about this event, please visit:  http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/CounselorsAcademy

Blogwell Seattle
Seattle, WA  (Microsoft HQ)
May 5th, 2010

The good folks over at GasPedal are putting on another great event continuing their successful Blogwell series and this time they’re invading Microsoft’s headquarters to do it.  As always, Radian6 will be there showing support for the event and available for your questions.  If you’re in Seattle and work in word of mouth or social media marketing, this is one show packed with live case study presentations from major brands that you do not want to miss. 

For more information, please visit http://gaspedal.com/blogwell/seattle

Marketing Profs B2B Forum 2010
Boston, MA
May 3rd- 5th, 2010

Radian6 will once again be taking part at the MarketingProfs B2B forum at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston.  If you’re planning on attending the forum, be sure to stop by our booth and see what’s new.  Our Boston-based community manager Lauren Vargas (@vargasl) will be there along with Jon Robertson (jon.robertson@radian6.com) to answer your questions, demo our platform and get their learn on.  Feel free to reach out to either Lauren or Jon if you’d like to schedule a time to chat in person during the event.

To register, or for more information about the MarketingProfs B2B Forum happening next month, please go to http://www.marketingprofs.com/events/11/conference

SOBCon 2010
Chicago, IL
April 30th – May 2nd, 2010

Come out and catch Amber Naslund’s presentation at SOBcon 2010 next Friday, April 30th at 3:15pm.  Amber will be going over the how-to’s of setting up your social media command center followed by a 30 minute group discussion panel on the subject where she will moderate. 

Despite it’s rather sad sounding name, SOBcon (founded by Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker) is the think thank of the social web where some of the best minds in the Internet space gather to present models, discuss insights, and determine best practices.  Over two days, SOBCon features six, two-hour interactive content blocks focused on strategy and tactics for integrating online and offline social marketing. 

For more information on this event, please visit www.sobevent.com.

When: Thursday, April 29th
Time: 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Register: eAnalytics: Social Media Analytics vs. Web Analytics with Jim Sterne

Web analytics. Social media analytics. What’s the difference between the two? Is there a difference? How do they connect and influence one another? In our next Webinar on April 29th, Jim Sterne, Web analytics expert and author of multiple books covering the ins and outs of online marketing, will be discussing what differentiates web metrics from social media metrics, how social media participation influences consumer actions on your website, and how these two separate sciences flow together.

Jim Sterne is the President of Web strategy firm Target Marketing, and focuses on measuring the value of the Web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Jim has written eight books on the use of the Internet for marketing, is the current Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, and produces the eMetrics Marketing Organization Summit. His latest book, which came out this month, is titled “Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment”.

Our community manager Lauren Vargas will be talking with Jim after his presentation, and we’ll be hosting a short Q&A toward the end of the Webinar to address any questions you have regarding web analytics, social media analytics, and/or specific points that were brought up during the presentation portion of the Webinar.

As always, please feel free to leave us questions beforehand in the comments of this post and we’ll make sure to address them before or during the Webinar. Also, we’ll have an eye on Twitter the day of, so don’t hesitate to flag any comments or questions you post to Twitter with the #Radian6 hashtag so we can catch and respond to them.

We’re excited to have Jim joining us, and hope you can join, as well!

Change is personal. When an organization proposes change, the workforce is fearful of how their jobs will change, what new skills and responsibilities will be required, and how the layers of management-employee communication will alter. Change challenges employees to step out of their comfort zone and old organizational structure. Successful change implementation cannot be forced from the top-down. Acceptance of changes and commitment to the vision is vital at every level. Here are some steps about how you can start making change happen with your team:

1. Involve: Avoid mandating change and invite your employees to be part of the efforts to evolve processes. Be open and honest with your team about the developments and ask them what they need to feel comfortable and effective in implementing the changes. Give your team a safe place to vent their fears and address their concerns. Create a team wiki or portal to share ideas and feedback. Get your team invested.
2. Develop: Organizational change tends to be communicated in hi-level terms that do not encourage lower level acceptance. Tailor goals and objectives specific to your team that will assist your organization in achieving overall process change. Keep your plan flexible to adjust to lessons learned and mature and adapt to new tools.
3. Support: Follow through with the plan you create with your team. You are in this process together. Employees will need training, reward systems may need to be adapted, or hiring may be required. Give your employees what they need to succeed and make the required adjustments. Consider hosting bi-weekly brown bag lunch sessions with your team and/or department while participating in a webinar addressing new knowledge areas.
4. Communicate: Calm employees and encourage their continued support by keeping the line of communication open. Discuss what is occurring, why the changes are being made, and how they will develop. Be available to take suggestions or answer questions that employees might have. Encourage employees to use the new social media tools internally and boost confidence in use while giving them a new method of communication with you and the team.
5. Motivate: There is nothing better than a bit of peer pressure to enact widespread change. Share your team’s accomplishments across the organization and social web. Place your employees in the limelight and allow them to express how they are carrying out their role in the organization’s vision.

Have you given thought to how organizational change can occur at the ground level? Please share your lessons learned and how your organization has adapted social media.

“Really, we’re just not that social of a company. Nobody here is on Twitter and we don’t blog. We’re just not a social organization.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say that about the companies they work for. Whether I hear it at a conference, at a coffee shop when someone leans over my shoulder and asks me what I’m doing (it’s happened), or over a few beverages with friends while chatting with work, it seems like most people think that their companies “just aren’t social”.

I beg to differ.

Teresa nailed it when she said that “Traditional enterprise set-ups generally operate outside the bounds of human behavior. What do we mean by that? Businesses act like machines, even though they’re run by people, and treat their customers and clients as anything but fellow human beings with basic wants and problems in need of solving (this is true for both B2C and B2B).”

Finding opportunities for your company to be social helps bridge that gap and helps you, as a business, start treating employees and customers like people.

We’ve thus far covered what “Socializing the Enterprise” really means, as well as explained how “going social” often requires a culture shift.

It’s often hard for organizations to know where to begin. How do they pick a project to use as their use case for how social can work in their organization? Where do they start from?

1. Listen I’m sure you hear people in meetings offering to research a project further, or talk with Sally in accounting to see how that accounting process really works. Listen and see who is interested in reaching out, digging deeper, and making connections outside their own silo. Take note when you hear these things and keep them filed away for future reference.
2. Identify It seems like organizations, especially large ones, are always starting a project to improve efficiency, redefine a process, or update a procedure. These projects usually require multiple contributors from many departments, and end up happening through a combination of email, meetings, and file sharing in some capacity. Look for these projects, especially the smaller ones, to use as your test cases for how your organization can start being more social.
3. Reduce Risk While improving efficiency and reducing duplicated efforts are great benefits of a more social organization, risk is a real concern that needs to be addressed before any social efforts can truly begin. Internal projects using a small group may often be seen as less risky than a larger internal, or even public, project.

We talk a lot about how socializing the enterprise can help break down barriers between departments, meet your clients and partners on their turf, as well as improve efficiencies and reduce duplicated efforts inside your organization.  Often times the first step to achieving these goals is just listening and identifying where your organization can start being social. The opportunities already exist, but it’s up to each organization to define them and find their own secret sauce.

Where have you found opportunities for your company to be more social? Share them in the comments!

Step back for a minute from the metrics – the click-throughs, the conversion rates, the sentiment analysis, and so on. They’re all great, and they’ll definitely help you make better business decisions, but they deserve a little help from the intuitive, anecdotal side of the brain as well. Especially if you’re making the case for the power of social media and community within a larger enterprise, your numbers deserve to be paired with stories. The more brutally honest those stories are, the better.

Two truths to remember:

• We humans love stories. Our brains are wired for them, in fact. We use stories to make sense of things, which is why you’ll often hear someone say, “What’s the story here?” if they’re presented with a bank of facts and figures. We want to know how things fit together, and out of instinct we look for the tale of how A led to B and on to C.
• It’s easy to avert your gaze from hard truths. We typically hate to have to think about things in new ways, and we hate to be proven wrong. So even though the data may say that A led to X and then to Y, we’re likely to revert to the A-B-C narrative if that version is more palatable emotionally (for an individual) or politically (for an organization).

This is your cue to say, “Great, Tim – thanks for the psychology lesson.” But bear with me, because here comes the big lesson:

The well-adjusted social enterprise
combines the stories of its audience
with the best numbers it can get
to lead it to hard truths about its business.

When I say “well-adjusted,” I mean an enterprise that succeeds in both financial and human terms.

In place of “audience,” you could insert “users,” “customers,” “patients,” “community,” “donors,” “constituents,” “peers,” “analysts,” “journalists,” or whatever group of people makes sense in your case.

By “hard truths,” I mean those key, fundamental realities that shape your market, your competitive space, your company’s identity, your place in the broader economy, or – most importantly – your customers’ lives and worldviews. Calling these truths “hard” should remind you both that they’re centered on hard facts (even if it’s the fact that some customers have unrealistic views about how the world works), and that they may be hard medicine to take.

As you seek out these hard truths, keep in mind a couple of things:

• If the numbers tell you one thing and the stories tell you another, dig deeper. Test, ask questions, and listen harder – both for the answers you do get and the answers you don’t get.
• Discipline yourself to hear what the people in your audience are actually saying in their own words, not what they’re saying once it’s translated into your company’s in-house lingo. The raw dialect, that’s what you want.

The real boon of social business as a whole – and, therefore, of the individual social enterprise – is that it uses all of these amazing social technologies not for the sake of their gee-whiz-ness, but because they put people in touch with people.

Business is about people and their needs. The numbers, whether they’re on a metrics dashboard or on the bottom line, are just a reflection of that. People will often express their needs in stories. Some of these stories are very short – the length of a tweet, even. Some of them are longer and more scattered, and require more detective work to piece together. But the effort is worth it.

Use the gee-whiz tools. By all means, embrace them. But use them to listen to the stories of the people you’re serving, and to respond to the needs they have. If you’ll do that, you can’t be beat.

Tim Walker runs social media programs for the business information publisher Hoover’s, Inc., where he has worked as an editor and marketer for ten years. His professional background spans journalism, business analysis, and graduate training in European and U.S. history. You can talk to Tim anytime on Twitter, via @Hoovers (for business) or @Twalk (for anything else).

“Social Media is not only changing how we communicate, we are also changing the culture of business from the outside in and from the bottom up.” – Brian Solis, Q&A: Culture Shock, How Social Media is Changing the Culture of Business

Socializing the enterprise internally and externally is certainly a challenging task to take on, especially because change doesn’t happen overnight. As your organization explores the online culture of the communities with whom you wish to engage, do not overlook the importance of your own corporate culture when trying to implement new business methods. For change to take root and success blossom, a mind-shift is required within the company culture.

1. Collaborate: Change cannot occur when it is being mandated from the top or when a grassroots effort is made from the lower echelons only. Change happens somewhere in the middle and requires top-down empowerment and trust, as well as, bottoms-up interest and participation. How it fits into your plan – Take a page from IBM and start collaborating on a living, breathing document setting expectations for how your company should engage in the social media space.
2. Establish Guidelines: Provide clear guidelines for engagement and disclosure, so that all employees can represent themselves and the company clearly and professionally. How it fits into your plan – By allowing your workforce do what they do best and act as your representative, your organization can gain valuable social capital, credibility, and opportunity.
3. Internalize: Don’t jump into the social media ocean without learning how to swim in your nearest watering hole. Discover how social your own organization is by examining how current relationships are being cultivated on and offline. How it fits into your plan – Start using social tools and tenets to improve business processes and begin socializing the enterprise.
4. Experiment: Do not feel pressured to copy the actions of another company because of a case study you read. Success is a custom-made solution determined through trial and error. How it fits into your plan – Start small, but think BIG! As you begin to implement social media internally, determine a few areas externally where you can begin engaging with your community. Use the lessons learned to grow your social media campaigns into an invested program.
5. Share: A culture is molded and shaped by stories. People conform to what is around them. Change their story. Allow your workforce to partake in your organization’s social media experiments and get their tongues wagging, so they shout out these stories from the mountain top! How it fits into your plan – Share stories and feedback throughout the entire company to spur change and believability in your organization’s vision.

Have you given thought to how corporate culture fits into your plan? Please share your lessons learned and how your organization has adapted social media.

Out the gate, most businesses choose to make social media programs part of their Marketing and Communications departments. Those are the departments doing the most external outreach, right? Sales is right up there, along with Business Development, too. When you get down to it, social media, by definition, facilitates more than conversations with clients and prospects; a social channel opens up communication between two parties, no matter where they sit within the orbit of your company.

By all rights, the philosophies and tools living in your external social media outreach should live within the walls of your organization, too. There’s room (and a growing need) to go social, so let’s break down what socializing a business really means.

Going social means breaking down barriers between internal departments.

In a traditional enterprise set-up, employee functions are broken down into departments, with very few crossing paths and very little communication amongst them. In a social enterprise set-up, departments interface with each other regularly via social tools such as internal communities, chat clients, and company-specific micromedia platforms, and that interaction provides a more holistic picture for employees to work from.

Getting insight into how each department impacts another allows your teams to see exactly how they fit into the fold and gives them much-needed intelligence about things like what’s holding up a project or changing its direction. Bridging gaps in enterprise-wide communication through social tools helps put everyone on the same page and breaks down the walls that keep people blind to the bigger picture.

Going social means using social tools and tenets to improve business processes.

In traditional enterprise set-ups, most processes and frameworks for getting things done are antiquated and lean on methods that are clunky and inefficient in today’s business world. Take IT, for instance. In many organizations, people have to submit a work ticket if they’re having an IT issue, and it takes time for an IT team to work through specific tickets, close out, and log the issue as taken care of, for a number of reasons.

What if, instead of a traditional work ticket submission process, a company had an internal community established with a separate section for IT issues? Employees could use a format similar to hashtags to tag what sorts of issues they’re having. IT team members could be assigned specific types of problems, and they could tackle those problems that come through the platform flagged with the corresponding tag. The community platform could be set up to aggregate all IT issues for end-of-week and/or end-of-the-month reporting, and can have an open set-up so anyone on the IT team can log an issue as closed if they know it’s been handled.

This is a high-level example, but the basic premise of infusing a business process with social aspects and supportive tools that smooth out and balance workflow can be tailored to your organization’s and department’s various working processes.

Going social means meeting your customers and clients on their turf.

Traditional enterprise set-ups generally operate outside the bounds of human behavior. What do we mean by that? Businesses act like machines, even though they’re run by people, and treat their customers and clients as anything but fellow human beings with basic wants and problems in need of solving (this is true for both B2C and B2B).

Part of the reason for this disconnect is that businesses have removed themselves from the direct line of interaction. They’ve chosen where and how they want to talk with customers and prospects, instead of going to those customers and prospects to meet them on their turf. That disconnect makes it easy to count your customers as numbers and not as individuals with needs.

Social networks and tools now give businesses the opportunity to get back on the front lines, so individual representatives — people — can talk with customers where they’re already spending time. Person to person, empathetic soul to empathetic soul. While that might sound fluffy, this one-to-one meeting makes customers feel respected, listened to, it makes them tell their friends about their experiences with your company (and thus referring them to you), and it brings them back again and again.

These are just a few examples of what going social really entails. Simply, going social is not about the tools, it’s about figuring out how the true meaning of the word “social” can improve your business. Get creative and think of ways you can integrate the tools to support the methodology.

Have examples of how your organization has started going social? Share with us in the comments!

At Radian6, we’re often asked about how we’ve built our community team, what purpose it serves, and how we manage our tasks and workflow to do all of the listening, engagement, and content creation that’s part of our gig.

In this new series for the month of April, we’re going to look at how we’ve built and structured our team in hopes that, by using our experiences as our own case study of sorts, you’ll get a few ideas of your own for the role that community can play in your business, or how your existing roles can evolve a bit inside the world of social media.

Today, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this whole community thing in the first place.

Community Mindset

We actually built our community team before we started adding more “traditional” marketing roles to our team. In many ways, community and marketing really go hand in hand for us, so we started building the team based on what we needed to do to support our customers and community, and represent our company and brand to the outside world.

To us, our community is comprised of:

• Radian6 customers
• Our prospective customers, who are businesses and agencies learning to integrate social media
• The larger social media community

Everything we do is about delivering a platform that helps companies and agencies listen and measure their social media efforts, and engage with their customers. So our vested interest is in helping them tackle those topics for business, and understand how Radian6 can help when appropriate.

Our community and our customers are the lifeblood of our business, so our company is built with that in mind. And our community team is really the day-to-day reflection of the mindset that all of our folks really embrace, from sales to development to our technical support and executive team.

As a group, our community team represents a number of things: some customer support, a bit of sales stewardship, content creation and subject matter expertise, promotion and support of our brand and platform, and bridging between our internal teams, external community, and all the pieces in between.

Our Purpose

We’ll get a little more in depth later this month about how our team is actually structured and what our roles and responsibilities are. But generally speaking, our team is built to deliver these things on an ongoing basis:

• Listening and monitoring on behalf of our own brand, and developing protocol around that
• Listening and monitoring for larger industry discussions in key areas of interest, like social media, social CRM, content marketing, etc
• Engaging with our community online for all of the above conversations, which for us is mostly via blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and our own site.
• Measuring the impact of our efforts
• Helping our internal teams with social media subject matter expertise when needed
• Shepherding external publicity efforts for our company and products,  like strategic public relations initiatives and contributing content to other sites and publications
• Creating content that helps educate our teams and our customers on key social media topics as they impact business
• Representing Radian6 in person at industry events, as speakers, sponsors, participants, or all of the above
• Supporting our prospect relationships, customer accounts, and partner relationships

Goals

Our goals are actually rather simple and straightforward. And yes, we have some measurable factors set against many of these for our own internal purposes, and you should do the same. More broadly speaking, though, a few of our goals are to:

• Build a purposeful, engaged audience around relevant content that illustrates business benefits of social media monitoring, engagement, and measurement
• Actively engage discussions of Radian6 around the social web to provide presence, accessibility, and awareness for our brand
• Participate thoughtfully in related industry discussions and events, both online and in person,  in order to contribute our expertise and invest in our larger community
• Act as a resource for internal teams for social media subject matter expertise
• Establish a Radian6 user community online to support active customers and their ongoing needs
• Develop our own benchmarks for community impact metrics, accountability, and engagement protocols & guidelines
• Gather and steward active feedback from our communities to continually drive development of Radian6 capabilities

There are more and some additional layers to the above, but overall, it’s about supporting our users, stewarding our brand, and participating in the online discussions that represent the interest of both our company and our customers.

This Year

As 2010 continues to roll by, we’ve got some key initiatives going on around our community efforts as well. They’re all built on the needs of our communities, both internal and external, and we’re excited to take them on. Just a few examples to get you brain turning:

• We’re going to build both an internal community portal for sharing knowledge and resources among our teams, and and external community to help support the needs of our customers to connect with us and one another.
• Our team is refining and building our own “listening grid”, our method for integrating listening and engagement into our own business workflow, and helping our customers outline models for doing the same.
• We’re working with our training team to develop social media-specific curriculum to help deepen knowledge for all of our community members, including our own teams
• We’re building programs like our Higher Ed and charitable initiatives to give back to communities and sectors that we think can benefit from access to Radian6, and the knowledge of our teams
• Continually building and tweaking our arsenal of content to address the needs and interests of our customers and prospects, and help them continue to understand the larger social media landscape as it relates to business applications.

And much like your business, our goals and objectives are flexible as we adapt to the needs of the market, and the goals of our company overall. It’s our job to adapt our role and function within the company to support the bigger organization goals.

What Else?

In the next post a week from today, we’ll talk specifically about the people that make up the community team, and how we’ve allocated roles and responsibilities. In subsequent weeks, we’ll chat a bit about our process, workflow, and operations among the team (including a realistic look at some of the challenges), and then finally a bit about how we assess and measure the impact of our efforts overall.

We’re structured differently than lots of companies, but perhaps there are some ideas you can take away for your own business. What can we help you understand about a community-driven model like ours? Please sound off in the comments!

What a great Webinar, right? And I say that from a place of humility – it was an honor to have Brian Solis join us to chat about his newest book, Engage!. Admittedly, he chatted about so much more than his book, most notably discussing the very true fact that social media isn’t just changing business, it’s changing society and the way we interact with each other and with brands. As one of Brian’s slides said, “We are defining a new era of society and how we ultimately communicate with each other.”

We genuinely encourage you to take the time to listen to the archived presentation and the Q&A Amber Naslund and I hosted afterward, which is linked below. If, for some reason, you can’t listen, though, here’s a high-level overview of what Brian talked about.

Myths

Brian tore down some very prevalent myths about social media engagement that are continuing to surface in business conversations, including:

• The myth that engagement equals conversation. Engagement isn’t just about conversation; engagement is about strategically participating in a way that triggers a desired response from your connections, whether that’s a purchase or a referral or anything else you decide is meaningful.
• The myth that social networks are populated by “pimply, goth teenagers”. The average age on the most prevalent social networks is actually much higher than we’d expect. (There’s a slide that proves it.)
• The myth that social media engagement is free. Effective social media engagement is both science and art, and it takes experience, which is an investment in time and resources.
• The myth that engaging in conversations will create a negative perception of your brand. If anything, not engaging to shape and shift the course of conversations about your brand will breed negativity.
• The myth that if you engage, you give up control of the brand and reputation. On the contrary, engaging gives you more control than ever, because you now have the ability to directly contribute information that people seek to clear up false perceptions.

Core Concepts

Brian also touched on some big ideas and concepts regarding social media engagement. Here are a few of those for you to chew on:

• The opportunity for champions of social media engagement — in the very purest sense of meeting people on their turf and contributing value to their lives by empathizing with them and learning about what they need and want — is in becoming an internal diplomat of sorts. It’s the responsibility of the champions to translate all this talk about authenticity and transparency and engagement into language and messages that make sense to and resonate with executives.
• There’s is more to the online social space than the dialogue that is occurring. Businesses and the people working with social media have to establish what it all means for them. The conversations that are occurring are bigger than the social networks they reside on. Brian calls this connection of conversations and relationships that surpass the bounds of a single network the Human Network. The Human Network is truly the marketplace for businesses, and it spans across the entire Internet. What’s important for businesses is understanding how this network builds and transpires across online communities.
• Social media engagement begins with listening and research. It’s the research about people, the information businesses gather about relationships and networks, that helps a company humanize its story and make it relevant to the people it wants to connect with. Connecting on a human level is about being empathetic and listening to what your audience members need and want in their lives. If a company can’t understand what it is people are looking for, how can it personalize its connection and empathize with them?
• Attention is the currency of the online social landscape, and the community dictates where it is we as individuals and as businesses need to focus our attention. Strategic participation and engagement makes all the difference in building relationships and social capital. Both sides of a relationship — business and follower/fan/customer — have to receive a benefit from interacting. This truth should change the way we create and share content, because simply acknowledging people as followers or fans isn’t enough anymore. The key is to share information and content in a way that inspires measurable action that directly benefits both parties.
• Creating social objects — videos, blog posts, pictures, etc. — that speak on our behalf when we’re not around to speak for ourselves is an important part of the engagement equation. Effectively, brands are becoming media, because people are looking for that sort of valuable, educational, decision-inducing information directly from brands themselves. Optimizing these social objects to be found on social media channels (Social Media Optimization) is as important as SEO and will have a lasting impact on whether people will be able to find your valuable content in real time.

Want to Hear the Whole Thing?

We thought you would. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the bits and pieces here are only high level. Take the time to listen to Brian’s presentation and his comments surrounding peoples questions when you have the chance, to get a full view of his perspective on social media engagement and where all this stuff is headed.

Brian’s slides, as well as a link to the recorded Webinar, are below. When you click on the link to the Webinar, you’ll be asked to register for it (again). Once you do that, a media player should pop up on your desktop and play the whole thing for you.

We hope you find value in the information Brian shared on our Webinar. Please let us know what you think, and if you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to post them in the comments. And thank you, again, to Brian for joining us!

Click here to listen to the recorded Webinar.

**Mac folks, we had some issues getting the Webinar recorded properly to run on a Mac OS. This isn’t something on our end but a slight discrepancy with the Webinar platform’s recording functionality. While we’re pretty sure there isn’t a fix for this problem, we’ll do our absolute best to find out if this is something we can resolve in the days to come. If, by chance, you happen to get the recording up and running, please leave a comment saying so for others who stop by. Thank you!**

March flew by, didn’t it? After taking you through the details of social media measurement and analysis last month, we hope you’re feeling confident you can get started tracking and making sense of the numbers supporting the key pieces of your social media program. If you’re still wondering about some bits and pieces of the social media measurement puzzle, please give us a shout and let us know what’s on your mind – we’re happy to answer your questions and help you figure things out.

But now that March has come and gone, it’s time we get moving to our next topic for discussion: Socializing the enterprise.

Throughout April, we’ll be talking about how you can get your business fully socialized, from explaining what “going social” really means to providing you tips and advice for how to combat resistance to social media integration. We’ll give you ideas for where else social tools and tenets can live within your company, and start you on the path to seeing how the foundations of social media can directly impact the efficiency of your teams, the relationships you build and maintain with your clients and prospects, and your bottom line.

Community manager Lauren Vargas has even put together an ebook for you about change management, breaking down what it takes to actually get change moving within an organization based on John Kotter’s eight-step change model. Lauren directly ties each step of Kotter’s model to the process of social media integration, giving you fully actionable steps to take to go social.

Have questions you’d like to ask us about what it takes to get social media running throughout your company on an enterprise-wide scale? Want to see a particular topic living under the umbrella of social media integration covered this month? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

Click Here to Download

Up until recently, social media use for business has lived mostly in marketing and communications departments. Given the context of social media – online applications and platforms that allow people to connect and socialize with one another – it’s not surprising it’s lived in those departments that are founded upon tenets of clear and powerful communication.

But marketing, communications, PR, all those heavily communication-oriented pieces of the business puzzle aren’t the only places within an organization where social tools and processes can live. Customer service, sales, and product development are just a few of the additional possibilities.

The implications of socializing an enterprise – of infusing online social platforms and the principles of relationship building, collaboration, engagement, and meeting people on their own turf – are huge and vastly important to consider as the landscape of modern business continues to shift and progress at break-neck speed.

To help demystify and break down what it means to socialize your business we’ve created an ebook from Radian6 community manager Lauren Vargas’s eight-step change management series on our blog. In this ebook, we give you basic steps to:

• Foster a sense of urgency within your organization to see the value of social media outside of its typical marketing uses;
• Build a strong team of people within your organization to lead the change and integration process;
• Create a vision for socialization that is clear and aligns with the goals of your organization’s business plan;
• Communicate with your C-Suite in a way that helps them understand the goals you’re working toward to integrate social tools and methods throughout your organization;
• Empower teams throughout your business to take action;
• Find and share short-term wins that keep people motivated and feeling good about the change that’s happening;
• Remain persistent without losing sight of your goals;
• And make the changes you’ve worked hard to instill stick for the long term.

Throughout April, we’ll be discussing on our blog what it takes to socialize a business, and exactly how that socialization will affect both internal processes and external perceptions and the bottom line. Have questions for us about change management or integrating social media? Please let us know!