Well, it’s hard to believe that June is already here, and we all know what that means – another EBook! This month, with
“Getting the Competitive Edge with Social Media”, we’re going to dive into what some might call “competitive intelligence gathering”. It’s been going on for thousands of years – in fact, it can be traced as far back as the China silk monopoly. The earliest surviving references to silk history and production place it in China, and for nearly 3 millennia, they held that secret close to their chests. So close, in fact, that travelers caught trying to smuggle eggs, cocoons or silkworms out of the country were executed.

But have no fear, thankfully those days are far behind us. And nowadays, aside from the myriad free web based analytics tools out there, a company would be remiss not to explore just how much information can be gleaned through the use of social media.

This real time, current information allows you to make definitive, today-based decisions about where your company is heading, and how to best directly compete in your marketplace. This EBook will ask you to ask yourself some important questions, such as:

• What departments will be directly affected by information about our competitors?
• Will you be using this information immediately? During the next quarter? Long term?
• How much of this information will have an effect on your choices? 20%? 50%? 80%? 100%?
• Would you be willing to change your original plans if the information you gained went against them?

It will also lay out step by step ways you can analyze and use this information to find out what others in your marketplace are getting up to. And, it will illustrate the hows and whys of turning that information inwards, in order to take an honest look at how YOU are doing in relation to your competitors.

Seeing the bigger picture will help you to plan strategically for your company’s growth and product development. And this EBook – “Getting the Competitive Edge with Social Media” – will send you forward with clear vision. We hope you enjoy it!

This time last week, I was sharing a stage at BlogWorld & New Media Expo New York with three fabulous gents, Jim Storer, David Spinks, and Dan Brostek. We were chatting about hiring community managers-what to look for in the people you hire, how to prepare the organization, and how to set internal and external community expectations. Perhaps in the social media bubble, the need and responsibilities for a community manager have been established, but outside the bubble, people are still exploring how to incorporate a social presence into overall business goals and experiencing the pangs of a changing corporate culture. This past month on the Radian6 Social Strategy blog, we have stressed the importance of internal training. Let’s end this month discussing three important lessons learned to remember before hiring and training community managers.

Quality Over Quantity

The question of scale always comes into play when discussing the integration of social media strategy and community engagement. While it is important to be aware of the conversations occurring across the social web, it is not realistic to think an organization can dive in and begin to engage in all communities and in all conversations from the onset. The lure of social media engagement has been built on the experience of a meaningful two-way dialogue. Just as you monitor for relevant conversations to add meaningful and quality interaction, you need to seek out the folks who can facilitate and encourage this healthy dialogue.

Having a person on your community team who can handle rough conversations with grace, able to solve issues on the spot, and can think about engagement and content creation through a strategic lens is worth more than ten people who lack the life and business experience or initiative to handle such situations. Yes, head count is important, but before you hand over the keys to your company, ensure you have the right combination of folks to represent the humanness of your organization. Warming a seat may only be fueling a future firestorm.

Nurture Versus Nature

You can teach people how to use new tools and technology, however, it is not so easy to rewire how a person balances time or the processes employed to solve a problem. As you look at the makeup of your current community team or the team you envision, are you considering the skills required outside of brand engagement? Analytical and project management skills are invaluable for a community manager to employ. Check out this infographic from Get Satisfaction blog. The community manager needs to be able to process and execute more than a status update.

Being a “people person” is an added bonus if the person has the skills necessary to be solution oriented and have the natural ability to make the community the hero of the conversation. There are many hats (and counting) a community manager must wear. Understand what can be taught and what has to already be present in the person or team you hire.

Community Health

No, I am not talking about the health of those folks that make up your community. While those folks are extremely important and not to be discounted, it is important you recognize the toll community management takes on a community manager. You know the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Not quite true, is it? Imagine the people who are on the front lines taking the brunt of the people’s frustrations and emotions day in and day out. Even if your community is satisfied, the emotional investment of community interaction begins to take a toll on those who facilitate these conversations.

The folks over at #cmgrchat tackled this very topic in February. The folks you may tend to hire feel very connected to their communities and may find it difficult to step away and take care of themselves. After all that you invest in your employees and the communities they serve, your organization cannot afford to have a community manager burn out. Social media may serve as an outlet for your community, not the community manager. As this role becomes more main stream, the responsibilities will continue to evolve and mature. Address this issue now and nurture the health and continued education of community managers, so when (not if) a situation develops, the community manager can focus 100% on the needs of the community.

What lessons have you learned for hiring community managers? Please share how you develop your own team.

This month we tackled the topic of internal training, and by now your teams should be ready for social media use, and aware of how to be concise in the space. Whether integrated into their daily tasks or not, what happens when the training is all done, your employees are out engaging in the space and someone does something that goes against outlined guidelines? What do you do then?

Correct Mistakes
Let’s face it, we are all human. We all make mistakes, from small ones like forgetting to CC someone on an email to large ones like tweeting out that uber secret company password instead of entering it on your login page. It happens. It will send panic through your body everything single time it does, but the sooner you can breathe deep and realize it was just a simple mistake, the sooner you’ll be able to recover.

Be Prepared
The best way to get over mistakes happening is by being prepared for them. You can do this by creating a crisis management document or by simply listing out all your biggest fears about your employees being in social media and then listing how you would overcome them. This can be a great exercise to do as a group to understand the mindset of your team. Maybe someone is terrified of mistyping or misspelling a word. In advance you could help them devise a plan to double check their tweets before sending. These types of plans will help to improve your reaction should something go wrong.

Don’t Over React
It’s probably the hardest thing not to do when something goes wrong, but when you have a crisis such as a misstep by an employee in social media, the best thing you can do is not over react. Even though we are all living in a real time world, take 10 minutes and clearly outline what your next steps will be. If you’ve previously created a crisis management plan this is a good time to open it up and review what you had planned out to do. Keep in mind, whatever is happening can be dealt with, it’s merely a matter of taking the time to plan out your actions and response.

Learn from the Wrong
No matter what goes wrong, you need to learn from mistakes, errors and just plain unfortunate events. After something happens, make sure you take the time to bring in your team to break down the situation and see if they can decide from their training where the error occurred, how it could have been avoided or what needs to be adjusted for next time. Learning from your mistakes is not just an old saying but something you should practice to improve your social media training.

Adjust your Training
After you’ve tackled the crisis, broken down the situation and learned from what went wrong, make sure to go back and adjust your training so that new employees benefit from your experience. Don’t just consider changing the content that you discuss with your employees but also the timing of that discussion. You might learn that employees felt rushed in the amount of time that training was completed in or that they felt certain areas we’re sped through. Whatever the case make sure you are looking at both content and delivery of your training.

Since we’re always looking to improve our process we’d love to hear about the ways you’ve overcome internal training missteps. How have you overcome challenges? Have you adjusted your training content and timing? What is the top lesson you’ve learned?

What time is it? It’s time to find out where in the world we are going to be in the next couple of weeks! As any social media enthusiast knows, being a practitioner is not just about sitting behind a desk – it’s about sharing, meeting, talking and learning. Guaranteed that if someone took the time to crunch the numbers, travel woes would be the number one tweet topic on any given day. But events and conferences are always important and usually more fun than a barrel of monkeys, so on that note, read on:

Next week sees Radian6′s Jon McGinley, Director of Marketing, and Rob Begg, Director of Sales Support shuffling off to Ottawa for MARCOM. An annual look at the trends and topics that matter most to public sector and not-for-profit marketers and communicators, it’s a chance to mix and mingle and catch some great talks by social media thought leaders like Brian Solis, Christopher S. Penn, and the aforementioned Rob Begg himself.

Next up is Measure Up, focusing this year on The New World of Marketing Analytics: The Integration of Traditional & Social Media. Held in Boston, June 6th – 8th, the event bills itself as ‘the world’s most comprehensive cross-dimensional view of marketing measurement best practices’ and says that ‘…the event is structured around integrating many fractured pieces of measurement analytics into one effective marketing strategy. The event will focus on return on investment (ROI) as it relates to online activities; specifically, Social Media.’ Social media ROI is a hotly debated topic, and one that’s of particular interest to our own Director of Community, Lauren Vargas, who will most certainly be there!

No sooner has Radian6′s Rob Begg (Director of Sales Support) unpacked his suitcase after Marcom, he’s packing it up again and heading to – I’m not going to lie, I’m jealous – New Orleans. The home of Mardi Gras and the famous French Quarter hosts The Enterprise Council on Small Business from June 6th to 8th. This is an annual gathering of senior marketing and sales executives who specifically target the small business segment, and will provide attendees with an understanding of the new digital technologies at their disposal, how small business owners are using them, and how marketers can use the technologies most effectively.

Around mid-month it’s back to Boston, and a chance to connect with Radian6′s Director of Social Strategy, David B. Thomas, at the MarketingProfs B2B Summit June 14th and 15th. What is interesting about this event is that it’s geared literally for everyone, from the newbie to the pro, with their sessions grouped in easy to follow, colour coded blocks. For example, if you’re new to a marketing discipline, or need to get back to the basics, attend the Explorer sessions (green); looking to discover new ways to improve your current campaigns? Then the Adventurer sessions (blue) are the way to go. And if you’re an advanced marketer whose campaigns have already been across the sea and back, then you might want to focus on the Globetrotter series of presentations (orange). Radian6 is a proud sponsor, and we’re certain you’ll enjoy meeting and listening to David, as well as everything else this conference has to offer.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve touched on several themes, from training to inspiration through to using social media to drive sales and leads. For many companies and agencies alike the individuals charged with social media objectives and responsibilities are pulled in many different directions. Because social media is no longer only within the realm of marketing, engagement practices are increasingly rolled out across the enterprise. Those tasked with taking such endeavours forward need to be well versed in not only the wider company objectives, but those of PR, Marketing, Customer Service, HR, Research and Sales. One of the single most important pieces of the puzzle when going social and training your organization to do so is buy-in. Setting yourself up for success means creating accountability and responsibility across the organization.

Start at the Beginning

To sustain a truly social organization start from within and get buy in from your employees. It’s important to make sure you are all on the same page and don’t leave anyone out. While many of your colleagues will be well versed in the art of social others will not, so make sure you cover the basics. What is social, why is it important and how can you engage, are all things that you may have discussed previously over the years but this doesn’t mean that everyone is comfortable with or necessarily understands it. It may be as simple as getting colleagues to become more comfortable in using twitter – for example, suggest that they tweet and share articles before their own thoughts to help them overcome the initial barrier that many face when using twitter for the first time. Or alternatively, you may want to make it official and recognize your employees by setting up a certification program as Dell has done. Regardless of how you chose to do it, encouragement, support and cooperation are key.

Said Who?

Remember your audience. The simplest way to ensure that what you are saying or the training you are providing is taken on board is by making it applicable to those you are speaking to. Using compelling case studies and examples as they apply to your audience can go a long way to driving home the message. Reinforce the notion that social media is not something you are doing because everyone else is. As such, it needs to integrate with overarching organizational objectives and those of the departments you are working with. Get your stakeholders to co-create content, strategies and goals for social media; a great way to create accountability. Imposing finite, ‘set in stone’ social media rules and structures, in most cases then not, will not be sustainable in the long run and they likely won’t slot in with the existing objectives. The point is for your various departments to work together. One size does not fit all. Remember, your social strategy is there to complement what is already there, to help lead generation and assist in customer service response for example. You’re not reinventing the wheel.

Say What?

Create a framework, not a set of rules. Make sure you allow room for personality, change and wider integration. Share what you’ve learned and how you do things but if you set up guidelines that are too rigid it’s likely that your audience will tune out, both when you are training them and when it comes down to execution. Social media is ever evolving and re-training everyone is not always viable. However, by getting the buy-in from your colleagues you’ll notice that they will take it upon themselves to learn with enthusiasm and not because they are asked to do so.

We appreciate your feedback and comments. What are some of the ways that you’ve ensured that employees are on board with social? Would you agree that your social media strategy is there to compliment your existing brand outreach teams, i.e. Marketing and Customer Service? What steps have you taken to ensure that everyone is integrated and on the same page?

Getting started with social media is a little like starting a family – except instead of taking care of a baby, you’re taking care of your brand.

You think about it for a while, discuss it at great length and when you feel like you’re ready, you start to weigh the pros and the cons. You consider your resources, who’s going to help you take care of it, nurture it, protect it and how will you handle a crisis? You’ve got your support system in place, a whole team perhaps and you’ve read all the relevant material you could get your hands on. Like so many others before you, you’re wondering if you’ll ever be fully prepared.

Just like you wouldn’t mindfully go into starting a family unprepared, you’re not going to begin your social media strategy unprepared either. However, if you’re waiting for the perfect time to get started, you may wait forever. There may never be that unlimited budget for whatever you’ll need and no matter how much you prepare, your baby, er, brand is going to grow and change and you’re going to have to grow and change to meet its needs. So be prepared but be flexible enough to adapt when needed.

The Time Is Now

What are you waiting for? Much like starting a family, once you have started down that path, you are committed. You have got to be in it for the long haul. Your brand is waiting to makes its social media debut and let its voice be heard. Granted, those first sounds may be tiny and small and it may take some time to find that voice, come into its own and mature in all the ways you’ve envisioned it, but with you there for guidance and direction it will happen. Sure you might make a few mistakes along the way, who doesn’t? The important thing to remember is that mistakes are a part of growth, and through learning from them we gain experience.

Start with baby steps, but start now.

Have you kicked off your social media strategy? If not, what’s holding you back from starting today? We’d love to hear more about it in the comments below.

Back in December, Dell officially launched its impressive Social Media Listening Command Center. The center tracks on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as mentions of Dell on Twitter, and that information is analyzed and broken down based on topics and subjects of conversation, sentiment, share of voice, geography and trends.

But this tracking is not just about Dell’s customers. As Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta said: “Dell’s Ground Control is also about getting that information to the right people wherever they are in the Dell organization, globally and functionally.”

And Dell has certainly stepped it up when it comes to ensuring that each and every one of those employees is a fully functioning and engaged member of their social media strategy. Dell considers them all, no matter what their position or department, to be important brand ambassadors, and they put their money where their mouth is by creating an innovative and company wide social media certification program. We had the pleasure of chatting with Amy Fowler-Tennison, Dell’s SMaC University Program Lead, about this initiative. Read on for some great tips on empowering your employees in social media, and why it’s so vital to your organization.

Hi Amy, nice to meet you. Tell us about your role at Dell?

Thanks and it’s nice to meet you. I lead Dell’s Social Media and Community University program or SMaCU. The program is designed to educate Dell team members on our overall social media strategy, governance and principles. While many social media training classes and documents are available online, our program focuses specifically on how Dell team members can use these tools to build authentic and long lasting  relationships with our customers. By empowering team members to get more involved the right way, we can imbed social media deep within the fabric of our company for the benefit of our customers and our brand.

What is the Dell Social Media Certification Program?

The certification program was established last year to equip team members to be effective Brand Ambassadors for our company. Any team member, regardless of their function or business unit, that wants to engage  on behalf of Dell in the social media space is required to complete SMaC Professional Certification. Once certified, team members receive an official certificate and they can start interacting with customers within their area of expertise. They can also request new social media pages, groups or accounts to be created with approval from the social media leadership team.

What was the thinking behind getting it started?

Our customers were and are looking for team members within the company that are experts on their area of interest or need. That meant that no one group could be responsible for all of our social media outreach, but rather that we needed team members from all functions within our company to engage, including marketing, sales, product development, HR and services. Fortunately, our team members were already participating in these platforms personally and many had the desire and ability to listen and engage on behalf of the company. By allowing any interested team member to attend our classes and get certified from the launch of the program, we enabled team members that already knew the space to move from personal to professional engagement.

You mentioned that “no one group could be responsible for all of our social media outreach”. That sounds a bit chaotic. How does Dell keep their SM outreach tracked and – for lack of a better word – ‘controlled’?

Great question. Social Media governance and Dell’s overarching strategy is owned by the SMaC team. Once team members are certified, there is a request form for all new requests and access to our tools. Once any new account launches, we monitor it to make sure the account is active, brand compliant and has tracking available.

How exactly do your employees end up “certified” in Social Media?

There are two levels of certification: SMaC Professional and SMaC Spokesperson. Professional certification requires basic understanding of four main content areas: our SMaC Principles, Dell’s overarching social media strategy, how to represent the Brand in social media and governance for the platform they choose to use. Spokesperson certification requires additional media training since these team members are using social media to communicate to shareholders and media.

What has the employee response been? Has there been any push-back? People who didn’t embrace it at first? Employee generation gaps..?

Overall, the response from team members has been overwhelming. Promotion of the program has primarily been spread through word of mouth. Some team members attend the classes because they are active practitioners and want to get more engaged, while others are not familiar with the tools, but see this an important career development opportunity. Eager attendees have even participated remotely during extremely late hours, called into a class during their vacation or paid to fly to a global training location themselves.

Wow. That’s a motivated employee base. Do you have any thoughts or advice you could share with other businesses who are just getting their internal Social Media programs/training up and running…?

Don’t jump into training without laying a strong foundation first. Our classes are successful because they are based on how Dell uses the tools and provide actionable next steps. Before you start training, you’ll want to think through who can engage (all employees or just a particular group), engagement guidelines and governance for company social media pages, groups, accounts, etc..

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A huge thank you goes out to Amy for taking the time to chat with us about this great program!

What do you think? Could your organization create something similar? Do you agree/disagree that each and every employee is a brand ambassador and should be trained in social media best practices? We always appreciate your feedback, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

Note: Radian6′s social media engagement and listening platform drives Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center.

Yesterday we were joined by Bryan Jennewein as we hosted a special Insights overview webinar for our clients. During this webinar Bryan walked us through the capabilities of the new Radian6 Insights platform. He gave us an overview of what Insight does, how Radian6 overlays the data and who this information can be used by. Continuing with the question theme, he then walked us through a live demonstration of the platform showing us the who, what and why behind the topic profile data. All questions that you can answer with insights! We then finished up with a Q&A session that brought up some great questions from our users that you will see answered over the coming weeks in a series of blog posts on the Platform blog.

Many of those in attendance asked about the possibility of getting access to the deck that Bryan used and since we never want to disappoint, we’ve provided that below.

If you missed the webinar or would just like to view it again, you can do so by visiting here.

Big thanks to everyone who joined us!

Martian: “E.T.?”
Kermit: “No, no, not E.T., Kermit THE Frog!”

Sesame Street might be the world’s best known address, trumping even 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and The North Pole. What was born from a 1966 Manhattan dinner party conversation - yes, even then parents were concerned about how much TV their kids were watching – and finally launched in 1969, went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. The original series has been televised in 120 countries, more than 20 international versions have been produced, and Sesame Street has received more Emmy Awards than any other program. Who would have thought that an 8 ft tall canary, a miserable garbage can dweller and an invisible (but not) Snuffleupagus would so enthrall and engage children? Jim Henson, for one.

Henson realized that children are often frighteningly smart, scathingly direct, darkly humorous and twisted little creatures – oh, and that they get bored easily. Children need to to be taught what to adults seem to be the most mundane things – that even crotchety and crabby Oscar the Grouch has feelings, that C is for cookie (that’s good enough for me!) and why a book is not a phone. He realized that the sharing of information and knowledge could be funny – preposterous even – and still be smart and engaging.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and how it relates to social media. I had a short, early morning, Sesame Street related Twitter exchange this morning with a colleague. Being, ahem, of a certain age, I mentioned the Phone Martians. Said colleague, being of, ahem, a much younger age, responded that he didn’t know who the Phone Martians were? As the kids say these days – OMG! I immediately launched YouTube on my phone, found the clip, and Tweeted it to him. It made my day – because I still laugh at the absurdity yet sheer brilliance of the Phone Martians – and it made his day, because he was introduced to something that he hadn’t experienced before, to which he promptly responded “Trippy!” Believe me, everyone needs to experience the Phone Martians – if you haven’t clicked on the link yet, please do so now.

There are a number of social media lessons learned in our little exchange. We live thousands of miles apart. We were able to communicate quickly and easily at an ungodly hour of the morning, via PC and Smartphone, and we used Twitter and YouTube effectively to exchange ideas and content. But it eventually boiled down to one core thing. Inspiration. Those of us who create content – which you should be doing by now, as you have your staff all trained and eagerly embracing social media – are often asked how we find inspiration. Ideas. Jumping off points. Well, let’s take this post as an example:

• One of the most successful television shows in the history of the medium was born of some chatter at a dinner party – I guarantee no one at that dinner party had a clue what that chatter was going to inspire.

• Jim Henson kept it simple, and found the inspiration for many of his most iconic characters in simple, even obvious things – a cookie, an inchworm, a trashcan, a big bird. He saw the world with an open, unbiased eye, and I doubt he ever said “that won’t work” or “that’s too silly” or “what if people don’t like it?” I mean seriously – the man made TV gold out of two bathmats with antennas on their heads. And a rotary phone.

• I woke up this morning wondering what I was going to write about today. Truth. It happens. And within ten minutes of a friendly Twitter/YouTube exchange, I had my inspiration – inspiration itself!

People love social media because of the non-stop flow of knowledge, ideas and inspiration they can access in the cloud. Without inspiration, you won’t create anything. And if you don’t create anything you have nothing to share with your community. But don’t let the very idea of inspiration hobble you before you’ve even left the starting gate. Feeling blocked? Allow yourself some space and breathing room. Read a good article. Have an exchange with a friend or colleague. Take a walk. Marvel at how that bumble-bee manages to stay airborne! Think tangentially. Don’t look for the obvious connections. But most importantly, don’t think too hard about it. Inspiration strikes at the oddest times, and more often than not, when you are least expecting it. Like Sesame Street. And Phone Martians.

What tips and tricks do you utilize when you’re looking for some inspiration? What’s the oddest thing that you’ve found inspiration from? As always, we appreciate your comments and feedback.

We’ve talked this month about how to train your team to be ready to participate in social media, but there’s one big area that still needs to be discussed. Do you sell online? When we say “sell online” we don’t mean making it so your products/service can be purchased via a website, but rather will you build a strategy to have your sales or lead generation team actively pursuing clients through social media channels? If this is an area you’d like to train your staff to be prepared for there’s definitely some things you need to keep in mind.

In order to make sure we give you the right perspective, we talked with Tom Hasselman, now a Product Marketing Manager here at Radian6 with over 5 years experience as a sales person in the online space. One of Tom’s current responsibilities is helping to educate and train our own sales team for participation in the social space.

So Tom, what do you feel is the most important lesson to share when introducing social media culture to a sales or lead generation team?

That the social web empowers consumers and people making decisions on products or services with the ability to make a much more informed decision. No one wants to be “sold to” anymore, therefore social media truly forces the hand of the true sales professional to become a “consultative seller.” In a lot of ways, a sales professional in the  2.0 space is a co-project manager with his/her prospect. Their role is to ensure that the prospect has all of the info needed in order to make an informed decision and to remove any obstacles hindering the decision making process.

Sales pros in the social media monitoring space must fill the shoes of not only a software sales professional, but also be someone who understands the subtle nuances of the ever evolving social media landscape.

What are your top tips for sales people to keep in mind while in the space?

Well, some are obvious, some are not. The obvious include:

• Don’t be pitchy or salesy
• Don’t treat your twitter handle as an advertisement, no one likes someone who is always “on”

Some things are less obvious like:

• Don’t get into competitive comparisons of your product with other solutions
• Don’t join a LinkedIn group simply to “pitch”
• Don’t just be a salesperson online, add value to conversations, not just value propositions

How about planning to get your sales team into the space?

Pay attention to tenured reps. Your sales managers and directors will be great resources when planning if you should use social media as an avenue for your sales team. They will know the processes of your organization and be able to provide great information when preparing your strategy for selling online.

Training to have people speak online?

Selling is often successful based on the tone of a salesperson’s voice, the smile they flash across the table or the comfort level they give their client. It’s no different in the social space. Spend some time working with your team on how the right words and phrasing can make all the difference in the world when reaching out online. Work on growing each team member’s social media voice, so that they have a unique personality in the online space.

How do you incorporate your current process?

Layering a social aspect, perhaps engaging on twitter for 1 hour a day on top of their current day to day activities, could help to ensure that your integration of a social aspect is smooth. It will also help to identify areas of your current process that don’t transfer over to a social side.

Thanks Tom for taking the time to talk to us today!

We know that sales development is a huge training section for some businesses so we want to know how you feel about allowing your sales or lead generation team to use social media as a resource? Would you like to see a sales component added to your social strategy? What keeps you away from selling online? Let us know in the comments section or send us a tweet!

So you’ve graduated high school, you’ve completed your university degree and it’s time to leave all the cramming behind and get to work, right? While in school you might have thought that work is work and school is school, but over the years you’ve probably come to realize that learning and training doesn’t stop once you’ve been handed that diploma while wearing that silly hat. In more cases then not, your job or the environment you work in does not remain static. This is true in most cases but maybe even more so in the IT/tech and social media world that we operate in. Social networks spring up all the time, and technologies, systems and software are constantly evolving, not to mention the industry itself. While we might have been talking about listening a couple of years ago, we’ve moved on now to engagement and ROI. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of your game, especially in your job, and learning opportunities can be endless. There are a few basic elements to remaining personally engaged that will help you stay motivated and eager to keep increasing your knowledge base.

Passion and drive is a huge advantage. If you are lucky enough to be passionate about the industry, brand or product that you are working with, your appetite to learn and operate at your best will come naturally. That’s not to say that it’s always easy. We all have other priorities in our lives, whether family obligations, personal goals, work pressures or deadlines to meet, so it’s understandable that the focus on your own development can often end up on the back burner. The key is to accept that priorities change but make a concerted effort to stay involved. In other words, don’t sweat the details. Staying involved can mean many things to many people. To some of us, it’s as simple as catching up on industry reading, speaking to stakeholders on and off line, or taking enough time to allow yourself to reflect on what you know and where you want to improve.

One way to make sure you remain on the learning curve is to ask for clarification. It’s extremely easy to miss the tone or nuance of exactly what it is that people expect from you. As we wrote about earlier in the month, there are NO stupid questions, so don’t be shy. Deadlines and priorities are not entities that operate in your realm only, they affect your team, your colleagues and your superiors, which means that your initiative is your most valuable asset. If your company has just introduced some brand new upgrades or add ons to systems you use daily, take the initiative to ensure you get the training you need, and take the time required to feel comfortable maneuvering around the new landscape. Proactive is not just a word that you put on your CV but it is the key to staying on top of your game.

In addition to being proactive, asking questions, and the passion you have for what you do, practice what you preach! Don’t ask your colleagues or your team members to take a stake in their development if you don’t do so yourself. Moreover if you create a dependency on one person’s skills and expertise, your team is likely not operating at the level that it could be and you are not driving the best value. So, ensure that you support and cooperate with your colleagues and make an effort to lead by example. A few nudges here and there always help, but above all your mission to train and drive their learning will keep you on your toes.

What do you think? Does your organisation maintain an internal training department? Do you offer staff incentives to pursue further learning? When’s the last time you’ve been through a training program or scheduled a ‘learning seminar’? We would love to hear how you work to ensure that you are staying on top of the newest and latest, so feel free to comment and let’s chat.

You’re at your desk, cup of coffee in hand and you’re ready to start your day. You can’t wait! Soon, you’ll be representing your brand across the various social networks. The first order of business on your list today is to begin reading some of those great social media blogs that were suggested to you by your friends and followers. You open up your RSS reader, dive in, and suddenly realize within the first few paragraphs about CRM, sCRM, ROI and KPI that you’re overwhelmed by all these acronyms. What the heck do they mean and how can you focus on the point of the article if you have to keep stopping to look them up?

Keep It Simple Silly

It happens. Sometimes professionals forget that not everyone in their audience knows exactly what they know. This isn’t exclusive to social media either. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, every industry has their own terminologies and they can be quite confusing at times. Therefore, when setting out to share industry related knowledge across your social networks consider keeping it simple.

It doesn’t matter what social network you’re on or if you’re writing for the corporate blog, consider that on any given day your audience might range from someone who’s learning about your brand for the very first time to the industry insider who’s considered an influencer. You want to build a community based on your brand. Doing so means not only talking with others in your industry but perhaps educating consumers as well. If you want to use acronyms, instead of assuming that everyone knows what you’re talking about, explain exactly what each acronym means the first time you use it. The same goes for industry terminology too. Don’t get caught up in technical jargon. You don’t need it to present yourself as a thought leader and you may find yourself alienating part of your community if you don’t take the time to educate and inform when necessary.

Become A Resource

If you find yourself using acronyms and industry terms quite a bit, think about creating a glossary post on your corporate blog that can be used as a resource within your community. You can link back to it and reference it as needed. Plus, one of the best parts about creating it on your own site is that you’ll have the ability to update it as needed. You may even want to take it a step further and create a white paper that others can download and share.

About That Jargon

Because social media terminology is ever evolving, like social media itself, it would be quite an undertaking to try to list every single social media term. However, we did want to share a few of the popular social media acronyms and what they mean. Again, this isn’t a definitive list but rather a few of the more popular terms we thought you’d like to know:

• B2B: Business to business
• B2C: Business to consumer
• CGM: Consumer generated media
• CMS: Content management system
• CRM: Customer relationship management
• ERP: Enterprise resource planning
• KPI: Key performance indicators
• QR Code: Quick response code
• ROI: Return on investment
• SCRM: Social customer relationship management
• SEO: Search engine optimization
• SM: Social media
• SMM: Social media marketing
• UGC: User generated content

You can also check out Aaron Friedman’s Digital and Social Media Acronyms post at Digital Highrise for a more detailed list.

If your goal is to keep your community engaged, enchanted and educated about your brand why not make things as easy to understand as possible?

Do you find technical jargon, acronyms and industry terminology distracting when reading articles or trying to follow conversations? Are you using them yourself? What tips would you add? Please let us know in the comments below.

Social media is all about, well, being social! And what could be more social than a cocktail party? The room’s abuzz, laughter tinkles through the crowd, you grab a Dirty Martini – extra olives please – and begin to mingle. Suddenly, you find yourself in a small pod of people, you introduce yourself, and as expectant (tipsy?) yet friendly faces look to you for a bon mot or some interesting trivia….you freeze. Your brain shuts down and your mouth turns to paste. You’ve broken the golden rule of cocktail party going: always come prepared with some conversation starting statistics or an eye opening, maybe even controversial, tidbit to inject into the mix. Then you remember reading this blog post earlier in the day, and your heart rate begins to return to normal. “Did you know,” you say, as heads lean in to listen “…according to ads from Vogue magazine over the decades, that in 1937 a woman with a 32 inch bust line would have been considered a size 14!?  By 1967, she would have been an 8, and….wait for it…today she is considered a size zero!?” You reflect for a moment on what a size zero even means, as the woman in your group look at each other in acknowledgement, nod their heads and roll their eyes in solidarity, and slug back the dregs of their drinks.

Ready to wear women’s wear is a relatively recent innovation. And almost since it started, companies have been engaging in what the industry calls “vanity sizing” – lowering the sizes of women’s clothing to appeal to consumers’ sense of vanity. Nowadays, while men can pretty easily still buy off the rack “a 32/34 pant, please!” – most women try on ten pairs of jeans to find the one pair that fits. You can be a size 6 at one store and a size 12 at another. The problem is that there is no industry standard.

Social media is a bit like that too, especially when you’re just starting out. There aren’t “industry standards” to guide you as to which social media platform you should or shouldn’t embrace. It is an ever changing beast, with new apps, platforms and startups appearing virtually every day. Some will become the next big thing for awhile, and quietly fade away, while others will become the next big thing…and really be the next big thing! That’s why keeping your finger on the pulse of social media is so important. That said, social media, much like the clothing industry, is not “one size fits all”, and you don’t need to have a company profile or presence on all outlets.

Here are a few suggestions and things to think about when trying to narrow down your social media strategy:

Evaluate and nail down exactly what your company does, and where you will get most return on your company’s social media investment: For example, say you run a small but successful construction company. You specialize in building additions, but you also have an award winning landscaping division whose work deserves to be shown off. Twitter might not be the best outlet for you to invest company time in. You might take a pass at LinkedIn also, save for a company listing in order to share your credentials and trades licenses. Facebook, however, will allow you to reach out to past clients and their contacts, and allow you to showcase photographs and even videos of your work. So will YouTube.

Don’t be afraid to be the big fish in a small pond: Maybe what you do is somewhat niche. You only can afford one employee to ‘manage’ your online social media presence. But, you know exactly where your relatively small client base – and potential client base – ‘hangs out’ online. It’s ok to focus your energies there, and aim to expand your social media strategy in line with your company growth.

Don’t overextend yourself by trying to be all things to all people: You’ve spent valuable time – and money – training your employees and setting up an internal team of social media experts. But if you can’t deliver, if your customer’s tweets are being ignored, your Facebook fan page is stale and outdated, and no one has written a company blog post for weeks – or worse – months, your social media strategy is not working. Social networks are not fun and games (although you can have a lot of fun on them) – they are customer service tools that help you connect with your consumer base on a very personal and up-close level. And those consumers are exceptionally savvy social media users themselves. If you’re so overwhelmed that your company’s online presence starts to smell stale, all the expertly trained staff in the world won’t be able to help you.

Remember this: one size does not fit all. Even if it looks like it might. What works for one company will not necessarily work for you. Try a few things on for size, before you invest in something that just doesn’t fit you or your company culture. Because you can’t return a bad social media ‘purchase’ and get your money back.

What do you think? Agree or disagree? Have you narrowed down exactly what your best fit is when it comes to social media engagement? Have you recovered from a bad purchase, or know someone who has? What lessons came from the experience? As always, we love to hear your comments and feedback.

In social media we talk a lot about being engaged or becoming an engaged brand. But engagement isn’t just for interacting with your customers. Engagement starts on day one of your social media training by making sure that as a group you are communicating clearly. But how in the world do you stay engaged internally and externally in ways that will work for you? Let’s take some time today to walk through a few things to keep in mind.

Talk about it
It might seem silly to have a discussion about being engaged, but the first place you need to start is figuring out the methods that will work best with your team. Have a conversation. Find out the ways your team likes to communicate, list the different ways you plan on communicating and about what. By starting the conversation early on everyone will have a voice on how to stay involved.

Write it down
We often talk about having an external playbook, which is basically a place to house everything you do as far as guidelines in the social media space. But what about internally? Have you ever considered recording everything you do as a team to communicate internally? Walking through the process of writing down the ways you communicate and encourage internal engagement may help to expose areas you are missing.

Don’t be afraid to change it up
Just like any good external engagement strategy, it’s important to keep your internal engagement strategy up to date and always shifting to your team’s needs. Try picking a monthly time to review the ins and outs of how you talk to each other.

What ways are you fostering internal engagement as your team learns and grows? What stumbling blocks have you hit a long the way and how did you overcome them as a team?

Remember high school? On any given day walking through the hallway you would hear murmurs of he said, she said – gossip. To many of us, it was aggravating and left us  wondering what they were they saying, who were they talking about……me?

If you are new to Twitter it can be a similar type of feeling – tweets fly by in the blink of an eye, and if you’ve missed two or three out of a conversation, you’re lost. But from a business perspective, Twitter is an amazing pipeline. Now when someone talks about us, we can – and should – know about it within seconds! When customers are discussing your brand/products, it’s bad business to ignore them, right? And traditionally, marketers flock to where the market and customer base is present. Well, today, when upwards of 72% of internet users are active on at least one social network, you can put money on the fact that a considerable number of those users – and your customers – are on Twitter.

To say social media is simply a fad could prove to be costly from a business standpoint. In the old days, to be acknowledged by a company with a response after writing them a letter of concern or complaint was extremely satisfying – though it usually took months. So now, when your client base is expressing their concerns or complaints in less than 140 characters, and in real time, you should be prepared to extend that same satisfying feeling to them, in that same ‘real-time’, where possible.

Customers, prospects and influencers are already engaging with one another in relation to your brand, it’s time for you to become involved as well. If you are new to social media and ramping up your staff and/or colleagues, start slow and begin listening to what these individuals are saying and gain some insight into who is talking about you the most. Stop the guessing game and you are on the fast track to incorporating this new means of customer service to your existing traditional tactics. This means of communication can be intimidating to many, but by stepping back a bit and taking the initial step of listening and monitoring how these conversations are playing out, you will adapt and fit right in.

Relationships with our customers have long been recognized as a crucial element to a company’s success. In the past, these relationships were traditionally created through advertising, telephone surveys, eventually emails, and any number of other faceless encounters to ensure customers knew you cared and were meeting their needs. Being an active and engaged organization on Twitter provides you the EXACT same opportunities. Except with an ease and immediacy to action that has never been available before.

Here’s an interesting statistic – 58% of tweets about bad brand experiences will fall on deaf ears. If your company’s customer service department was reporting percentages like that, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be happy about it. Consider Twitter a key extension of your customer service strategy, and you will have the advantage of dealing with those complaints and concerns before they have a chance to fester – or worse yet – are shared among thousands.

That said, be sure you are prepared. Those 140 characters don’t allow you much wiggle room, and remember, tone and previous tweets that might change the subtlety of what you ‘think’ you’re dealing with are extremely important. When the opportunity arises to respond, it helps to ensure all involved within the enterprise are on the same page. Have your social media staff collaborate with colleagues company wide to outline questions and processes to consider when engaging with your customers – this will dismiss any confusion. You have just created a strategic monitoring and engagement playbook! Compile and distribute this playbook amongst all of your employees. It is vital to continually manage – and change if needed – this content to ensure consistency across the enterprise. Once this element has been tackled, have your social media team debrief, report and keep track of your progress in your Twitter account engagement and how it reflects on your overall presence within the whole of Social Media. This is far from an overnight process, but a well managed Twitter presence can be a huge and relatively easily developed first step towards building effective relationships and rapport with customers.

Individuals are forming and sharing opinions with or without you! These public discussions about your brand are there waiting to be tapped into, in order to leverage and build upon traditional means of customer service. Incorporating tactics relayed over this month of internal training tactics and tips will allow you to create positive relationships and ultimately expand markets, build brand awareness, spark demand, and create loyalty and advocacy all in a mere 140 characters or less. By capturing these conversations you will know exactly what people are saying – good and bad – and who is talking about your company.

Tell us what you think? How important is your Twitter presence within your social media food chain? What things would you add to a strategic monitoring and engagement playbook?

Mark Burns is a Training Specialist at Radian6 where he works to develop course content, delivering open training sessions as well as custom closed sessions for clients. Follow him on twitter and connect with him on Linkedin.

It’s been a busy last couple of months here at Radian6. The first few weeks of April were consumed with our inaugural Social 2011, immediately after which the focus turned to wrapping up the Salesforce/Radian6 union. But there are events to be at and conferences to attend – producing our own event and sweeping up after a little acquisition deal was not going to hold us back!

The end of April saw our Director of Community, Lauren Vargas, flying off to Seattle, where she attended the PSRF Spring Conference. Held at the Museum of Flight - one of the largest air and space museums in the world – the Puget Sound Research Foundation’s spring educational conference covered topics such as “Tracking Research in the New Age of Influence” and “Lessons Learned in the use of Mobile Apps for Market Research.” Vargas’ presentation – Socializing the Enterprise – explored the importance of training your employees, top to bottom, so they can deftly handle the tools needed to implement social media objectives and strategies. As she said,”The path to social media integration won’t always be smooth, and it definitely won’t be immediate, but the key to making the transition as easy as possible is setting reasonable and realistic expectations.”

Before we knew it, May was here, bringing not May flowers (for the most part), but more places to be and people to see.

We all know that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but surely not when you’re attending the SOCAP Spring Symposium! With a tip of the hat to industries like Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Healthcare, Travel & Hospitality and Financial Services, the event also held ‘hot-topic’ workshops on Social Media, Contact Center Operations, Crisis Training and Regulatory Issues Impacting Customer Care. Toss in a featured talk by Radian6′s Vice President of Social Strategy Amber Naslund and a couple of tickets to the jaw-dropping Cirque du Soleil, and we dare you to try and keep the details under wraps.

Radian6 headed north after that, and landed in Washington, D.C., just in time for BlogWell DC. We were a proud sponsor of this event, which featured in depth case studies from groups as diverse as USA TODAY is to the U.S. Navy. The Internal Revenue Service, ConAgra Foods, Discovery Communications, UnitedHealth Group, Delta Air Lines, and the National Association of REALTORS were also featured, and event goers could learn important lessons in how to use Twitter to drive web traffic and engagement for events, how to move social media forward in a sensitive environment, and the social media recruiting process.

This coming weekend has Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun attending Mashable Connect in Orlando, Florida, along with other heavy hitters and thought leaders from the social media world. An invite only affair, this gathering is billed as “an intimate conference experience that will bring together leaders from the digital world for three days away to share and connect offline in a unique setting.” In between presentations, key influencers from American Express to CNN, Fidelity Investments to PepsiCo, Tumblr to Unilever will have more down time than usual to network and share ideas. Expect to cover new territory and hear about the lastest breaking news at an event by Mashable.

A lot of you will be familier with Jason Falls, and if not, look him up. The man behind Social Media Explorer, he’s an educator, public speaker and thinker in the world of digital marketing and social media. Falls is bringing his first-ever Exploring Social Media Business Summit to Toledo, Ohio on May 18, and Radian6, who is also an event sponsor, will be there. The lineup of speakers at this one day summit will talk about social media strategy and content marketing for the communications and business professional, and include Joe Pulizzi, Allen Mireles, Erik Deckers, Chris Baggott and – who’s this? Our own Cory Hartlen!  You can catch a preview of the event, Cory’s interview with Jason Falls, right here.

And we couldn’t round out the month without mentioning Salesforce’s rolling Cloudforce tour, landing in Atlanta, Georgia May 19th. It’s the biggest-ever cloud computing event to hit Atlanta, but that’s not the best part. The best part is – it’s FREE! Swing by for the day and meet Radian6′s Director of Product Marketing Rob Begg, and experience all the social, mobile, and open innovations driving success in the Cloud 2 world.

Radian6 does indeed get around. And we do this because we understand the immeasurable gains achieved in meeting people face to face, and engaging in real time communication and conversation. Social media is about bringing people together. Online and off.

When it comes to social media success, everyone is looking for the magic elixir. The bad news is there is no magic elixir. However, there are some pretty good examples of what has and hasn’t worked across the social web. That’s right, we’re talking about case studies.

Dictionary.com defines a case study as:

the act or an instance of analyzing one or more particular cases or case histories with a view to making generalizations.

Who doesn’t love a good case study? As tempting as it would be to give you a nice, long, laundry list of case studies and take the easy way out, that certainly wouldn’t be doing you any justice in the long run. Don’t get me wrong though, we’ll give you a few tasty morsels to help you get your creative juices flowing.

Generalizations

Did you notice the mention of the word “generalizations” in that case study definition? Generalizations can be an issue. If you’re looking to create a campaign that will take things to the next level or you’re planning your social media strategy based on someone else’s case study, keep those generalizations in mind.  In other words, case studies, as helpful as they can be, should not be followed literally. Why? Because more often than not, much of the information that went into building that case study is not shared. It’s also important to remember that every company has different corporate cultures and business practices which will, without a doubt, affect the outcome of a case study. Noted? Perfect. Let’s move forward.

Give Me The Goodies

We promised to give you some examples that would spark your creative sides. Imagine growing your community 944% – in a day! Clairol, the hair product company did exactly that. They grew their Facebook following by 944% in just one day. The company created a campaign to support the launch of their Nice ‘n Easy Color Blend Foam and gave away 100,000 new bottles over four days. In their case they used a combination of a well-conceived giveaway and blogger outreach. The result was 255,000 new fans. Clairol was smart, in order to keep fans engaged they created a series of how-to videos, featuring product reviews and ratings by users, and they linked to tips from their own hair color experts.

Intuit’s user-community for its TurboTax product is a passionate one; so much so, that the folks at Intuit decided to create a top-notch user feedback community called the Inner Circle. After six years, the Inner Circle has more than 25,000 members and has become an integral part of the TurboTax product updating and improvement plan.

CBS had their eye on the cherished Thursday night block and wanted to breathe new life into their network. They introduced The Big Bang Theory and needed to get 20-somethings to watch it. In 2008, The Big Bang Theory made their presence known at the pop-culture conference Comic-Con. People began to notice and sought out the cast and crew across social networks. The show’s producer Bill Prady and some of the actors from the show had a presence on Twitter. Prady’s feed gave fans an insider’s view. Prady & Co. pinpointed their target audience and built on fans’ passions. In turn, the show soared from a Neilsen rating of 59 in 2008 to a rating of 12 in 2010 due to their social media efforts.

Now imagine what you can do!

Be The Expert

Instead of following your favorite case study examples to the T, consider documenting your own experiences – both good and bad. This is important for several reasons. For one, it is the perfect way to create more resources for your own internal training. You will want to look back on the progress you’ve made, what has worked best for your organization and what did not. Also, if you share what you learn, you will create a wealth of invaluable information that will help you expand your community and create lasting connections. Continue to do this over time and your organization will be well on its way to being looked upon as the thought leader in your industry.

Have you given any thought to creating your own social media case studies? What, if anything, has been holding you back and what information can we provide to help you on your way to becoming a social media success story?

Picture this: The year is 1631, and you are the proud proprietor of Ye Olde Print Shoppe in London, England. Council has just passed yet another ordinance prohibiting the stalls of fruiterers, fish sellers, tripe women, bakers, butchers, etc., from sullying your fair city’s streets, and you couldn’t be happier. A fish monger has illegally set up right outside your establishment. The smell of slightly over-ripe fish is really stinking up the joint, and you have an important order to fill. Yet another run of the revolutionary King James Bible.

You give your apprentice his assignment – responsibility for the popular Ten Commandments. You think to yourself, “Surely he can handle a bit of typesetting!”

Oh, he handled it alright. And he might have handled YOU right out of business, not to mention right out of town (this is the 17th century, don’t forget).

His error read as follows:

Seventh Commandment – Thou shalt commit adultery.

Thankfully, the transmission of news and information in the 17th century was nowhere near as transparent nor instantaneous as it is today. A trip between the nation’s two largest cities, Norwich and London, took fifty hours. For news to travel between the English Parliament in Westminster and the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh took nine days, weather permitting. Lucky for you.

We are well aware that if an error like that had been made today, say as an incorrect company blog post, or a rogue tweet by an overzealous – or overly pickled – employee, it would have been retweeted or ‘linked back to’ a hundred times over before said Master Printer had even noticed it. Social media giveth, and social media taketh away. Upsets – holy or otherwise – can happen, just don’t allow that possibility to scare you away.

Being nervous in the beginning is normal. But have some faith in what you’ve built – and those you’ve trained – as you’ve been setting up your internal social media plan. With a pre-planned Reputation Management plan in place and an in-depth social media policy drafted and disseminated to your staff, a PR bump in the road will be easily recovered from.

A study from Pew Research Center shows that Reputation Management is something that people are becoming highly aware of – 57 percent of adult Internet users have used a search engine to perform a vanity search, and 46 percent of Internet users search online to monitor the digital footprints of others. Celebrities and some high profile corporations are even taking out Twitter insurance, mainly to protect against lawsuits and legal battles around issues such as intellectual property, defamation and privacy breaches.

You might consider Twitter insurance be a bit over the top for the moment, but you still need to protect your company name and the integrity of your brand. Here are some easy and effective things you can do without breaking the bank:

• Trust: Your employees – they are skilled, intelligent, professional and presumably have a healthy grip on common sense.

• Develop: A detailed action plan – sometimes these PR nightmares happen at the most inopportune times – say, after midnight after the company party…? Have a detailed, easily accessed action plan in place as well as someone tasked with being the emergency response point person. If at all possible, don’t wait until morning to bring in your clean-up crew.

• Monitor: The web – use major search engines to set up alerts and always follow up when links are delivered. Assign someone the daily task of watching social media sites, review sites, blogs and online forums – use social media monitoring platforms if your budget allows. Keep track of where your name is mentioned daily.

• Respond: To errors in judgement immediately – explain the error or offense, and if there’s any way to fix it, do so. Just don’t sweep it under the carpet and hope it will go away. Worse yet, don’t dance around it. Social media users value the openness, contact and relationships they’ve built with organizations, and tend to not respond well to PR spin. Stepping up and saying “Hey, we goofed” will also remind people what’s behind the brand – human beings. Who sometimes make mistakes.

People can’t be at the helm 24/7. But if you adopt and adhere to a company-wide Reputation Management playbook, you’ll be able to respond to – and respect – your social media community members. And people are what this amazing new world of connectedness and conversation is all about.

What do you think? Have you thought about your organization’s Reputation Management plan? Who would you turn to or what would you do if an offensive tweet or Facebook post was causing a media firestorm? And where does your company draw the line at what is or isn’t offensive? Please leave your comments below.

Note: The Time Magazine link is an excerpt. Read the full article in the May 9th, 2011 edition.

The Internet has given new meaning to several words, including carrots. Prior to social media engagement, I thought of carrots as the bitter vegetable my mother attempted to feed me at dinner or the image of Bugs Bunny’s chewing nonchalantly on a carrot. Not any longer, folks! Enter the Twitter sig…

This month we are tackling internal training and the importance of an educated workforce as the cornerstone for effective external engagement. Individual voices and personalities can be celebrated and thrive if everyone has a defined safe haven to operate. Transparency to the external community is key for healthy dialog, but don’t underestimate the importance of transparency between departments in your own organization. The policies and processes formed as you integrate social media into your overall business are primarily created to promote internal communication. The buck has to stop somewhere.

Despite having multiple people behind our Twitter handle from the beginning, in a small company and tight-knit social media community, we did not identify who was speaking from behind the company handle with each tweet because it was assumed everyone knew us. As our company and the conversations have grown, we have lost some of this internal and external familiarity.

To retain organizational accountability, help manage workflow, and spearhead a scalable listening grid, Radian6 has started using Twitter sigs (i.e., carrots – ^LV) in response to issues or customer service questions requiring a personal touch. We are trialing this method of engagement to see if it improves external awareness and internal knowledge of who is responding and when/why they are engaging. A playbook is divine for communicating the essence of procedure, but there is nothing better than seeing, engaging and being accountable for the participation.

Is identifying the people behind the avatar in the bio enough? How do you identify the people behind the avatar? Does this accountability matter to your community?

What do you think about Radian6 using Twitter sigs?

It’s a bitter cold December evening and you’ve been called in for the night shift to help monitor for customer issues. A few months ago your company added in a social media component to your organization. There was a week long training course and instruction on the social media side of things, which up to this point had generally meant having another window opened up on your computer screen. Half-way through the night you read a tweet that you know needs to be escalated and responded to by  someone. Now who is that someone? You think back to the first meeting you had 3 months ago, after the chocolate chip muffin before the pizza was the part where they talked about who should respond. It’s 3 a.m. and all you can remember is chocolate and pepperoni.

Probably one of the biggest fears of anyone who’s out to train their internal team on how to use social media both for work and personal experience, is making sure they retain everything you teach them. All the best training in the world will mean nothing if you haven’t built out a place for your internal teams to refer back to that valuable information. Just like asking questions is a necessity, so is having a place to store the answers. By providing your team with self serve options to reference the material they’ve learned, you’ll be ensuring that there’s always a knowledge base for them to turn to.

How do you build this information?
Start from Day 1 of your training and make sure you are recording all the information that you provide to employees. Also make sure you are recording all the questions they ask and the answer you give them. Here’s a few suggestions for formats:

Written: Nothing is more simple than writing out all the information you have gone over.

Slide Decks: For those that are a little more graphically inclined, building out slide decks is a great way to document the information in a user friendly visual format.

Audio/Video: We’ve had enough Youtube celebrities lately to know that creating an audio/video file is pretty straight forward. Sing a Social Media Saturday song and you’ll be all set.

Where do I keep all this?
Almost as important as creating the information for your training course, is finding a place to store it that is accessible to everyone.

Content Management Systems (CMS): These programs can host all of your information and let you decide who sees what and when. Give this post from Social Media Examinar about How to Create your own social networking community a read and see if they are what you are looking for.
Community Platforms: These platforms can help to build out an internal community of information. Use them to store your internal training documentation and even have employees grow their knowledge base by asking/responding to each other’s questions. Give Forrester’s Community platform report a read and decide from there.
Shared Documents: If you’re not ready to go the full system route, try using your own special sauce mix of document hosting services. Most have free and paid options and you can limit security settings so your documents aren’t public. Examples include but aren’t limited to: Google Docs, Scribd, Slideshare.

How to stay up to date?
Information is ever changing and we’re sure your internal training will continue to evolve over time, so it’s important to make sure you’re communicating this new information to everyone. Why not try a couple of these methods:

Quarterly On Site Meetings: Working online via email and phone is great and cost effective, but sometimes nothing helps to keep communication lines open and training fresh in everyone’s minds than a good ole’ fashioned day of meetings. If you can, schedule some face to face time on a quarterly basis to keep everyone in the loop.

Monthly Webinars: Internal webinars are a great way to do a quick 1 hour refresher and update on any of your social media policy changes. Compare web conferencing software and find one that works for you.

Weekly Email Updates: We all have email, we all use it everyday. While another email in our inboxes doesn’t sound inviting, keeping it short and to the point with just the important changes like “Don’t discuss product X online” can help to de-mystify the week to week.

Daily Instant Message/Email Questions: Keep the communication lines up by having a variety of ways to communicate. During your initial training make sure to identify who people should contact AND how! Try different messaging clients like Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo or Skype to keep things rolling through out the day.

No matter how you choose to store, share and update your training information, the important thing is just doing it so that your employees continually know where to go and don’t get caught dreaming of chocolate and pepperoni at 3 a.m.

What formats are you planning on using for your training documentation? Where do you store your internal training information? Will you be having quarterly/monthly/weekly training updates?

You heard it here first! On March 30th, Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun announced the big news that Radian6 had entered into an agreement to be acquired by salesforce.com. Well, we are extremely proud and not a little bit excited to announce that it’s official, Radian6 and salesforce.com have tied the knot.

“We talk about how transformative social is, well, salesforce.com also sees that, both in the enterprise and with customers.” Marcel Lebrun, CEO, Radian6

Social media has really been a game changer – it has forever altered the way we live, play, and most importantly, work. As Lebrun mentioned a few months back, Radian6 and salesforce.com share the belief that social media has changed the playing field, and that the way companies engage with their customers and promote their brand is more and more social – open, honest and with integrity and transparency. Today, the medium really is the message, the village is becoming more global than ever, faster than we ever could have imagined, and life truly IS happening in the cloud. That is why industry leaders like Radian6 and salesforce.com can integrate so seamlessly.

“Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth.”

So what does this mean for you? Over the past 5 years Radian6’s unique technology has captured hundreds of millions of conversations daily across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities. The intelligence gained has helped you to better market and sell to prospects, serve your customers and understand what’s being said about your brands, products and competitors. That product innovation and progress will continue.

“Radian6 brings the voice of the customer into the enterprise, helping to transform the way a business operates,” said Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6. “We look forward to working with salesforce.com’s customers to show them the power of listening to, and engaging with, the social web.”

Community and collaboration will remain at the core of what we do. But now we will be doing it as part of Salesforce, an incredible company – one who pioneered the concept of ‘software as a service’, who transformed the ways that companies communicate and share customer information, and who revolutionized cloud computing. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Clouds aside, the future’s looking pretty bright these days.

“Our social networks, both the old-fashioned type in real life, as well as the new constructs created by social software, give us the ability to do amazing things for ourselves and for others. But it does require some thought and consideration.”  Chris Brogan

One of the best ways to set your team up for success is to arm them with great resources. Continuing this month’s series on “Training Your Company for Social Media” we thought we’d give you some ideas on how to build a resource library both physically and virtually that your team can begin to familiarize themselves with.

Laying the Groundwork

Resources will help your team grow more knowledgeable about what’s going on across the social web, as well as give them a good foundation to build upon as they go forward. How do you go about finding resources? Where should you look? Consider event sites like Plancast and Eventbrite that help you track events on the topics and locations that interest you. You can even use these sites to make note of conference speakers and thought leaders on particular topics and connect with them across your social networks.

Other great places to gather resources and learn who’s who on the social web are local clubs. One in particular that comes to mind is the Social Media Club. The Social Media Club connects media makers from around the world to promote media literacy, industry standards, and ethical behavior and to share the lessons they have learned. With over 200+ chapters, covering 6 continents, there’s sure to be a chapter close to you. While you’re at it, check out Podcamp and WordCamp as potential places to learn, grow and connect with others in the industry.

Twitter and Facebook can be great resources as well in a number of ways. Since you can ask questions and get immediate feedback, these platforms can be great sources of information. For example, if you’re looking for great books on understanding ROI (Return on Investment), ask your community what they’d recommend. You can do this to find great blogs to read on a particular topic, too.

Don’t forget the search option either. Both Twitter and Facebook give you the ability to search, Twitter has an advanced search that is quite useful as it allows you to  search people, places, hashtags and even sentiment.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There are already plenty of great resources available to you that others have created. Take Mashable’s twitter lists for example or the Huffington Post’s. These lists are broken down very specifically to include listings by city, state, and cover a wide variety of topics across several niches.

Naturally, not all of these resources will strike a chord – that will vary depending on your business, but they should whet your appetite. Make note of the ones that resonate with you and discard the rest – or better yet, create your own lists and share them with your team internally.

It’s also important to encourage your team to seek out social media resources on their own. To reinforce this, consider a reimbursement policy so employees can take courses, classes and buy materials that will help them build a stronger social media foothold without the constraints of finances getting in the way.

Don’t forget, there are plenty of free resources as well, your local library should have a social media section and you can also search the web for white papers, eBooks and case studies. Most are relatively easy to find with a simple search.

We know embarking on this social media journey can be a bit intimidating at times. Therefore, we’ve taken that into consideration with our upcoming posts. We’ll talk about cutting through the chaos of information overload, as well as help you focus on tips, tricks and resources to help internally share knowledge so you’ll be able to determine what works best for your company. Knowledge is power and we want to you to be prepared as you begin your social media strategy toward success.

Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start when it comes to building your own resource library, what are some of your favorite resources and what would you add to this article? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Have you ever peeled an onion? Oh, we’ve all chopped many an onion in our day, leaving us red eyed and weepy. But have you ever peeled an onion? Onions are intricate, multi layered creations, and peeling the onion is often used as an analogy for problem solving. But let’s look at them in a different way. Instead of peeling away layers to get to the core of a problem, let’s look at those layers as what they actually are. Stages of growth.

Your social media strategy will grow a bit like the onion. You’ve already planted the seed of change by embracing social media, and working hard on setting up a training program such as the one our recent ebook “Training Your Company for Social Media” outlined for you. And training should be the core – the heart – of your social media adoption. But after the training, then what? This is where the layers start developing.

The growth of social media has been so huge that to many new initiates it can seem overwhelming. In an upcoming post, we are going to explore information overload, and give you some tips on how to cut through the chaos and determine which social media platforms are right for you. But for now, let’s stay within the organization, and expand on that initial training with a few ‘next steps’.

Legal Is Your Friend

At this stage, you’ve worked hard to develop a comprehensive set of policies and guidelines for your employees to follow while they are engaging in social media. You’ve signed off on it, and made it easily accessible to departments and staff should any emergencies arise. But have you ran it through legal yet? Depending on where you are based, and whether your employees are part of a union or not, there may be laws and/or compliance issues that may affect your approach to social media. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia recently released their social media policy, only to experience an immediate and angry backlash from employees and their unions reacting to what they felt was an unfair intrusion into their private online lives. The transparency and immediacy of social media is a massive change in how we all live and work. Treat your social media policy as you would any other major shift in the day to day operations of your business. Nip potential problems in the bud, and run it through your legal department just to be sure.

Define Your Social Brand

The Who’s Pete Townshend may have written “Who Are You” after a hard night of drinking and an irritating encounter with members of the Sex Pistols, but the refrain remains as important today as it was in 1978 – who ARE you? You might have spent millions building a brand, defining who you are in comprehensive marketing and communications strategies, making sure that your teams consistently stay on message, and ensuring that staff know exactly how to walk the company and/or brand walk. But have you defined your social brand? What do you want your social identity to be? Will it align perfectly with your traditional media campaigns? Or will your social brand be altogether different? Will you use social to ‘rock the boat’ a little, to be controversial and take a few risks? Knowing – and making sure your employees also know – exactly what your social brand is and how it relates to your traditional marketing and communications strategies will help everybody understand and follow your rules of online behaviour. It will provide a strong reference point for employees as they learn how to interact and have two way conversations with your community.

Scrap The Script

Positive word of mouth has been an important marketing tool since salesmen started selling, but it lost its power a bit when people started moving into the suburbs and half their lives in a car commuting to and from work. People just didn’t talk to each other much anymore. Today, people communicate with thousands of others with just the click of a mouse, and word of mouth marketing has regained its power. And while social media adoption will allow you to engage with customers and fans, and share your products and ideas, in order to communicate successfully you need to find your voice. We’ve written about voice in depth before, but let’s break it down again – ‘voice’ usually means written or spoken expression, feeling, or opinion and the power or right to have an opinion heard and considered. Your employees should be encouraged to express themselves online. But scrap the script. Employees despise scripts. And let’s face it, so do consumers. They are robotic, unfeeling, and unnatural. And it makes those “talking” the script sound phony and fake. And phony and fake are the last things you want your community associating with you – or your brand. Allowing your employees ‘off the script’ empowers them, and shows them that you respect their abilities. But, before opening the social media floodgates, it’s imperative that they know exactly what your company’s voice – and their voice – is supposed to be. How far can they go? How opinionated can they be? And what exactly are they allowed to say?

Just as peeling an onion requires a layer by layer approach, so does developing an effective social media strategy. But you won’t end up crying over the kitchen sink.

What do you think? Should you systematically build a social media strategy or shoot first and aim later? And are you prepared to give your front-line employees some freedom? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.

“I want to change the pop world one sequin at a time. Artists tend to take themselves way too seriously and don’t enjoy the fun of making an impact on culture. I just have a good time and sequins represent a good time.” – Lady Gaga (1986 – ), BBC Breakfast, 04-21-09

There is no denying Lady Gaga is pushing the pop culture evolution, just as Madonna and Michael Jackson before her. These super stars wanted to change the world and their role in it…and did so in a big way. Making the case for integrated social media efforts and an educated staff is not an easy sell to the C-suite. Of course, we wouldn’t recommend showing up to work wearing a dress of raw meat to make an impact and a case for culture change, but there are steps you can implement to make the environment more hospitable to change.

Change begins with YOU

According to Amber Naslund, “Whether it’s designing a more social business or simply improving communication between departments, change has to be a verb before it can be a noun. It has to start somewhere before it can take root and actually impact the business for the better.” If nothing else, social media has taught us we do not have control (or the illusion of) of the responses of others. However, this does not mean we lack complete control, either. We have control of our own actions. We can choose to lead by example, to get our hands dirty, to make mistakes and continue learning. We can keep our side of the street clean and make the case by fostering an environment embracing change.

Socialize the enterprise

Throughout May, 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.

Take a couple of minutes to explore our resource library and rediscover our ebook 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. The eBook 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.

Take up your mantle

When getting started in social media, you cannot dismiss and ignore an organization’s fears about social media engagement. Social media success is dependent upon a drastic change in corporate culture’s thinking and execution process. This process takes time, commitment and passion. While there may be times when you become so overwhelmed or stuck in a rut, do not waiver. Keep your vision in sight. Your drive will encourage and inspire others to take up your mantle and assist you in making changes for the better.

Business is serious. Change is serious. But every once and a while a sequin is needed to embrace our own artistic expression and find our voices within our own organizations. As Brian Solis said, “Social media is the democratization of information and the equalization of influence. Monologue gave way to dialogue and we the people ensured that our voices were not only heard, but felt.” Organizations can create all the Facebook pages they desire, but until the internal community of said organization is educated, fears abated and voices found, external communication will falter.

Imagine for a second you’re on a date. It’s the first one and you’re nervous. You meet in a coffee shop and the conversation begins. Well, sort of. You see, every time you ask your date a question you get a rather generic response, or no response at all. Chalk it up to shyness. So you try again a few days later, and the same thing happens, more generic substance-less answers. Needless to say, the conversation is boring and this relationship isn’t going very far.

So what happened to send this potential match off the rails?

The communication – or lack thereof – is the disconnect. It should come as no surprise to anyone just how crucial dialogue is to make any relationship work. There has to be active involvement to keep people interested and make the relationship worth anything.

Now, in the above example, take out coffee shop dating and replace with social media – the analogy remains the same. I see it all the time, as I am sure you do as well. Company ABC hears about social media. The CEO exclaims, “We must get involved. This is the key to making our business successful!” They source an employee who is computer savvy, and set about setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts.

More often than not, the extent of this involvement typically consists of creating a Facebook fan page, racking up as many followers as possible, signing up a twitter handle and leaving both relatively idle. Or worse yet, tweeting out only press releases and articles, and never logging into Facebook to join the conversation around their posts.

Do you know what this does to your brand? It certainly isn’t adding any real value, that much can be said for sure. And potentially, it could do your brand real harm. Why? Because you’ve become the boring date sitting across the table. Social media should always be about driving meaningful conversations first, and not just being the pretty face in the room. That is why it’s important to understand the image and approach your brand wants to portray, as well as have the proper training program in place before getting your organization and social media team wrapped up in social media engagement.

I heard Mitch Joel for the first time at Social 2011, and I can’t get the mantra, which he quoted from Chris Anderson, out of my head. “Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is” (and then he added Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – if you haven’t already, watch his keynote here). But what if these networks add nothing substantial about your brand? Sure, they might be filled with links back to your social media accounts, or your web site, but if you’ve never once responded to a customer who asked a question about a product, never proactively reached out to your community, or never posted anything beyond a company press release, they simply add no value to your brand. And where is the value in that?

Before getting involved in social media, it’s important that you ask yourself the following:

• Do we have clearly defined engagement goals in place? And if not, then hold it right there. How will you know if you are showing success? How will you track if your audience is responding well to your efforts, ignoring you – or worse, mocking you – because of something you said? You won’t, which is why it would behoove you to take a step back and set real achievable goals before starting anything.

• What resources do we have? Do we have the resources to handle communication? Do we have the funds to hire someone new, train existing employees or invest in technologies? Social media is all about open, transparent, and real-time communication -  so if your current and/or potential customers want conversation, you better be able to provide it for them. They expect – and deserve – to have that level of engagement, and if you nail it, if you develop real relationships, you will also develop some serious and committed brand ambassadors for your company and products. Make sure you have the proper resources in place, so you don’t short-change your customers.

• How committed are we? Right now, who isn’t excited about social media? You look around, and everybody’s doing it – what’s not to love? Well maybe the level of commitment that you will be required to adhere to. Trust that as your community grows, so will the time that is needed to provide top level engagement. So stay committed to your goals and stay committed to your resources. If you are starting a social media training program for your company, that’s absolutely terrific. But make sure it doesn’t fade away. Make sure training is ongoing and make sure you demonstrate to your company your true commitment. They will feed off your excitement and in turn show dedication. And that excitement and dedication will reflect on your social media community.

Focus on these things and you will have a solid starting point for your company’s social media strategy. Start at the bottom, create a good foundation, and start building. The rest will come after, but without a solid foundation, cracks are sure to appear.

And who knows, you might even end up being a better date because of it.

What about you? Have you recently re-evaluated a social media strategy that had gone a little stale? What steps did your company take to freshen it up? Or if you’re just starting out, what are your thoughts on staff time allotment? How will you track your team’s level of engagement? As always we love to hear your comments and feedback.

Aaron Friedman is a member of the Content Solutions team at Resolution Media where he is experienced in SEO ranging from local, Digital Marketing, to National and Global Search Marketing. Aaron specializes in content creation including Social Media Strategy, Image and Video Optimization. He blogs at Digitalhighrise.com. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on Linkedin.

Let’s time travel a little bit this morning. Everyone think back to your first summer job. Whether it was working the cash at a fast food restaurant, chasing after kids at a summer camp or maybe saving lives at the local pool, you can probably remember going through some form of training. Extensive or short, your attitude towards it might not have been that enthusiastic. We’ve all been there, not asked the questions we should have and also not been told as much under the banner of being “just the summer workers”. Now imagine your current workplace having that atmosphere as you are trying to teach and learn the massive new area of Social Media. Suddenly the lifeguard chair looks pretty good.

Before you start building out your training strategy, before the evaluation of where your staff members fall and before the words “Social Media” cross people’s lips around the water cooler, there’s one thing that you need to make clear straight out of the gate. There is no stupid question.

It’s a common phrase that we all say multiple times a day, while most of us are secretly thinking I wonder how stupid the question I’m about to hear is. But here’s the thing, thinking that is part of the problem. For those of us that live and breathe social media everyday, it might seem like common sense to not post your weekend exploits on your twitter feed, but maybe that Service Manager’s brother’s band was playing at that bar and he really did want everyone to come and get all the way down with their bad selves. In a personal and brand reputation sense, it might not be the best tweet in the world but currently we don’t teach that type of etiquette in our regular K – 12 education system.

Common sense is not common in a new developing industry. Why? Because nothing in social media is yet to be common. It takes us years as children to learn what is and isn’t appropriate in our own culture, so don’t expect others to join the social media culture and know exactly what fork to use the first meal in.

Training your staff is as much about training yourself to accept that there are different levels of awareness. It’s our privilege to learn from the entire world and share what we learn with others. So trainers, really listen to what your staff is saying and don’t roll your eyes at anything that comes out of their mouths. And staff make sure you ask what a hashtag is, ask where to click to send a tweet, ask if telling the world what color underwear you’re wearing is a valid contribution to a discussion on emerging apparel trends in Europe. Just ask. If both sides of your training equation keep an open and honest attitude, than the training itself will end up going a lot smoother.

What questions have you always wanted to ask about social media but have been too afraid to be labeled as the newbie? What attitudes do you think your organization will have to overcome in order to build an open, accepting of questions culture? Let us know in the comments below or better yet ask someone you work with and a start a conversation!