The PR people have always recognized value of partnerships between companies in press releases and stories pitched to the media, but brands rarely think to champion strategic partners via social media the way they might champion consumers. Why is this?

Many folks in the B2B space often blame the lack of social media content opportunities on the fact that what they do doesn’t directly impact consumers, but I don’t buy it. Every company touches people in some way; as an employer, and a community stakeholder. Every business sells something to another company that touches consumers in some way, and every business sponsors a charity, a big community event or some other cause that involves people and issues that are of importance to the company. These partnerships are chock full of opportunities for social media content.

Other companies with a social media presence are also publishers

Treat them like there is value in their audience and the social media engagement they have built with their brand. Build processes for social media teams inside your partner organizations to stay on top of positive news about your company and other events you may need help promoting — ask them for advice on how to make your content more relevant to their followers. Offer to do the same with their good news and make conversation with them via social channels. Promoting others’ activities via social media is a best practice anyway. Engage in best practices with a strategic perspective that aligns with other business goals. Strengthening stakeholder relationships is always something that provides value to any business.

Go behind the scenes by developing content that explains how your company’s sausage is made and how what you do is better/different from others and how this makes for a better sandwich (sticking with the sausage metaphor) than using a different sausage. Ask your business customers for advice in developing this type of content and position their social media team to publish this content in a way that benefits them.

Get social with your favorite cause  

Social media activity makes for great event sponsorship activation, but just like everything else involved in social media, it will be up to you to make sure you’re participating in the success — paying someone else to Tweet about you only works for so long, you must be ready to sustain any social media momentum the old-fashioned way.

Lots of companies are already engaged in philanthropic activities, look for ways to support fundraising and community events with your social media presence — send someone to take photos and video of community events and ask that the organization’s web team attribute your company with a link each time they use any of the items you share with them. Whether you’re providing the files or sharing links to items you post on your own social media profile, make sure you specify how you would like to get attribution. This is a big part of making sure you are bringing the value of this activity back to your company.

Post pictures, short videos, updates about the event and quotes from speakers on Twitter and make sure to use relevant hashtags to keep up and respond to others in attendance at the event. Profile others involved with the cause on your company blog and talk about why this issue is important to your company. Most of the time there is a strategic reason for companies to select causes to champion, get your social media presence aligned with helping that cause along.

Let others know why this particular issue is of importance to your company and your future on your company blog. No one will naturally connect the dots between your company’s logo appearance and the charitable activity on their own, it’s up to you to look for ways to share that story.

Better together

How are you working with partners to improve your social media presence? What are some of the roadblocks you experience in taking your company’s strategic partnerships to the social web?

Photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor

The Power of Partnerships in Your Social Media Content Strategy is a post from: Very Official Blog

If you’re one of the unfortunate people out there feeling disenchanted and completely disappointed with the day-to-day activities of your social media job, you’re not alone.

The social media job shop is my way of describing a scenario where the social media specialist or team is simply told what to post by marketing, communications or other business area, to social media channels regardless of whether or not the content and approach are meaningful to the people on the receiving end: your customers or other important stakeholders.

I’m very lucky to manage social media for a company that really empowers me to build and execute strategically. But, even though I’m not on the wrong end of the order-filling process in the social media job shop, I had a few near misses earlier in my career. I’ve also heard dozens of stories (at least) from others who feel downright miserable and powerless to set their company’s or client’s approach to social media on the right path.

In social media job shops no real strategy for engagement exists and those responsible for content creation are far removed the social network. The only responsibility of the person tasked to handle social media is to post, publish, upload or tweet. They, in essence, pull the trigger or personally flip the switch on something that has been produced for a mass audience. This doesn’t exactly make for warm fuzzy online conversations (hint: the tools don’t humanize your business) and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to good measurement. Where’s the ROI on this approach? Good question.

How to Avoid Working in the Social Media Job Shop

1. Set expectations early in your working relationship (preferably during the job interview) that you need to have input on what is being published to blogs and social profiles. Assert your expertise as knowing what is best for the channel, but remember to formalize that approach as much as possible and give it visibility with more people than just your boss (especially if you work in a large company). Remember to keep repeating these things — other people have lots on their plate: they think about you, they just don’t think about you all the time
2. Take control of your channels (nicely) by meeting with teams early in the process to learn about their needs and put together a smaller strategic plan within your larger plan you feel will help them achieve their goals. Present it to them and ask for approval. If they’re not ready to approve, ask that they provide feedback – compromise a little if necessary and keep reworking the plan to find something that will achieve mutual goals – even if they’re only short-term. Repeat this process as much as possible.
3. Make your own (better) processes. When you tell others that their existing processes suck, be ready to provide a better alternative that addresses all the things they will care about: how much work will this put on their plate, specifics on exactly what you need them to change, a schedule for re-evaluating your new process to make sure you’re creating a framework that others can actually snap to.
4. Negotiate (always) and ruffle feathers (occasionally). When others hear “no” you’ll need to hear “not like this.” There’s a certain mentality that looks at layers of bureaucracy, regulation or other organizational structure like a puzzle that must be figured out in order to achieve one’s goals: figure out a way to adopt that. Don’t take things personally, don’t allow people to think what you do is silly, don’t back down from adopting best practices or taking a strategic approach, but DO pick your battles: you probably don’t want to fall on any sword over a single tweet unless it’s ridiculously inflammatory and your brand is very high-profile. Don’t make it about personalities – keep it about what’s best for everyone to achieve their goals.

Help! I Feel Like a Cog in the Social-Media-Job-Shop Wheel

This is the tricky part — once you’ve been relegated to the job shop as the person who simply posts the updates and uploads the videos it’s really tough to get out of that role until a consultant comes along and shakes things up. That could mean a lot of things to someone already in the job shop — it could mean being let go altogether, put into another department or given a new boss and a new team. These may not be bad things, but they each still leave you at the mercy of your professional circumstances.

If you really want a career that empowers you to manage social media communications, social business integration or any leadership position in digital marketing — you need to learn to take the reins and it will never get any easier.

You will need help, but to get help you need a plan. Work on your plan — even if you have to work on it at home during off-hours. When it’s perfect, get some time with the executive or leader you trust most. Present your case and ask them for their help in refining your case so that it will gain traction with all the other leaders in your organization.

If that doesn’t work, find something better. But, don’t quit until you try this: transforming a nascent job shop to a functional business area is how leaders are born. Really going through the process of improving your company’s approach to social media will also ensure that you squeeze every ounce of professional development out of an otherwise stagnant period in your career. You’ll be ready to soar in your next role and good leaders will recognize that.

Are You Punching a Clock or Building Something Sustainable?

Whenever you set out to build a new area of a business or assume a brand new role in an organization it helps to think like an entrepreneur rather than an employee. How do you avoid being relegated to job-shop status?

Photo Credit: Philo Nordlund

Avoiding the Social Media Job Shop Scenario is a post from: Very Official Blog

Notes by Hal Thomas from the Socially Regulated Core Conversation at SXSW Interactive

For me, coming home from SXSW Interactive always means sore feet from standing at events in heels for four days straight, and a tired disposition that lasts several days. It’s a ridiculous pace you need to keep to attend so many events all day and every night, but I felt like I was able to make the most out of a lot of interactions in real life this year (not just online). I spent a lot less time tweeting than in years past, but I blame that partially on AT&T’s poor coverage in Austin, Texas and Twitter apps that would take turns crashing on my iPhone.

In any case, I tried to get the most out of the face-time I could get with friends old and new.

Dell Heaven

My trip started out with an afternoon spent at the Dell headquarters out in Round Rock. One look at their command center and workspace coupled with knowledge of their internal training program and social media team of 50, and I was basically drooling. It was great to see a mature social media program in action – theirs is very old in social media years and it shows. For someone who’s helped launch social media programs without sticking around for several years after, it was very beneficial for my ability to envision a future-state for our program at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and our blog, A Healthier Michigan.

Pre-Conference Pre-Commerce

The day before the conference officially started I was lucky to be invited to attend the release party and mini-conference for WCG Chief Technology Officer, Bob Pearson’s new book, Pre-Commerce. I’ve only just made a dent in the book, but I can already tell it’s a good one. If you’re steeped in social media goodness you may not be surprised to know that the point of all of this is to build relationships before the sale, however, the case studies and insights will help you tremendously if you ever need to explain why all of this real-time social media stuff is so important to someone in the C-suite without falling into the why-should-I-be-on-Facebook? trap. Better yet, buy them the book (affiliate link).

Socially Regulated: Social Media in Regulated Industries

My core conversation with social media/pharma pioneer and founder of SXSH, Shwen Gwee, and Marc Monseau from Johnson & Johnson could not have been better. We had a room full of smart people who had great things to add to the conversation. Some of the key points were to start with content that’s well within your company’s comfort zone, be crystal clear on exactly what you would like to do with social media before asking your legal team for permission to launch something like a Twitter or Facebook account, and realize that regulated industries often have several layers of compliance with respect to different legal requirements, company policy and branding guidelines — all of which need to be considered before you get started.

Blogchat LIVE (or unplugged, as I like to say)

Mack Collier did a great job planning the first-ever offline #Blogchat. Rule No. 1 was no tweeting (although a few people in attendance disobeyed for the greater good). Richard Binhammer from Dell and I led one group, the topic: what corporate bloggers can learn from personal bloggers. Big lesson of the night was that good corporate blogs always let bloggers use their own voice, but that voice must align well with the mission of the company, its brand, and most of all — what the audience, or its customers want! It was a real treat helping out with this event, especially with people like Lucretia Pruitt, Sheila Scarbrough and Connie Reece in the house.

Other Notable Events

I met Adam Garone, co-founder of Movember, now the world’s largest fundraiser for prostate cancer research. Last year Movember raised $72 Million — not too shabby for a fundraiser that is almost 100% driven by social media by challenging men to raise money while growing a mustache (nicknamed mo in Adam’s native Australia) throughout the month of November.

I finally met Bill Brister in real life – a hockey fan who I came to know online during my days running social media for the NHL Detroit Red Wings. He rode into Austin on the Startup Bus all the way from Florida.

I had a chance to take a good look at Badgeville — a very promising application that helps companies integrate badges and other fun social functions into their websites to encourage the sort of behavior they would like to see. It seems pretty lightweight and I can’t wait to take a deeper dive into their offerings.

Allhat 3 (sponsored by Chevy and Dell) was also a fun time — I’m a third-time Allhat attendee. For a fun look at the festivities, see David Alston’s photos.

Seattle friend, Shauna Causey and I also had a chance to catch up and she seems to be loving life managing social media for Nordstrom. They’re a lucky bunch to have her on board.

Thanks to Hal Thomas for posting his notes from our Socially Regulated presentation at SXSW on Twitter. For everyone I missed, I’m sorry – there’s always next year and I can’t possibly capture everything here.

Takeaways From SXSW Interactive is a post from: Very Official Blog

SXSW Interactive 2010: Shannon Paul with Sara Davidson and Justin Levy

Forgive me, but it really does tickle me to refer to myself in third person… but only in writing. This post is a little late in coming, but I assure you I definitely plan to attend SXSW Interactive this year. This will be my third time attending the conference so it’s all starting to feel a bit familiar, but I’m excited to see old friends and new (as well as some old friends I have yet to meet face-to-face.)

I promise to deliver at least one live blog post from the conference here and another over on A Healthier Michigan, (the heart of our growing social media presence at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan) that will focus on the people and companies from Michigan in attendance at the show and what they hope to get out of being there. If you’re there on behalf of a Michigan-based company and want to be included in that post, let me know and we will set up time for an interview. Chevy is sending two teams from Detroit in its SXSW road trip competition — it’s a little difficult for me to cheer for one over the other since I know and love members of both teams. Is it okay if I wish they would tie?

Sunday is the Big Day

You’ll definitely be able to catch up with me Sunday when I co-host a Core Conversation about social media in regulated industries with Shwen Gwee, a person whose name has become synonymous with social media and pharma. After that, I will join the #Allhat crew at Guero’s for my third year in a row before heading over to the first-ever LIVE edition of #Blogchat where I will team up with Dell’s Richard Binhammer to discuss lessons corporate bloggers can learn from personal bloggers (and vice versa I’m sure!). #Blogchat will take place at the Social Media Clubhouse, which has several floors this year. If you get bored with Richard and I, you’ll be able to wander up (or down) a flight to chat with C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley (aka @marketingprofs) — trust me, #Blogchat creator Mack Collier thought of everything!

See You There?

One thing I’ve learned over the past three years is that it’s better to schedule meetings than leave it up to chance. I’m over-scheduling myself this year to make sure I make the most of this conference. If you want to make sure we meet, please shoot me an email at shannonpaul5 at gmail.com and let’s make it happen. Direct messages on Twitter during an event don’t work so well when you’re running around from place to place.

Photo Credit: DavidSpinks

Find Shannon Paul at SXSW Interactive is a post from: Very Official Blog

Many creative types get frustrated when they work in a B2B situation, or any other industry that may be much less sexy than consumer technology, fashion, sports, or entertainment. Everyone wants to focus on creating the right content — content that will attract positive attention, better SEO and social media viral goodness. But what if you’re selling network cables? dumpster covers? toilet seats? the sticky stuff that keeps rugs from unraveling? What do you have to work with?

Plenty.

Solve a Problem

Get back to basics — you’re probably in business because your product solves a problem, or makes something else better. Write about the challenges and solutions that will benefit your potential customers — not just the problems and solutions that involve your product, but the other unique challenges your customers face with everything from supply chain management, logistics, global networking, web conferencing solutions, etc. This is what is meant by becoming a resource. Yes, it will take work, but there should be plenty to keep you juiced up creatively, get your foot in the door with prospects and retain your most valuable customers.

Get Relevant, Get Creative

Anytime you’re just focused on your own product or service you will have a relevance problem. This type of navel gazing can often be fascinating for those who devote their day-to-day activities on this product or service, but the rest of the world could often care less. For this, I like to play a game — write down the 10 most prominent pop culture influences that are prominent right now. Then, force yourself to write headlines for each that combine the pop culture reference (no word play) with your product/service/issue. To be relevant in a way that will still drive business value for your organization, you need to get creative. Connect the dots between what the world cares about and what your business cares about — realize they’re rarely the same things. You don’t necessarily have to use these headlines, but you must break through the notion that your business is boring.

Be the Media

Not mass media, of course, but your own little hyper-niche, hyper-focused version of the media. Publish interviews with industry leaders, government regulators and experts that your potential customers look to for guidance. Tip: it’s often a lot easier to ask the CEO of a prospect company for an interview than an appointment for a sales pitch. Just make sure to follow up with thank you notes that include links — arm your sales force with the links to the interview to send their contacts within the organization. Make sure they’re the first to know what you’re doing and how it can help them.

What Does the Audience Say?

I know many of you are doing great work in boring businesses. How do you move your organization to begin thinking of the audience first?

Photo Credit: phoenixdailyphoto

3 Ways to Get Great Content From Your Boring Business is a post from: Very Official Blog

What makes a successful social media program? Awards? An engaging Twitter presence? Scores of Facebook fans? Lots of coverage in Mashable and speaking gigs on the conference circuit? Maybe. Many argue he (or she) who drives the most sales wins. Unless yours is a nonprofit, business, is still about having a healthy profit margin and even nonprofits need capital to fulfill their mission.

Even though neither metaphor does much to explain how food is produced these days, the hunter and the farmer is still widely used in sales departments to explain how tasks involved in the sales process are divided into those that support acquisition of new accounts, and retention activity focused on growing an existing account.

Peter Chee asked me about my thoughts on the hunter-farmer model a few weeks ago, so thanks to him for the inspiration to write this post.

The Hunter and the Farmer

Many sales departments have segmented the hunter and farmer responsibilities in ways that make logical sense:

• Hunters find prospects, land appointments with decision makers and focus on closing deals.
• Farmers grow relationships with potential customers through a consultative approach, provide service, etc.

Now, you might jump to the conclusion that anyone using social media should immediately adopt the role of the farmer, or that those who fulfill the role of farmer should use social media. Is it really so simple? Can a kinder, gentler sales approach make quota?

It’s true that those who engage in social media should listen and share first and allow customers, clients, stakeholders, etc. to discover you in a way that makes them want to buy — not because doing it any other way is wrong, but because this is the model that has been proven to gain the attention of others within these social networks in almost every scenario.

However, once you learn the rules of personal engagement, don’t think that’s all there is to this business of social media. If it were only so simple…

Networks are complicated and the path is anything but linear. Many in sales hardly think the hunter/farmer metaphor is apt for their own function within today’s economic environment.

Shortcomings of the Hunter-Farmer Sales Model

From Ann Bares’ summary of a report from Harvard Business Review report by Jerome Coletti and Mary Fiss:

• Assumes selling to new customers is transactional rather than consultative (easy to “hand it off”)
• Assumes skills required for the hunter and farmer business development roles are fundamentally different
• Assumes there is more business to be had from new, rather than existing customers
• Trivializes the cost of the hand-off from hunter to farmer
• Disregards that the hunter may leave “loose ends” since they don’t have to deal with the consequences of on-going customer relationship

One could also argue that these assumptions are harmful when you take the approach of flipping these statements to imply the opposite with your social media presence. In social media should one never ask for a sale? Should transactional relationships be avoided even when they may benefit both parties? Is it easy to hand off a social media connection to other departments within your organization? Should it be?

What About the Buying Process?

Are hunters and farmers starving equally in a world connected via social networks? I love this comment from Andrew Rudin (scroll down to the comments) where he explains the problem with traditional models in this new space:

Ever since I’ve worked in the selling field (over twenty years) we’ve approached selling problems in a fundamentally consistent way:

“Find out the pain points.”
“Learn what keeps the customer up at night.”
“It’s about finding problems, and providing solutions for them.”

Good advice that works–but not always. When I review my own wins and losses, and consider the ones that I’ve analyzed for others, I’ve learned that many selling activities fail on not clearly understanding the buying process–more accurately, not understanding the social networks that facilitate buying processes.

What I believe Andrew is saying is that focusing on the buying process misses a lot of the circumstances, scenarios, behavior and individual demands that lead up to the buying process. If we’re only focusing on the buying process, we may be skipping over the first five chapters of the story.

Maybe in the past, the first five chapters in this story that led up to the buying process were boring exposition — today, they’re chock full of important data.

I’ve always maintained that the mechanized approaches to communication no longer work as well as they once did. Although there is still an important role for those mechanized, traditional approaches, we need to also make room for the new approaches that are more improvisational, more adaptive, proactive and iterative to stay relevant and competitive.

How Can Social Media Help Sales?

This question still matters. Is it about augmenting the popular hunter-farmer sales model with social media communication, or is it simply time to change the way we define the buying process altogether?

Photo Credit: Natalie Maynor

Hunter or Farmer? Does Social Media Have a Role in the Sales Cycle? is a post from: Very Official Blog

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and the FTC agree: material relationships should be disclosed when posting comments, tweets, status updates and the like. I understand this may not be news to many. However, I still see many people overlooking disclosure when it comes to posting negative comments or spreading negative news about competitors — especially on Twitter.

So much has been discussed about ethical disclosure in promotion in the last year since the updated FTC guidelines were announced, but we haven’t heard nearly the amount of noise over competitor demotion even though the rule certainly governs each.

The Social Media Group published an overview for companies on compliance with the FTC guidelines:

• Disclose whenever you have a relationship with an advertiser, brand or company. This has specific implications for employees. You must make a disclosure if you work for Acme Widgets and you mention your employer, competitors, or the widgets industry in a blog post, tweet or elsewhere online.

• You must also disclose the name of your employer if you are commenting on a forum thread or in a group about Acme Widgets, the widget industry or about a competitor.

This all seems pretty clear to me.

Material Relationships Work Both Ways

If I work for a company and I’m promoting its good news on Twitter, everyone expects me to disclose the fact that company I’m tweeting about is my employer — either in the content of my post, or in my profile information. Makes sense, right?

The reason behind this law is that consumers encountering user generated content need to readily distinguish between bona fide word of mouth buzz from consumers with nothing to gain from sharing positive information about a company or product, and those who are expected to promote the organization out of material self interest.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing positive information about your company. If I work for the company that may change how you feel about the information I share and that is your right as a consumer.

Now, let’s say I run across some negative news about a competitor company and begin posting that news on Twitter. My status as an employee with a direct competitor might also change how you feel about the information I’m spreading online. At least if you knew, you could decide whether or not you should take my participation in distributing this news with a grain of salt, right?

My point is this: You don’t just have a material interest in your employer, but also your competitors. I’m not necessarily proposing additional laws, but negative posts without disclosing a competing interest is just as suspect as astroturfing for your employer or client company.

You Are the Context

Information in social networks has the potential to surface on the Internet out of context. Real-time search, aggregators and Twitter search make it possible for your updates to make traction into other places online you may never visit. Comments on mainstream news sites and blogs also have this potential.

If your material relationships mean you can’t possibly be objective, you should either disclose your relationship, positive or negative, or stick to other subjects.

I get that there can be a lot of gray area associated with disclosure and ethics — how much material is required for a material relationship. What if you used to work for a company, but don’t anymore? However, the law seems to provide a pretty firm foundation for honest engagement — the rest is up to you.

Haters Gonna Hate: Statler and Waldorf Edition T-Shirt available on Busted Tees

Social Media Ethics: Competitor Relationships Should also be Disclosed is a post from: Very Official Blog

Some of the challenges holding regulated industries like those in health care, finance, or government back from embracing social media are unique, and some aren’t so unique. However, whether the industry is heavily regulated or not, rules and regulation over time often become myth. To read the complete post, you’ll need to go over to Identity PR’s blog, id tags. Thanks to my friends, Nikki Stephan and Brandon Chesnutt for asking me to contribute.

The key to moving things forward in a regulated industry is to separate the weight of the myth from the actual rules of engagement:

There is something incredibly rewarding about helping a business navigate the rules brought by regulation in a way that helps them embrace this new dialogue-driven style of communication to connect them with customers and other stakeholders in a meaningful way, yet also respects the notion that most regulations are intended to protect consumers — never forget that.

There are a lot of things that make social media communication in a regulated business challenging to say the least, but many myths often permeate this environment.

Continue reading on id tags: 3 Myths Keeping Regulated Biz From Embracing Social Media

Myths Keeping Social Media out of Regulated Industries is a post from: Very Official Blog

Even though business strategies come from the top down in organizations we still need strategists, or at least strategic thinkers, in every area of business, but especially social media. Not only because so few businesses have direct experience with social media used to deliver on business goals, but because it requires a fundamental shift that the same old evolutionary approaches fail to address.

Whether anyone likes it or not, the deliverables in a social business are almost always a matter of fulfillment, not department. I mean this in the sense of the traditional departmental silos found in most companies inhibit the ability to work cross-functionally.

Bottom line: fasten your seat belts. .

Viva La Revolution

The word strategist gets a lot of flack, and for good reason. It seems like everyone and her brother are claiming expertise in this emerging field with respect to everything from digital marketing to content development to social media communications.

No doubt many are far less than expert in any digital discipline or even fundamental business practices, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still need a strategy.

However, frustration over how people use any particular word doesn’t diminish the importance for strategic thinking and strategic communication in any successful integration of social media tools and communication into existing business processes. Fakers, posers and resume-inflaters exist in every field

The real role of a strategist: organizational alignment

The word strategy is still one of the most misunderstood concepts in business. When delivering on any big strategic goal, it’s important for internal subject matter experts or agency partners to provide translation between the big goal and the nuances required to succeed in the particular channel (in my case, social media channel/s).

Two necessary ingredients for strategic alignment:

1. Context – Your role as a strategist is to provide enough context for leaders in your organization to understand your creative choices with respect to your discipline and to trust that they are indeed aligned with their big strategy. I often use the example of traditional broadcast TV advertising: the person in charge of selecting a particular advertising strategy or creative direction should be able to explain their decisions in terms of effectiveness with respect to the particular medium AND connect the dots between their decisions and the overall business strategies at work in any given campaign. One might also argue empathy as a prerequisite for an ability to provide context, but I will save that for another post.

1. 360 Degree Reinforcement – Organizational alignment rarely happens overnight in any company larger than just a handful of people. Even then, other cultural constraints may inhibit whether your message is received, understood or respected.

The first obvious reason for the need for strategic communication is to help translate the BIG corporate goals down to the day-to-day activity (tactics). However, the often overlooked role of a strategist isn’t focused on top-down communication, but rather on the opposite.

People don’t like change / People change every day

In my mind this aligns well with the concepts addressed in one of my favorite books on change management, Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. If we want to help an organization change in order to adapt social technology into their current business operations, we need to make our communication incredibly crisp; crisp enough to cut to the front of the line in a growing list of known priorities. Then we need to prescribe the tweaks in day-to-day conversations and operations to get the most leverage the fastest. From there it’s all about communication, iteration and continuous improvement all while you’re still handling the day-to-day stuff of social media.

Nobody else is interested in learning our acronyms

Every function in a company has plenty of technical jargon to go along with what they do. For most people who live blissfully outside the social media echo chamber, there is a huge learning curve associated with shortened URLs, APIs, FBML, RSS, PHP, hashtags, embed codes, and any number of apps or sites you use on a daily basis. The reason may have a job or a client probably rests with the idea that you can understand much of this so they don’t have to.

If you spend time in meetings with executive decision-makers hashing over tactical details you will earn a reputation for wasting others’ time. Unless, of course those meetings are about reinforcing skills with those on the front lines.

Strategic communication makes all the difference

In the end, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, or how much you know if you can’t connect the dots for others between what you do and what they do, or between what you know and what they would like to do.

Photo Credit: Phil Romans

Why We Still Need Real Social Media Strategists is a post from: Very Official Blog

It’s no secret that social media has a credibility problem in the business community, especially when most only see the noise generated by so many of us out there on any particular social network. Many of us also lack credibility on the technology side because we may not fully appreciate how integrating social technology adds a layer of complexity to existing processes. People who come from more technical backgrounds tend to see the communications-dominated social media space as lacking in skills, knowledge and patience to bring their projects to fulfillment, and they’re often right.

Social Media is a Hybrid Discipline

I’m not a coder – I don’t build things on the web, but I do need to know how to tell others what I want things built in language that conforms to their standards and processes (not mine). In an enterprise environment, that’s often easier said than done for someone with little-to-no technical knowledge, which describes most of us with traditional marketing or PR backgrounds.

I didn’t learn this overnight. I’ve always been somewhat techie and my mom made sure to it that we were one of the first people in our zip code with an internet connection; in college I thought for some time I might be a science journalist since I had an aptitude for understanding theoretical math and scientific theory, but my passion was clearly on the communications side of that equation. I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t really have the personality to be happy plugging away in a laboratory environment although I have great respect for those who do.

To learn the things I was lacking through formal education and my regular professional development in communications, I researched on my own time and read A LOT. I also started writing this blog to give me a place to continue experimenting with web-based communication. I still ask a lot of questions.

Developing deep enough technical knowledge became my job within my job. As I began to get stronger on the technical side of managing social media, I also began to understand why so many social media programs and practitioners were still scratching their heads over the dreaded question of ROI.

Where Strategy Falls Short

For the record I’m a huge proponent of having a sound social media strategy, but having the tactical knowledge necessary to execute and deliver the right results and measurements is still extremely important.

For example, lots of companies have great social media strategies that focus on building brand awareness, but they choose to build an online community as a means of delivering on that goal. Most online communities do little to build brand awareness with a new audience. In many cases, however, community might be a great way to deliver on a retention-oriented or cause-oriented goal.

Understanding the Role of Social Media in Other Digital Marketing Disciplines

I have said this before: social media doesn’t have an ROI problem, it has an integration problem. Social media rarely delivers value as a stand-alone discipline, but helps other types of digital marketing and web content work more efficiently and reach the appropriate people IF social media activity can accrue to each of those areas. Silos don’t work.

Consumers exposed to a brand via social media conversations AND search marketing are much more likely to seek that company out when it’s time to buy than if they were only exposed in one of those channels. In Scott Stratten’s new book, UnMarketing, he talks a lot about the importance of having meaningful interactions with people way before the sale and how social media enables marketers to do this in a meaningful way. Traditional marketing needs to be a numbers game because they’re focused on targeting broad segments in order to reach the few who may be ready to buy now.

If you’re working as a social media professional, get ready to understand how search marketing works and educate others as to how a social media presence can support that.

• Understand the importance of landing pages as dot-connectors between social networks and your corporate site(s).
• Work as a subject-matter-expert to help inform how to connect the dots between those you interact with in different communities and think of how to make your company more relevant to them based on where they are.
• Understand how Google determines relevance (no, adding metadata will not help you), “Our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.” If you don’t understand how linking in social networks and blogs can help Google determine the “collective intelligence of the web,” you may be in the wrong business.

Why We Compare Social Media with the Telephone

Marcel Lebrun (and others at Radian6) have done a great job at explaining how brand mentions are a lot like a ringing telephone aka the social phone. Why WOULDN’T you answer if you think of it this way.

In keeping with the telephone analogy, talking to people on the phone doesn’t do much if those conversations aren’t recorded to provide product/service feedback, if people you talk to aren’t informed as to what they can do beyond talking to you on the phone, or if your conversation doesn’t solve their problem.

Turning these conversations into data points that are integrated into other types of business intelligence is crucial.

Social > Techie?

I was inspired to write this post after reading my friend Brian Ambrozy’s post on a similar subject. In his article, he questions the use of Twitter to hold public chats and cites this decision as evidence that those running social media/online community programs aren’t technical enough. I can’t say I necessarily agree, but I found it interesting that one of his commenters said technology is becoming easier to use everyday and that it’s more important to be “social.”

Is there truth in this? Is it better to focus on the social aspect of social media and let the technology take care of itself, or is there much more to developing a sustainable social media strategy?

I have my own ideas, but I’m very interested to know what you think.

Photo Credit: mil8

Social Media Professionals: How Techie Should We Be? is a post from: Very Official Blog