Intersection Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing and Communication Strategy, Implementation & Education
I love the campfire analogy presented by Spike Jones over at Fleishman-Hillard.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the numbers game and misinterpret the actual value of the followers and fans you’ve amassed on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Take the time to understand and nurture relationships with the folks that are actively interested in what you’re doing. Don’t just collect a bunch of names across various channels.
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Social Media is not a solution for organizations with major infrastructure issues. If anything, social media marketing will be the weight that exposes cracks in leadership, culture, product quality, customer service, etc.
Thanks to David Armano for the inspiration – check out his post on how infrastructure is at the core of most organizational issues.
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Originally posted on Social Media Explorer.
When we talk about a corporate blog, the first thing that likely comes to mind is a public facing channel where organizations connect with external audiences. What about internal blogs?
There is a lot of learning and risk associated with launching a public facing blog including audience analysis, content strategy, the use of tools, the development of guidelines, understanding best practices and developing implementation discipline. An employee-only blog presents organizations with the opportunity to soft launch their public facing initiative – offering up the ability to develop strategy, test ideas and practice tactics within a safer internal environment.
Audience
Understanding your audience and their information needs is critical to the success of any blog. Treat your employees like any other audience – conducting research into their content needs and channel expectations presents a great learning opportunity that can be transferred to the launch of your public facing blog.
Content
Content is…well, you know. I know you get it – relevant content is one of the cylinders that drive the blogging engine. An internal blog provides a great testing ground for developing content ideas, learning how to use the tools, executing on content creation, etc.
Tools
It’s not rocket science, but there is a learning curve associated with the set up and use of blogging tools such as WordPress. An internal blog let’s your team practice how to create and format blog posts, use plugins, etc. so that when you launch that external blog everyone is up to speed.
Guidelines
Guidelines are an important part of every social media initiative. Using the internal blog to build understanding around guidelines related to posting etiquette, reader expectation and blog comments is a great primer to the development of any future public blog policies.
Best Practices
There are so many things to learn when it comes to blogging best practices. An internal blog presents an opportunity to teach important tips and tactics while letting you practice as you – this approach helps embed learning and makes the launch of any external blog project much easier and more effective from the onset.
Discipline
Blogs are hard work. Using an internal platform to develop discipline around writing, content creation, posting frequency, schedules, work flows, monitoring and responding to comments builds a valuable asset that can be used to position a successful launch of a public facing blog
Ambassadors
Leveraging employee participation is a great way to build blogging capacity – developing programs to recruit guest bloggers for an internal program can pay dividends when launching an external blog. Building a culture of Blog Ambassadors helps position the scaling and effective management of a public facing blog project.
What do you think about launching a corporate blog inside before taking it public? Please share any ideas you have about internal blogging in the comments – I’d love to hear your take.
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Originally posted on Social Media Explorer
Every once in a while we have the opportunity to read or view something that stops us in our tracks. Scott Stratten’s recent Oakville TEDx talk, Keep going until you stop, qualifies (an absolute must see).
Scott’s talk prompted me to take a deeper look at a couple of things around our evolving relationship with technology and its impact on our ability to be genuinely engaged. The love affair with social media can be a doubled-edged sword, both an investment and a cost. Once you step on the social media conveyor it’s pretty easy to just keep going, hyper connected 24/7/365. But to what end? How many of us assess the value of the time we spend online? Are we really connected and adding value to meaningful relationships or just killing time waiting for that next post, tweet or update?
Let’s start by clearing the air – this post isn’t about social media being evil and I’m not “that guy”, telling you to change your ways, or else. I live in the glass house 
I get it – I am a small business owner who depends on new marketing. But I do struggle with maintaining a digital balance (adding/extracting value vs. wasting time) and life balance (screen time vs. face time). Frankly, sometimes I feel like a bit of sucker when I get caught up in the game.
It could be said that we’ve developed some level of dependency on social media – I don’t like to go as far as referring to it as social media addiction (I think that trivializes some of the real battles people face). But there is no arguing that we’ve developed certain patterns of behaviour that could be cause for concern. Scott Stratten talks about the feeling of dread when he realizes he left his Blackberry in the car – for me it’s the sense of dropping the ball when I can’t get to Google Reader and share links on Twitter. What is it for you?
In the end, I think engagement is the most important barometer – it’s not just the Holy Grail of social media but of all personal and professional relationships. My goal will be to focus more on being truly engaged online/offline while cutting out some of the fluff – and not beating myself up too much for taking an occasional break from social media. How about you?
Lastly, here’s a great gut check about getting lost online from Chris Brogan:
“Ask yourself what the top 3 priorities are: for the day, for your role, for your business, for your home life. Look at these lists of three. Do they make sense? Is that what you’re spending your days doing? If not, you’re still lost.”
Technology is embedded in our lives and I get the sense that many of us struggle with engagement and balance. I’d love to get your opinions on this. Does the thought of taking a social media break scare the crap out of you? How do you stay really engaged? How do go about achieving a digital/life balance?
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Originally posted on Social Media Explorer
One of the biggest challenges organizations face when it comes to social media is social capacity – the degree to which they can effectively engage in social media discovery, strategy, implementation and management.
In order to build out programs in a financially efficient manner, some businesses adopt an “off the corner of the desk” approach – where existing employees take on social media responsibilities in addition to their regular job tasks. As social media takes root, some level of success is attained and value becomes established, another challenge begins to presents itself – deciding whether it’s time to assign a dedicated social media leader to guide strategy. When does the opportunity cost of a desk corner mind set begin to outweigh the cost of restructuring your social program?
Distributing the burden of social media capacity building across an existing team is a great way to get a program started – and for some organizations, competent tactical implementation and management is as far as they want to go. For those that sense more potential for their organizations, here are a few indications that your social media program is ready to take the next step:
Is your organization at a social media crossroad? What are some other indicators that suggest your social media program might be ready to evolve?
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When planning your social media outreach strategy, don’t discount the power of building niche networks – often they can present greater value than traditional mass channels.
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Originally posted on Social Media Explorer.
If we were to go by its moniker, Social Media should present itself as a communication channel rooted in human interaction – people from around the world using accessible publishing tools to share news, ideas and information with each other. It is definitely social, but could it be more human – particularly when it comes to organizations or brands?
We know that individuals are behind the posts, tweets and comments but it seems that organizations may have lost sight of the fact that actual people are connecting with their content. In order to free up their trust in a brand, audiences might like to know a little bit more about the people behind the icons and logos they subscribe to, follow or like.
People Buy From People
Organizations are ecosystems built around people, so humanizing them might seem like an oxymoronic exercise. But is it? Lauren Vargas from Radian 6 wrote a great post about humanizing the organization from a B2B perspective, but the principles apply to any online or offline relationship – people buy from people:
The essence of social media is about breaking down barriers, forging relationships and encouraging a dialog and not a monologue between the organization and the community. As defined by the dictionary, a relationship is an emotional or other connection between people. Not between a person and a company avatar. Not between a person and an automated response. People to people.
Part of the issue for some brands is transparency – if they are communicating to their audience through an agency and not from inside their four walls, it’s more difficult to make that human connection. Yes, some organizations are up front about the fact that a PR firm or agency acts as the conduit between them and their audience, but trying to build a relationship around that is another matter altogether. Imagine the profile:
We’d like you to meet Jane Doe, a key member of our team. Jane is an intern at the PR agency we’ve hired to communicate with you on our behalf. The brand message is ours, but the words are all her own. In her spare time she likes to go for long walks, read historical fiction and watch costume dramas. Thanks for connecting with us.
Tough sell.
A Peek Behind the Logo
But what about organizations that are leveraging employee participation to communicate with their audiences through social media? Here are a few tactics to consider implementing to humanize your brand:
What other tactics could you implement to humanize your brand?
Understand Your Audiences
A word of caution before pulling the curtain back on your organization – take some time to really understand the needs of your internal and external audiences. Before setting out to humanize your organization through social media:
What types of things are you doing to humanize your organization? Have you experienced any benefits for your brand? What are some of the challenges with connecting a human face to your business or non-profit?
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This visual was inspired by a tweet from marketing cartoonist extraordinaire Tom Fishburne – check out his cartoon and blog post on the concept of fans and followers.
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the numbers game. Increases in the number of fans, friends or followers are easy to measure but they might merely be hinting at success.
A few thoughts when it comes to measuring fans, friends or followers:
What are some other ways to make fan metrics more meaningful?
p.s. There are a few other social media pet peeves living in this cartoon – I just didn’t have the energy to address them today – I’m sure they will resurface in another post
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Originally posted on Social Media Explorer
In order to tap into the true potential of social media, businesses will have to make a cultural investment – and begin the process of evolving into social organizations. This integration of social communication within/across organizational ecosystems is becoming a more tangible possibly as companies and non-profits begin to embrace emerging technology while developing more strategic approaches to social media.
There has been some great thinking and model development in the area of social business design. David Armano developed a compelling Hive Mind Visual during his time at the Dachis Group – it speaks to the need to move away from the information silo mindset towards a more collaborative approach, where sharing information across the organization becomes the norm. Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group has presented some excellent analysis of the five primary social business models. His social business framework and matrix delves into pros and cons of each model and offers great “behind the scenes†insight.
The Social Business Sunflower Model might be considered a hybrid:
Social Leadership
Similar to hub and spoke models, there needs to be a social organizational leader that feeds the internal core. Depending on the size of the organization this role could be C-Suite i.e. Chief Social Media Officer, or simply a social media manager in a smaller business. The key here is to empower a role that becomes responsible for key strategic social business elements such as social media strategy, education/training, guidelines, etc.
Internal Structure
The structure around the social leader is more organic in nature, similar to the honeycomb model – where functional social teams work within their departments (under the mentorship of the social leader) to craft initiatives that are relevant to their respective audiences.
Here are some examples of what that might look like within an organization:
Audiences
The final layer is made up of the distinct audiences that each organization serves. Each petal represents stakeholders that influence (or are influenced by) the organization – it’s products/services, social media initiatives, business objectives, etc. It’s critical to build deep knowledge around each of these groups – understand demographics, where and how they play in the social media sandbox, what content are they interested in, what buying questions they have, etc.
Social media shouldn’t stem exclusively from one department – it needs to reach out from across the organization, touching audiences in manner relevant to their information needs, social channel preference, etc.
The sunflower represents an organic approach to social business – Relevant content stemming from the center of a collaborative, educated and socially aware organization reaching out towards select, deeply understood audiences.
Make sense? Is your business evolving in this direction? What are some of your real world challenges?
This visual is inspired by an engagement funnel developed by Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer.
I like the addition of the “Loyalist”. Don’t make the assumption that everyday customers/members will become ambassador for your brand – what are you doing to recognize/care for your customers to pave the way for them to become advocates?
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