At first glance it sounds like a relatively simple problem and is usually summarized by a question like “what is the best mobile app for us?”

If only it were that simple for a company.

The mobile trend is accelerating faster and faster.

It isn’t a question of if someone is connected,
but how, why, and when they are connected.

As a business professional there are dozens of reasons to use different mobile technologies ranging from 3g/4g wireless access, tablet applications, QR codes, GPS services, photo sharing, and content management systems.

There are also a variety of technical questions revolving around IT infrastructure, HR training, and on-going business integration.

Some basic questions I would have for any company looking to offer a mobile experience-

Basic 101

• What areas of our business could benefit?
• What is the most practical and results oriented project?
• How will I define, track, and improve my results?
• Who else has done something like this?

 Who is the audience?

• Is it internal or external?
• do they represent revenue or cost savings?
• do they use iPhone/iPad?
• do they use WIFI?
• do they use offline apps?
• do they need push verification?
• do they need SEO?
• do they publish content with high volume storage needs (large video files, etc.)
• does this audience have active social media channels?
• does this audience have an active online or offline community?
• do they utilize GPS or geo-location data?

Mobile specific questions

• does the mobile idea support revenue/cost savings?
• does the mobile idea attrition or undermine current revenue?
• does the mobile idea use a native or web delivery?
• what is the overall budget of the entire ‘web experience’?
  (you don’t want to blow your entire web site budget on your app…)
• what is the overall app marketing/user acquisition strategy?
• what is the method of deployment and training?
• what is the method of service and support?
• what is the product lifetime of the mobile idea?

The nutshell you need to crack

The idea around mobile media training isn’t that mobile ideas are either good or bad…. but that most mobile ideas are half-baked.

Costs, efficiencies, and revenues need to take multiple impact points and coordinate and effective business projects.

For large businesses this means that multi-disciplinary teams need to work together to distribute costs and maximize a collateral effort. Singular departments looking for singular efficiencies will miss opportunity areas and education savings.

Smaller businesses need to focus on retaining and growing current revenue using mobile technologies, as this goal is often far easier to accomplish than trying to generate new customers through mobile media.

One of the core elements we continue to discuss is the social media policy frameworks for what is acceptable behavior for different types of industry communications.

As part of the social media policy goes, there are A LOT of areas that management and workforce personnel should give some thought to.

It boils down to questions…

Rather than focus on where we see market trends a going, sometimes the most effective way to figure out where the boat is sailing is by asking the crew what they think. In many cases the messages being sent from ‘the top’ are often misunderstood by the team of people who need to accomplish the tasks at hand.

This often leads to confusion, lack of focus, and sometimes mutiny. The 10 most common questions employees had about corporate social media policy in 2011 (results from personal client surveys through-out the year)

• Who do I ask about what is okay?
• Who owns things I contribute on social media sites?
• When am I officially ‘off the clock?’
• Should I friend my boss?
• Can my boss tell me to friend them?
• What information should I keep away from my employer?
• What if I access sites using my personal smart phone?
• What happens if I quit / get fired?
• How do I report an employee for bad behavior?
• Can I contact colleagues and clients?

The Biggest Employee Question

A critical and often overlooked component of social media policy is addressing 

‘What is in it for me?’

Employees are not ignorant of the fact that company policy and internal documents are often written in the best favor of the employer brand.

Taking the time to craft a valuable set of social media policies and guidelines allows employees to properly consider how they can best work with the company to help them, help the company.

These are some of the most recent social media training articles I’ve written on my personal blog over at BarryHurd.com

Some of them are a little more casual than articles I write here on 123socialmedia, but they all have some great tidbits you can learn from and apply to your own business challenges.

So without further wait, here are four articles from this month at BarryHurd.com.

• 40+ Social Media Dashboard Tools for Tracking Stuff
• Social Media for Sales (why social intelligence rocks)
• Competitive Intelligence with Social Media Monitoring
• Social Media Analytics and Tracking Points of Market Impact

One of the biggest problems facing business leaders is that society at large has adopted the mindset of open dialogue and personal opinion. I personally believe that this has led to some great changes, but the downside is that very few people keep up to date on changes in technology, legal regulation, social trends, and  the business impacts.

Someone in your management group gets to be the voice of common sense…
and the messenger sometimes gets to be the bearer of unpopular messages.

While the message of social media policy is generally not the most popular topic, the combination of open dialogue and personal opinion weighed against the need to be held accountable and drive a profit often reside on contradictory ends of the spectrum. There are very important and long-term benefits that need to be considered by everyone in your audience.

• To say that social media policy is complex would be an understatement.
• To say that social media policy is simple would be idiotic.

Yet business owners, employees, investors, and consumers all have to find a way to have common ground when dealing with each other. Instead of jumping into the legal abyss of what your social media policy should or should not contain, try to absorb these five tips that will help get you in the right mindset for the situation at hand.

Being human.

The essential starting point of any management document is to relate with the team who will be impacted both positively and negatively through policy. If you lose this relationship with your team, any worthwhile leadership benefits will trickle away. As a leader you should focus on gratitude, humility, and collaboration. If your new social media policy makes you hesitate personally, you should rethink your viewpoint.

The best intentions should matter.

Social media ventures into a vast unknown territory of personal expression and social interaction. The fact that technology is often involved only means that both elements have an economy of scale and the rapid ability to multiply. It is rare that someone does something on purpose for negative reasons, and your management of any given situation should be guided by your professional respect, personal accountability, and leadership of the team.

What if my employee does something stupid?

Your social media policy won’t help you from a team member doing something stupid. Even the best people occasionally have bad days and make a genuine mistake. This is an important item to think about when setting the tone of your social media policy. If you treat talented and trusted professionals like children you can predict a few employee memos in the resulting backlash.

What if my employee steals my client list?

This is an important consideration to think about, but isn’t necessarily connected to your social media policy. If you have a client, vendor, or employee list that is a valuable asset for your organization it should be protected by proper non-disclosure, intellectual property, and non-compete contracts. These types of documents are not exclusive of social media (but social media often provides easy access to some very portable list.)

Who owns it?

This is a very complicated topic that can be influenced by factors before, during, and after employment. It can also vary depending on whether the employee was on-the-clock, was required to do it as part of a job function, or if the account was created on behalf of the company.

If you consider a typical corporation, you could easily have multiple accounts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkined, Youtube, and industry blogs that serve as the face of your organization. You could also have ‘celebrity’ employees who spend an large portion of time cultivating online audiences for your business. To gauge the importance for your organization you simply need to ask the question: what if you suddenly had access to one of these services revoked or permanently disabled, what types of business impacts would it have?

Hopefully these give tips give you some good food for thought.

Always keep in mind that your team not only works for you, but with you. While a drab social media policy may provide you with the proper legal structures to manage your team, a great social media policy can aid you in motivating your team as a leader.

While our crew is often working on a number of projects, some of the ideas simply don’t make it to this blog. Here is a recap of ideas on BarryHurd.com and TradeShowSocialMedia.com that shed some light on some pretty tactical questions.  Take a few minutes to browse around some of the other topics and put your thinking hat on to ask “how can I apply these tactics to my situation?”

Social Media Analtics and tracking points of market impact

Event Hashtags – a guide to using them

Social Media Security – is your event social and secure?

On top of the personal reaction to avoid disaster planning, many decision makers face a compounded problem when terms like social media, online conversation, and crisis response are added into the mix.

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the two elements create a perfect storm of excuses for professionals to look the other way.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at some specific issues using social media to prepare for, manage, and maneuver through one-time occurrences.

In some areas we will examine true disasters on a global scale while other events will be unexpected crisis on the individual and local level.

To help prepare for our conversation,
ask these questions.

What would you do…

• if your office building burned down?
• if your community was suddenly flooded or shook to the ground?
• if someone died because of what your business did?

None of these questions are easy. The answers are even harder.

As you keep these questions in the top of your mind, take a few minutes to read about the following disasters and how social media played a role in the situation.

Think about how your network, technology, expertise, and planning can help prepare for your own disaster planning.

Ask some questions

After you’ve given some considerations to what happens in a worse case scenario, come back and ask some specific questions about problems you see in your own area of expertise. There are A LOT of overlapping areas of risks and concerns that can only be addressed by communicating with people who know how to create solutions.

TIME.com – How Social Media Is Changing Disaster Response

“Halfway around the world in Japan, social media was a primary source of communication following the earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11. However, unlike the situation in Joplin, citizens were using networks like Twitter, Facebook and Mixi (a Japan-specific social site) to send warnings, ask for help and relay bits of information from the scene as well as to announce that they were safe.”

Information Week – Social Media Carries Risk At Disaster-Relief Time

“While the federal government increasingly is using social media in its efforts to improve disaster-preparedness and relief efforts, a new report warns of possible hindrances. For example, people may use social sites it to spread inaccurate information or may find that they can’t access social-media sites when needed.”

Federal Computer Week – Social Media Travels Faster than Seismic Waves

“People texted and used social media to keep in contact instead of calling on their cell phones, which overwhelms a network. More than that though, Twitter was the go-to website for breaking news. “It was my primary news source” during the earthquake.”

Hopefully one of these five questions will lead you to a ‘I hadn’t asked that…” statement.

The Q and A isn’t meant to be rocket science, merely an prescriptive set of questions to make sure you have your business bases covered.

Do you have any formalized goals or reports in place?

Properly charting success or failure in new ventures requires an understanding of where you are and where you need to go. This rule of business does not change in regards to social media. During strategic preparation it is best to perform a review of departmental and process metrics across the entire range of your business and ask the simple yes / no question of “does this have a potential point of impact with new communication trends?”

If you don’t have these metrics as starting benchmarks, proof of failure or success later down the line is incredibly difficult.

What is the budgetary support of the new venture?

In the online space there is an unlimited amount of budgetary range for new projects. When allocating budgets it is best to collect benchmark numbers from other departmental efforts and compare them to likely areas of higher return. It is also important to highlight traditional areas of business that have severe problems, as new tools and insight may be able to correct costly problems that exist in the current operation of the business.

If I don’t have budget, can I reallocate resources?

A properly implemented social media project should be able to prove performance and enhance other initiatives. Like all projects however, any specific effort will take time before certain results can be measured and analyzed. Typical areas of budget impact for social media efforts are usually found in marketing, public relations and customer service.

What section of your online pipeline is causing problems?

The conversion funnel of moving a prospect into a customer is a long route that has multiple roadblocks in the digital space. There are core elements in technology, adoption, usability, process, and marketplace timing that have major impacts to successful pipeline conversions. By identifying where strengths and weaknesses are in the digital communication chain, you can focus on creating a more efficient process. (Don’t get tunnel vision and focus only on marketing as a core problem area!)

What groups are responsible for current online media activities?

Typical businesses are finding more and more usage in public relations, marketing, and customer service. However other external communication uses are highly effective (recruiting, tradeshow promotion, competitive intelligence, investor relations) and internal communication is often a neglected opportunity (project management, process improvement, employee training, executive communication.)

Any top questions to add?

Keeping up to speed with how technology and social trends evolve is a daunting task; even for me!

The reality is that each person on our team often spends ten to twenty hours researching new solutions and clarifying our ideas.

To that end, we recommend (and personally use) a variety of tools that help professionals research, collect, and share information with the people they work with.

This allows businesses to maximize budget and time spent on research by distributing the benefits of the information across everyone in the company who can benefit from it. I realize that many other business professionals don’t spend ten to twenty hours a week researching business solutions; so I went ahead and detailed a business professional that only spends 30 minutes a day working with the web.

*NOTE: in an internal study of almost 200 corporate professionals
we found that the average research and planning time was roughly 68 minutes a day.

Simple math:

1 = person spending 30 minutes a day researching
10 = number of people researching different topics (5 hours of daily work)
$100 = average executives hourly cost

Total Cost = $500 a day /$2500 a week in lost salary

If each person learns to aggregate simple and effective  online sharing tools of collected research, everyone in the ten person team can research different topics and benefit from the shared information colleagues have collected on other topics. The efficiency gained by knowledge sharing allows companies to reclaim 60% to 90% of lost salary budget (for an annual savings of $75k to $120k for a ten person team!)

Two Easy to Use Tools

Paper.li: allows you to take a series of news streams and combine the into an easy to digest format. It works very well with Twitter lists and keywords to rank articles shared in expert groups to create a one page newspaper of news. This makes it very useful for finding 10+ industry experts on Twitter and creating a tactical topic source for your team. An example is a collection of social media professionals on my Paper.li for The Social Strategist.

Addictomatic: provides a very simple  search process for scanning a variety of web portals such as Twitter, Bing, Google, Youtube, Metacafe, and more. Each source of information is placed into a widget that can be organized to your preference (if something is irrelevant you can simply delete it) and the URL for that specific collection you have curated can be shared with your team or saved as a bookmark. This allows you to create prospect and client dashboards with ease, and provides a way for your team to keep up to date on very specific topics.

Suggested Social Media Training & Education Ideas

Use Paper.li to create a ‘team newspaper’ to keep up to date with each other on the web.
This can be personal, professional, or both.

Use Paper.li to create a ‘prospect portfolio’ for your sales team.
You can include peers, competitive topics, and industry news.

Use Paper.li to research competitors.
Follow teams of employees, account managers, and clients.

Use Addictomatic to share recent news stories with clients.
Include advanced search phrases to focus on important topics.

Use Addictomatic to create a news dashboard about you.
Search for your name, employer, or recent projects.

Get creative

The above examples are basic applications of using these free tools for streamlined social media training. By thinking through your current daily and weekly work process you can find multiple ways of collecting information and sharing it with your team (to make faster and better informed decisions!)

Business executives often rely on traditional human resource and public relations tactics to manage how they manage the workforce. The problem is that these traditional tactics don’t take into account the numerous laws, regulations, and compliance issues that are found at industry, local, state, and federal levels.

Your social media policy needs to be ‘revamped’ from the ground up.

Some core questions you should think about

Who owns it?

This is both a legal question and an internal management question.

Part one: If your employees are allowed to post on social media sites during work hours or are required to post on sites as a function of their job, who really owns it?

This can be a very important question to resolve in writing with your employees. There are numerous cases were a socially engaged employee networked with hundreds or thousands of high-value contacts on a personal account and then took those assets when they left the company. This error could easily represent a six figure mistake twelve months down the road. (Just think… what would happen if your entire e-mail or client database was on the web and someone else owned it?)

Part two: do you have the ability to make effective decisions in your online communication?

In many organizations marketing owns the social media channel.

As organizations get larger and more complex, decision makers from information technology, public relations, legal, human resources, and executive management also get involved.

It is critical that a well-defined communication hierarchy is established so that effective actions can be taken when required.

Do you have access to all your social accounts 24/7?

Two important ideas to consider:

• It is Saturday night. Your office catches fire. Several witnesses on Facebook and Twitter comment and it begins to ‘go viral’Can you access all the pertinent social channels at your company to communicate the right story without being delayed?
• You fire an employee.You thought you owned it. They have the passwords.Have you created a proper human resource and information technology process to retain your social media assets without delay?

Have you identified mission critical communication paths?

There are multiple process paths for your social media policy that need specific guidance.

Some examples include

• sales / marketing funnel
• consumer communication
• crisis escalation
• hiring/firing
• security breaches
• employee/client privacy
• regulatory concerns
• executive communications
• investor relations

Each of these communication processes have mission critical elements that are accelerated by social media usage. In many cases the most immediate requirement is the management of fast and effective communication for senior managers and executive leadership. In the world of social media policy, many mid-management employees feel they are doing the ‘right thing’ and are unfortunately trying to make decisions in an area of business that they are acting blindly in.

Are you monitoring your employees for rogue communications?

This is a very tricky question.

• What if an employee says something horrible about you or a client?
• What if it turns out that what they said was not true?
• What if someone else posted it using their credentials?
• Have you communicated proper expectations to the employees in question?

If you have doubts about any of these questions, you open a series of employment headaches.

On top of the basic questions above, there are also a number of legal and civil rights and liberties that public and private employees have at the industry, local, state, and federal levels.

Does it influence hire / fire decisions?

Before you respond to a gut reaction to hire or fire someone based on social media commentary; do some research about local and federal regulations.

The National Labor Relations Board researched 129 cases that involved social media and the workplace to determine what the precedence for terminating an employee. The general conclusion of the NLRB was that the most common error was an “overbroad policy” that restricted employees from commenting on wages, corrective actions, and complaints about the company or it’s leadership.

My Biased Bonus Tip:

Don’t rely on a boilerplate social media policy

While we work with social media policies and strategic planning, it is critical to understand that your social media policy is not about marketing. It affects dozens of points within corporate business and represents benefits and liability areas that reach into six and seven figure sums.

From an expert level, most borrowed social media policies and the strategic planning giving to them have extraordinary holes in them.

Copying social media policy from a competitor or like-minded company risk issues and voids almost all the benefits of having a social media policy in the first place.

What would you detail in a social media policy?

The strategic thought behind this conversation is based on massive volumes of data.

Billions of Likes, Tweets, Visits, Votes, and Shares.

All of this data creates a variety of ‘mental static’ that causes decision makers to freeze up and become disoriented.

The sheer amount of information becomes a new type of obstacle that prevents businesses from moving forward at the right time and location.

Here are three social media infographics
that paint a picture with all that data

The Growth of Social Media – This social media infographic is a great place to start. It shows some of the tools that have reached adoption and global appeal.
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – The Growth of Social

Social TV and the MTV Video Music Awards – this covers what 5.5 million Tweets can show you around a live event (and this visualization doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg.)
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Social TV with MTV

Adoption of the Mobile Workforce -  we have to keep in mind that social media also covers a range of hardware such as mobile phones and tablets.
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Mobile Workforce

 Do you have any recommended social media infographics?
Share them in the comments below!