Social Media Stories

Daily business communication using social media: the central corporate channel

2010-01-20T08:52:47Z

See Part 1: Daily business communication using social media: people and objectives.

Are your social media programs focused on short-term campaigns or are they supporting your long-term business objectives and operations? Your company communicates at every level with its ecosystem of industry players, customers, partners, and enthusiasts, and your social media programs should be enhancing and extending these communications.

In Part 1 of this series, using the Forrester POST framework, I listed the People involved in your ecosystem and Objectives of the social media programs that are interacting with them:

Listen and Talk with the general industry community.
Support your partner and customer ecosystem.
Support and Energize enthusiasts.

Now let’s move on to the next two steps in the process, Strategies and Technologies. Each one of these objectives will translate into a different social media program.

Central Corporate Communication Program

Strategies

You want to establish a central corporate communication program to widen the “voice of the corporation” beyond press releases. Your goals are to increase awareness, improve brand equity, establish thought leadership. An inevitable side effect of using social media is going to be opening another feedback channel. This central channel will act as both your “corporate newspaper” and your “social media lobby.”

This program publishes corporate news, acting as a digital hub that links out to various programs and properties. It’s not the personal blog of a company spokesperson, although it should have a host who responds to comments. It should not be the personal blog of a thought leader, although it can include items that help establish thought leadership, like white papers, conference keynote reports, or essays from your CTO. In fact, it’s not a blog at all by some measures, although you’re going to use blog software to publish part of it.

What’s goes in the channel? Because of the nature of social media channels, you can increase the frequency of your communication beyond your normal press release schedule. The criterion here is not “is this piece going to be written up in the trade press?” Instead, you are developing a rhythm of news that reflects the daily business operations of your enterprise. Essentially, you’re running the corporate newspaper, and in fact, if you have a corporate newsletter, you can coordinate the two programs. Think of this as the newsletter exploded with each item individually packaged and published in a coordinated set of social media channels.

This channel can be an outlet for all the program news that comes to the PR group but either doesn’t rise to the priority level of a press release or otherwise can’t find a spot on the PR calendar. Items could include: product releases, new service offerings, contests, events, keynotes — either upcoming or recorded videos, promotions and campaign offers, new or changed programs, new services and tools on the web site, new translations of your site, new micro-sites, key hires or key new openings.

Since this is a more official corporate channel, news items should go through an approval process similar to that used by press releases. An approval process can help clear up ambiguous language and avoid statements about the future of the business or the market that your lawyers may not want people to assume are the official predictions of the company.

Your own press releases can go into this channel. If you decide to include them, you can use the blog post as a digital hub just for that release, a sort of digital press kit of Social Media Release, if you will. You can include screenshots, widgets, other press clips, white papers, and links to related resources. One example where we used this kind of technique was a blog post that pulled together links to online calculator, a press release about the calculator, and a very long post on a another blog explaining the methodology behind the calculator. None of the other components easily linked to all the other components, since they were coming from different people at different times, but the blog post easily gathered together links to all the relevant resources.

The Official Google Blog is a nice example of this kind of central corporate communications channel, although in their case, they don’t include press releases. It’s also a nice example of tone, with short pieces laying out the news, sometimes with a personal touch, and always signed by someone from the company — usually not an executive.

KPI. Direct: surveyed attitude, increased & better coverage with press, analysts, blogs. Indirect: traffic/subscribers, retweets, inbound links, and other engagement metrics.

(Engagement and traffic are both the easiest kinds of social media metrics to collect. While they shouldn’t be ends in themselves, they are at least a measure that you’re being valuable to someone, if not a direct measure of revenue or of people’s attitude toward your company.)

Risks/barriers

Resources. You’ll need to resource this program to step up the cadence as the Managing Editor and respond to comments as a “Social Media Host.” One scenario for starting out is for one person to manage the channel and split their time managing a central corporate listening program.

Schedule. The cadence should be kept reasonably high: 2-3 pieces a week seems about right. If you have fewer than one item per week, it will still work as an announcement channel, but you won’t develop a natural returning readership. More than daily news may overwhelm and should likely go to the Ecosystem Communication Program I’ll detail next.

Content. This channel must be interesting and avoid corporate bloviation. Don’t try to force everything into a release-like template, but do establish editorial guidelines. The language can be more informal than a press release. Use as many graphics, images, and videos as you can. Again, I think the Official Google Blog keeps to a friendly yet not indulgent tone.

Response Policy & Process. Since this is a social media channel, you’ll have to actually have a human being hanging around it. The editor (or another Social Media Host) should check daily for comments and questions on the blog, via Twitter, and on Facebook and then answer them. Since this particular blog is mostly about outbound news, you may not get many comments. However, these channels will now be acting as your social media main point of presence — your “social media lobby,” so to speak — you can get all sorts of oddball questions coming in. Because the host does need to respond as quickly as possible and without a great deal of oversight, you don’t necessarily want to give this to the most junior member of your marketing team or an intern.

Your company policy should specify that these responses do not need to come from a company spokesperson, because (1) they’re mostly going to be very tactical and (2) any sort of approval process will overwhelm this lightweight conversational mode. There will be the occasional comment that is either incendiary or hard to answer, you will also need to specify a response and escalation process so that your host can get respond effectively. (That’s a topic for another post.)

Technologies

A blog will act as your digital hub. A blog platform, as opposed to a Facebook page, is the most flexible and controllable tool for this. The blog can be run in-house or on an external platform.

You want to ensure that the information can be received by your readers in the format and location they choose to receive it:

RSS should come free with the blog, although there are vendors that can provide more control & analytics.
Email subscriptions. Integrated into your lead-generation and email management platform is best, but you can always get a free email subscription service from Google Feedburner or a few other vendors. Check your corporate email management policy — there may be issues using a separate email system.
Twitter. The Blog should have a Twitter presence. Since this is the Central Corporate News channel, the account name could be simply @Company, or it could be something like @CompanyNews. This account can be fed manually or via an automated tool like Twitterfeed.
Facebook. The Blog should have a Facebook page. Again, this can just be the primary Company Page or a news-specific one. Updates look nicer if they’re manually shared, since you can pick up some nice graphics, but it’s easy to use the blog RSS feed to publish automatically to the Page.
There may be other geographic or industry-specific sites you’ll need cover. If LinkedIn ever makes it easy to automatically publish news to a group, I’d use that as well.

That’s the overview of this Central Corporate Communications Program. As with all social media programs, the devil’s in the details of execution, and there are no end of tips online about what to blog about, how to get links, how to increase engagement, how to measure traffic and engagment, and all sorts of other tactical best practices. What I’ve tried to show is how social media can support the corporate communications programs you already have with your external stakeholders.

Stay tuned for Part 3: The Ecosystem Communication Program.

Catch up with Part 1: Daily business communication using social media: people and objectives.

Daily business communication using social media: people & objectives

2009-11-30T01:52:09Z

Many people want to hear from your business, but are you talking to them? Do your social media programs include your existing ecosystem of partners, analysts, investors, customers, and even your own field sales teams?

Social media conversations often fork into one of two directions. Some conversations get caught up in the revolutionary movement and we talk about how we’re driving engagement and equity for the brand, but without a clear connection to ROI. Other discussions gets stuck in a direct marketing mentality and we talk only about short-term campaigns, SEO, and conversion rates.

But your company is more than your brand, and your company does more than find new leads. Your company is a business. Are your social media programs supporting your daily business communication and operations?

Much of the overt communication of a corporation splits into two levels: one is a high-level voice of the corporation, with communication typically coming via press releases, interviews with spokespeople, and executive presentations. But there is an entire spectrum of lower-level daily operational output from a variety of teams and programs across the corporation: product teams, distribution channel and supply chain partner programs, education, professional services, promotional campaigns and events, technical support, customer programs, and on and on. They are producing items of interest that don’t belong in a press release, things like secondary product launches, new or changed programs or policies, events, case studies, webinars, white papers, calculators, contests, documentation, or even changed website sections or new capabilities. Often, though, it’s hard for people to keep up or even find what they need.

This kinds of daily operational communication can and does result in customer acquisition and increased brand equity, but that’s not its primary goal. Social media can be instrumental in conveying those program messages and also in enhancing the two-way communication between the program managers and their stakeholders.

Let’s loosely use the Forrester POST method on one scenario about this kind of a corporate ecosystem and see where that leads us. Here a few generalized assumptions about the current situation for many businesses:

You have a set of people who want to hear from you. These are your customers, partners, and even your employees. How do the people who would be interested in your company find out about the output of the corporation at a level of detail below press release-sized chunks? You send out email, but does it get opened? Would people prefer to get their information in other ways? People now spend more time on social media sites than they do with their email.

Attitudes surrounding corporate communications have changed. People want to hear directly from the company, not from the press and not from the partner and distribution channel. Although email can be forwarded, it’s hard to share on social networking sites. People who hear about policy changes via word of mouth often desire an official confirmation. (A customer enthusiast recently told me: “In my country, your channel partners get their information from me.”)

People

Here are three groups that actually want to hear from you, because they need to be talking with your company to do their jobs.

General industry audience. A wide variety of people from across the business spectrum want an overview of the company’s business activities, and they want a one-stop shop. They tend to be Spectators, at least in this context. This is a separate group from the prospective customers that come to the front page of your website.

Partner and customer ecosystem. These are hands-on sales, marketing, and technical types who want the tools and resources to work with your company. They get email from you and come to your web site often. To do their job, they need to be Collectors of news and tools. This audience also includes your own employees in the field, who also need to keep up on the latest tools you’ve made available.

Enthusiast community. Your product is useful to them and their careers. Usually part of the ecosystem group, this crowd wants tool and resources, but they also need hands-on information about how to design, use, and troubleshoot your product, and they often are the ‘gurus’ that others turn to for help, online and off. They use blogs, Twitter, and other online communities to connect with their peers. They are Creators, Critics, Collectors, and Joiners.

Objectives

So using the somewhat formal language of the POST model, what do you want to do with these folks?

Listen and participate in the ongoing industry conversation. Using these operational social media channels will push you towards listening. This will increase your agility and reduce risks, because you will have better early warning systems and hopefully will be using the feedback to course correct.

Talk with the business community. Because you are going beyond press release-sized chunks of conversation, and because you are going directly to the community without the filter of press and analysts, this general audience will better understand what the company is actually accomplishing and where it’s trying to go. You will increase their awareness & improve their attitude towards your business, establish thought leadership, and hear what they think about your strategy and execution.

Support your partner and customer ecosystem. Much of this mutual benefit is from simply communicating better, more frequently, and in the channel that each person prefers. This will increase your ecosystem’s ability to execute and will allow them to better leverage the assets you are already producing. If you’re listening, you’ll also find out which resources are actually useful and what you should be doing more and less of.

Support and Energize enthusiasts. You goal is to make these enthusiasts successful, knowledgeable, and more influential by giving them the tools and training they need. By empowering them to be better advocates, and giving them the tools to pass along resources to others, they will help you increase the number of successful customers you have, and in fact will help increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities across the funnel.

See Part 2 where we finish the POST process with Strategies and Technologies and present the first of three corporate social media communications programs: The Central Corporate Communications Channel. Part 2: Daily business communication using social media: the central corporate channel

Please let me know what you think! Are we moving beyond Social Media 101? Is this model resonating with you? Does it make sense for your type of business?

Telling social media stories: what I’m trying to do here

2009-11-29T00:20:09Z

Hi, I’m John Mark Troyer. I think I’ve built up enough momentum here on this new blog to stop a moment, say thanks (it is Thanksgiving, after all), and explain what I’m trying to do, and the kind of stories I want to tell you.

Geek and Poke: Consultant's Dilemma

Stories deeply resonate with who we are. We learn and remember through stories. We use stories, even when they aren’t quite right, to make sense of the world (q.v., narrative fallacy in The Black Swan). Stories told by our friends help us make decisions. Customer case studies (aka “success stories”) are one of the best ways to sell complex products. After all, if Bill is getting a 200% ROI and increased SLAs, I should be able to do that, too, right?

I’ve been surveying the social media conversation on social media marketing lately. I’ve noticed that people were writing a lot about big picture strategy and principles, and a lot about low-level tactics and how-to’s, but few real experiences and success stories were being shared, and mostly the same ones over and over again. Having never been a SM consultant, I can only guess that this is a common issue – you can’t normally share project details, but when something works big, you flog it for all it’s worth.

So here’s my story. I joined the communities group at VMware four years ago as “the blogger guy.” My job was to take all the goodness we were experiencing in our community forum — a wildly successful community of IT practitioners who were helping each other be successful using our products — and translate that into other venues. I had been involved with online community back through the days of Usenet, but I had never built a corporate blogging program. My plan, coming off a few nascent startup projects, was to swoop in, create some results, and jump out again to my next startup.

Since then, the community site has continued to grow exponentially (it contributes some ridiculous percentage of our web traffic), the blogs grew from a few posts here and there to a network of practitioners, all talking amongst themselves, and we headed to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We built an advocacy program, a conference blogging program, and a weekly community podcast. Most of the organization is either working with us or feeding information into our channels. I’ve alternated between tool builder, blogger, community manager, PR guy to the bloggers, and internal social media consultant. I’ve really grown to love the people in the community around our products and the challenges of the job. So much for the original plan of jumping in and out quickly! I’ve stuck around this long and at some point I realized I’ve had the best job in the company, and I think we have a great social media program. Our experiences as we grew will inspire some of the stories I’ll be telling here.

The challenges going forward for us are the same ones you see talked about elsewhere as programs grow: How do we deepen the connections between our social media programs and our other marketing efforts? What are the implications of every single part of the organization being able to talk, publicly, with their stakeholders outside the company? How do we reach out to new audiences and how do we scale? Can a product marketing manager ever find time to write their own blog? These are a few of the mysteries of the universe that we discuss in our current internal conversations, and are some of topics I’ll be telling stories about here as well.

Until now, I’ve been primarily focusing my attention inward, towards our community. Now I’ll be spending some of my time in the greater marketing conversation around social media and online communities. I want to share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. I also want to learn from you. Thus this new blog talking about Social Media Stories and you here reading it.

Up at the top of this post, I poked a little at consultants not being able to say anything meaningful, but for me to tell stories about our social media programs while we are actually running the program in real-time… well, that’s actually a tricky proposition. The competitive issues aren’t too bad — pretty much everything I do is out in the open — but I have to be careful to avoid negatively influencing ongoing projects, and I have to talk about how we’re learning and making mistakes without looking stupid. Added to that, some of the virtualization folks I work with every day are already reading this blog. (Hi guys)! While everybody knows I occasionally commit acts of marketing, I don’t want the gang to feel like I’m marketing “at” them when we’re hanging out together, and talking about how there’s a strategy behind what I do feels like explaining the punchline of a joke, which is always the death of the funny.

About the name of this blog: We’ve gone over the “Stories” part. I’m not in love with the term “Social Media” at this point, but I don’t see anything better on the horizon. I definitely don’t like being lumped in with affiliate marketing, MLM, and black hat SEO. I do like some of the terms I’m hearing like “social business” (although often confused with “socially-conscious business,” which is the same problem when you start using “community marketing”), and I guess we can always fall back to some sort of generic “integrated” or “digital” marketing. But mostly, I want people to be able to find me and talk to me, so “social media” it is. The site is also a marketing vehicle for me, so I apologize in advance for plastering my face everywhere.

Eight things I promise will never be on this blog

I’m not saying these things are bad, they just aren’t where my interests lie these days.

5 ways to supercharge your business with Facebook! You’re starting in the wrong place.
Attend my seminar and buy my DVD series! To all the legit consultants, no offense intended; I’m trying to make fun of the scammers and gurus here.
5 obvious keys to success: be smart, figure out something hard, impress people, love your work, sell some things. Listicles with no examples and a lot of ‘what’ but no ‘how’ didn’t work for the Underpants Gnomes, and they don’t make for a very actionable as a blog post.
You can succeed in social media! For self-help advice, I recommend checking some books out of the library or seeing a therapist.
Buy this blog template! Templates are pretty far down the priority list for me. I’m using a free one.
10 Twitter tools that won’t be around next year. Get those from Mashable.
A video tutorial on how to do turn on a setting in a web page. I have faith that you can figure it out.
Make Money Fast With Your Blog! Oh please.

And since it’s Thanksgiving here in the US, I’ll end by noting I’m grateful for my lovely wife, my rewarding job, and the amazing folks I work with both inside and outside the company. I am grateful to live in a beautiful place like the San Mateo Coastside on Planet Earth, and I’m grateful to you for coming by. Thanks! If you’re celebrating, have a great day, a lot to eat, and focus on gratitude! I’d also like everybody to be aware of Native American Heritage Day on Friday.

–John Mark

tl;dr VMware social media guy starts a blog. Not a social media douchebag. Welcome & thanks!

The ethical technology blogger junket

2009-11-28T08:55:51Z

A few weeks ago, I participated in an interesting event and new (for me) kind of event, Gestalt IT Tech Field Day. Stephen Foskett (see my earlier post on Gestalt IT) pulled together the event only 5 weeks after attending and being inspired by the very successful HP Tech Day, which brought together a dozen bloggers to (re)introduce to them what was happening with HP and storage. He and the community thought it was such a great event they wanted to do it again. So is this the start of a wave of enterprise tech blogger junkets?

Junkets and other related boondoggles have a long history – probably the first one was a rich Babylonian who invited some scribes out to brunch at his hanging gardens so they’d say good things about him. And we all know about junkets for doctors and journalists and politicians, and the rules many organizations have to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Everyone in social media is obviously watching the new FTC guidelines (I like these comments from Steve Hershberger of ComBlu), and most of us have heard stories about all the good stuff that can get sent to bloggers.

So let’s just take as a given that this kind of thing can go very wrong indeed in the wrong hands. This event was in very right hands, however. I’m somebody who often gives things to people in my job role, so I’m very interested in clear guidelines and disclosures, which will be a topic for another day.

The funny thing is that when we think of a junket, we think of a Mai Tai by the pool in Hawaii. Tech Field Day was not that kind of experience, but it was geek heaven, just the same.

Let’s turn over this introduction to organizer Stephen Foskett:

from Rod Haywood’s post: Gestalt IT Tech Field Days 2009.

Note what Stephen says – although it was sponsored by a set of vendors, this event was not controlled by the vendors. Sunshine Mugrabi helped organize the event and talks about how it rapidly came together. Attendee Rick Vanover describes the schedule and answers the vacation question:

Q: Is this industrial tourism?

A: To an extent, but it is not a vacation. Our day on Thursday started at 7:00 AM and went until 9:00 PM. Friday started at 7:30 AM and we didn’t get back from dinner until around 8:30 PM. Yes, we had fun – but we were busy giving the sponsors our full attention.

The event was a huge success for all the participants. 1,274+ tweets and dozens of well-disclaimed blog posts later, the vendors felt like they were able to communicate very intimately to a set of influencers. The attendees, all top-notch independent technologists, were stuffed full of information about new technologies, which was a plus for their jobs, and they were also able to convey what their perspectives to their readers, which was a plus for their blogs. A second Tech Field Day is now being planned.

An important part of the event was the quality of the presentations. You’ve got to bring smart technologists to talk technology with these guys. No marketing fluff, although you can talk benefits, as long as they’re real. Everybody loves a good benefit. Attendee Rich Brambley wrote about the experience in Thoughts About Presenting to Engineers. Ed Saipetch, another attendee, also wrote The Five Rules of Tech Day Club:

The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.” …

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

What were the success factors of this kind of event – new to our corner of the blogosphere?

Strong commitment from the organizers of no quid pro quo. What the bloggers wrote was up to them. Even when there is a vendor as a sponsor, like HP, this has to be the case. (Disclaimer: I’m pitching this kind of event to several groups inside VMware. I think it’d be a blast.)
Independent technologists who have their reputation at stake. I respect all these guys, and their reputations are based on being good communicators about their honest technical opinions.
Full disclosure. Disclose, disclose. When the topic comes up again in a few months, disclose some more.
Deep technical mind melds. The most successful vendors (the ones that generated the most love) had some of the coolest products, yes, but they also sent in top-notch technologists to have a deep dive with the visitors. This is critical; spewing marketing bs at a bunch of technologists is deadly – even if they don’t like your product, technologists like talking to other smart technologists.
A grueling schedule (14 hour days on and off the bus probably qualifies) that no sane person would mistake for a vacation.
Invite the right people: don’t aim for super-connected influencers whose greatest claim to fame is how often they get retweeted. In this kind of event, you want people with authority and respect in the communities you want to reach. Their opinion counts where it matters.

Obviously, we’re just catching up to the MommyBloggers here. Have you participated in an event like this? What ethical obligations do we all have going forward with these kind of events? What are other ways that we can get the opportunity to communicate deeply with people who specialize in our domains?

[Updated with more on presentation tips from Ed, and a final bullet point on inviting the right people with authority.]

The Enterprise Social Media Map

2009-11-28T22:56:10Z

In any company of appreciable size, social media gets complicated. Social media channels and platforms, interactions, linkages, things to track: they all start to interconnect with exponential complexity. Even an inventory of channels and platforms starts to look like a phone book and is about as stimulating. Going up a level and drawing a picture can help you and your management understand the scope and inter-relationships of your social media programs.

I call this diagram a social media map, although I’m not sure if there’s a more standard term. This diagram attempts to put your various social media channels and platforms into a relationship with each other and with your other online properties. This particular diagram is modeled on the way our company is structured, but I’ve tried to generalize it to make it useful to anyone at a large enterprise technology company. This is Version 0.1. Your comments and feedback are welcome, and I’ll try to incorporate them into the next version.

In case it’s not clear, grey blobs are web properties. Grey circles are blogs. Blue squares are Twitter accounts. Punch-card-looking blue rectangles are Facebook pages. Arrows are links. Most components should have arrows between them, because a link goes one way or the other at some point; I’ve just shown some of the more meaningful links.

Marketing Funnel. I’ve tried to spread out the components on a continuum across the marketing funnel — characterizing activities from the earliest awareness activities on the left to the care and feeding of happy customers on the right. This is for convenience and shouldn’t be taken as restrictive or prescriptive — most social media channels are used all in all phases of the marketing funnel.

The primary web components

Corporate Website. We’re talking about resources to be consumed and talked about — social media objects, if you will. For us, these are things like new white papers, webinars, product release notes, event schedules, etc. Most of those resources reside on the corporate web site. On our product pages, we point out to relevant blogs and community forums.

Campaign Landing Pages and Microsites. We try not to blindly spam our community with links to our campaigns, but when our campaign offers are cool and of interest to a community (white papers, research reports, interactive calculators, sales promotions), we’ll link to them from appropriate blogs and Twitter accounts.

Webinars, Events. Maybe include technical white papers and other resources here as well. On our site, these are hosted in a separate application than our regular CMS; thus the circular blob.

Program Blogs. We have a number of blogs from various product and program teams on our blog site (hosted on Typepad). Most of them act more as announcement platforms than dialog platforms, but some get a good back-and-forth going, and all are useful. These often point back to resources on our site. Although blogs live under a subdomain of our main URL, conceptually and tonally they are separate from the corporate site, so I’ve depicted them floating above the main site.

Community. Our community site is large and healthy. We get a lot of questions and a lot of traffic, from Google and elsewhere. There’s a lot of troubleshooting information there, and it gets linked to quite a bit. Our community platform (Jive) hosts blogs as well, so I’ve included a few of those here. Until recently, our community site was one of the 5 key tabs on the top of our page, and it’s still has corporate trade dress and is linked to from all over the main site, so I’ve depicted it as firmly embedded in the corporate site.

Knowledge Base. Our more structured site with known issues, tips, and suggestions. KB articles are authored by us, not directly by the community. but suggestions do get incorporated regularly into the content. Recently, the KB team has begun experimenting with producing some videos.

The primary social components

Central corporate channels: blog, Twitter account, Facebook page. Designated by the dotted line circle as sort of a single entity, these main corporate channels can act as ‘the voice of the company.’ Since the blog can hold more text and multimedia assets, it can act as your main content channel, with the Twitter and Facebook platforms pointing to it. Although similar content can go up on each of these channels, we find that quite different conversations take place on each platform. These channels link to all the other social media platforms as well as the corporate web site, but I’ve omitted those arrows for clarity.

@Events. Our particular webinar/event/white paper CMS application doesn’t emit RSS. (It’s coming.) The content doesn’t seem deep enough for its own blog, since it’s mostly listings. However, we do have a Twitter account for events. This is a human-powered account that talks about upcoming events, both online and offline. This Twitter account both serves almost as a town crier: “Starting the 9am webinar on disaster recovery http://bit.ly/abcd” as well as a way of getting butts in seats when an offline event isn’t full. We were a bit surprised that a global Twitter account can help fill up a user group in Indiana, but it seems to work.

Facebook Product Pages. We have a few Facebook Pages dedicated to various Products. Since we have a somewhat wide product portfolio, but our products are often used together, we’re still figuring out how many different Facebook pages we should have. Right now, our main criteria is audience. Since our main audience is IT professionals, our product for consumer and enthusiasts on the Mac gets a separate page, but yet another product for the data center, no matter how awesome, probably doesn’t need a separate page.

@Blogs RSS. A Twitter feed from every blog seemed excessive. We already aggregate our blogs on a single page, so we took the RSS feed of that aggregation, ran it through Twitterfeed, and made a Twitter account. It’s clearly an automated posting, so we haven’t had any confusion that it’s a human being. By serving up blog titles to people interested in them, it gets retweeted a lot. Although I’ve recently started using an RSS reader for the first time in years, Twitter is really the place most people seem to get their news these days.

@Topics. We have one team (our Performance team) that has taken all the content from their various corporate and personal blogs, plus all the new threads from their community forum, and then fed all that RSS to a Twitter account. Then an actual human acts as host/concierge to the account. It’s a useful way of aggregating very specific topics into a single feed, and the goal is also to drive people to answer new questions when they get asked in the forum. A joint robot/person account can be confusing, however, so the person part of the equation needs to be active or people will think this account is just another RSS feed.

Support Blogs & Twitter. Our support team has a dedicated resource covering social media. They have two blogs — one dedicated blog listing new content on the KB and one human-powered blog with featuring new resources, curations of entries around particular topics, and other important announcements. They also operate two Twitter feeds, one just about new KB news (human-powered), and one as the principle customer service response point on Twitter.

@Community Blogs RSS. We also pull together a few dozen of the best blogs in our area written by customers, partners, analysts, and journalists. Again, we aggregate, take the resulting RSS feed, and push those titles into the Twittersphere. They get retweeted a lot.

The Twittersphere. These days in our area, most of the directed conversation (troubleshooting, specfic questions) takes place in our community, and most of the undirected conversation takes place on Twitter. Most of the interaction takes place among personal Twitter accounts. We have a lot of employees on Twitter, and we just assembled the ones who tweet mainly about technology and work topics in a Twitter List. This standing chat room is the best thing going on right now among this group of technology peers. A lot of news and interesting resources — from the corporate mother ship, the media, or lots of blogs — gets passed around here. Most of the influential bloggers in our space at least check in. In 2009, Twitter is the engine that moves the rest of the social media train. So mentally draw in arrows from here to everywhere else in the diagram.

So what have we learned?

The modern enterprise web and social media presence is a complicated thing. This kind of diagram starts to break it down in big chunks, but each one of those chunks has its own goals, strategy, tactics, and owners. In fact, all of the areas should be governed by an overall corporate social media strategy before getting down to “what Twitter account goes where” sorts of details. The landscape of use patterns and social media site capabilities is changing too fast without some higher-level goals.

What are we missing? Hmm… Our YouTube channels. Our Planet blog aggregation pages. Our Partner-facing social media channels. The entire community of bloggers. News and community sites from 3rd parties. I’ll try to incorporate them in the next version.

This kind of diagram, while it incorporates some primitive notion of “links go from here to there,” really doesn’t talk about the flow of information or the canonical locations of news and resources. That’s an entirely other conversation.

Is this kind of diagram useful to you? Any additions or suggestions? What’s your social media map look like?

This whole exercise in diagram construction was inspired in part by Matt Zellmer’s post on Integrating Community into Corporate Websites. Thanks, Matt!

Influence is not authority. Keywords are not conversations.

2009-11-28T08:41:53Z

I am going to try hard in this blog NOT to talk about the latest Twitter tool of the day, and instead talk about real experiences for people in a corporate context trying to communicate with the ecosystem of people interested in talking with them. [Talking about the latest social media tools and jargon is gobbledygook that leads to satire like the following by Ellis Weiner in the New Yorker. Subject: Our Marketing Plan. This pretty much sounds like a normal Tuesday afternoon to me:]

We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. … If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.

But let’s talk about Twitter influence for a second. There are a number of tools that threaten to measure influence, Twitter or otherwise. Edelman just launched a new fancy one, and from Brian Solis this morning I saw that Klout measures influence over a topic.

Just what does influence over a topic mean? Let’s stay grounded in the reality of the topic I know: VMware. We have a great conversation around the enterprise use of VMware on Twitter. It started around VMworld 2008 and took off from there. The conversation consists of a few thousand IT professionals hanging out, swapping links and advice with some grace notes about our personal lives. Most of the virtualization bloggers hang out there. If you want to join our conversation, a good place to start is this hand-curated list by @ericsiebert, Top 100 VMware & Virtualization People to follow. If you really want to have a deep technical conversation about VMware, though, I don’t recommend starting at Twitter at all — go over to the VMware Communities and ask away.

From the vantage point of my personal involvement, Eric’s list contains some of the most influential people on Twitter talking about enterprise virtualization. Those people set the current “conventional wisdom” and have “authority” in our community. The part of the enterprise virtualization community that’s active on Twitter is small compared to some – it’s not MomBloggers or the Social Media Ouroboros – but I can assure you it’s a community that is of extreme interest if your company wants to participate in the virtualization revolution.

OK, you’re a marketing professional and you’d like to start talking to these people, because you have something they’d be interested in. (Exactly how to approach a community of technologists is a topic for another time.) You might start by searching for influencers on the topic “VMware” at Klout. Let’s look at the Klout list for VMware and compare it to Eric’s hand-curated list. At the current time, there are a few overlaps, with @CXI, @daniel_eason, and @Mike_Laverick being the most notable. Certainly, if you were a PR professional and used this list of tweeters to start talking to people about enterprise virtualization, or to introduce a product that was destined for the data center, you’d be very off-track, and I’m not saying that just because I’m not included on the list! What’s gone wrong?

1. Keywords are not conversations. With Twitter’s 140 characters, often the general subject of your post is omitted. Sometimes people will stick a #vmware in there, but we really don’t use hashtags outside of some events or special conversations. We are usually talking about VMware’s products rather than mentioning the name of the company in our tweets. Looking for tweets with VMware in them, which is what I assume that Klout is doing, catches only a fragment of the actual conversation. Compare that with a Topsy search for VMware, which looks at tweeted link destinations, and is dead on.

This observation was driven home to me as we looked at the results of one of our corporate announcements a while back. I watched a lot of conversations that morning in my normal twitterstream — actually quite a bit of back and forth considering how hard it is to keep a dialog going on Twitter. Point, counterpoint, argument, counterargument, predictions, reactions, positioning, counter-positioning — and a few poison pen letters. Our agency also did a search for a few keywords (company names in this case) – which showed a few hundred tweets and some mostly-positive pronouncements about the industry. The keyword search had missed much of the dialog in the community that day, because most of that dialog had moved past the keywords we were searching for.

2. Influence is not communty. The beauty and frustration of Twitter compared to forums or IRC channels is that, instead of having separate places to discuss separate topics, Twitter is a mess of overlapping conversations and overlapping communities. I think by relying on keywords, Klout has netted fish from several fishing holes.

In the current Klout list, there are actually quite a few people participating in the conversation on cloud computing, like @samj, @jamesurquart, and my new colleague @wattersjames. The Klout Score has a Network component, which transfers the influence of your followers and retweeters. Evidently the cloud conversation has a lot of influential mavens who have lifted the influence of people participating in the cloud computing community.

Another group of tweeters in the Klout list are people that work with VMware Fusion on the Mac. Mac users are obviously another community with lots of heavy hitters in the social media space. The Mac conversation is usually very separate from the enterprise data center conversation that I’m involved in.

3. Influence is not authority. From the explanation of the Klout Score, it looks like the score also considers reach and some cultural factors (how often people are retweeting & using lists). Nobody in our little enterprise virtualization community has hundreds of thousands of followers – I’ve got about 2K and @vmware about 6K, so I’d say those are the upper limits right now of our active community. I’ll speculate that our community is more close-knit and less self-promotional than some others I know — I’m aware of other communities that do a lot more logrolling and self-backpatting than ours does. That may affect our influence scores.

So for all these reasons and probably some others, a Twitter-wide influence score doesn’t adequately reflect authority within our community, nor can the participants even be found with a simple keyword search. (Hmm. Sounds like a job for lists?)

tl;dr Keyword searches don’t identify communities on Twitter. Influence scores don’t correlate with authority.

Elements of a social media program

2009-11-28T22:59:05Z

Here’s one way to slice up capabilities, services, and programs within your greater social media efforts. We’ve sliced the cake many ways over the years, but this seems to make sense for us right now. In our organization, the Communities Team runs a lot of this as a part of the Web Team. We work closely with PR, support, and various product marketing groups.

1. Technical Infrastructure Management. Manage the software and accounts that your social media program run on. In our case, it’s administration of the community platform (from Jive), the blogging platform (from Typepad), and then all the external accounts (Twitter, Faceboook, YouTube, SlideShare, etc.). If you’re hosting your own platform (as we do with our community site), you need resources in IT Ops, software development, web development, SEO consulting, program management. For our blogging platform, which is outsourced to Typepad, we still need administration and web design. External sites need icons, background design, administration – even down to where you are keeping the passwords, and tooling (like CoTweet or Ping.fm).

2. Program Channel and Community Management. Somebody’s gotta blog. Although we have some centralized channels, different programs within our company work with different subject matter and audiences. Often these are outside our core social media and community team, in the product or program team themselves. However, for us, our main technical customer/partner community is taken care of by the communities team. I run a blog and a weekly podcast, and each of those need content, and that requires resourcing for editorial, production, publishing, and promotion. These are of course social media channels, so each of those needs somebody to be present and interact on the channel.

3. Influencer Relations and Advocacy Program. Although you can operate out of your home base, somebody has to venture out and work with the greater community. In some companies, this might be a PR function, but for our company, the main community is filled with techies, and you need a techie to hang out with them. So I run our main “blogger” relations program, trying to keep up with bigger virtualization conversation and make sure I know most of the people there. It would be hard to do with without my postcast & Twitter channels mentioned in Program #2. Within this category, I also run an advocacy program, where we give awards to our best evangelists, the people who have given back the most to the overall community.

4. Social Business Consulting. I firmly believe that in the future, there will be no social media programs, just social media baked into all other programs. But for now, somebody needs to be working with all parts of the organization and seeing how they can be using social tools and processes. I think I’ve met with just about every part of our organization except finance. The need for social media interactions in the various groups I’ve talked with range from the very simple - just needing to get their news out to our existing community via existing channels – to being fully engaged managing their own social media presence.

5. Social Media Training. Somebody is training people. This needs to include both an overall stance toward social media (yes, you can talk to somebody outside the company on this website without being a spokesperson) as well as tactical training (strategies for using Twitter).

6. Social Media Policy. If you do it right, this doesn’t have to be revisited that often, but somebody has to do it, and hopefully it’s a collaboration between many somebodies. Our social media guidelines were inspired from public policies published by companies like IBM, Sun, and Intel. You need to set overall policies for social media participation at the corporate, the program, and the individual level. You can include policies for individual channels (like Twitter), but be sure you are talking core policies and not specific tools and tips, because those evolve very quickly.

7. Monitoring & Response. Somebody’s got to watch out in general, and somebody has to figure out how to respond to situations. In an ideal world, you’d have many eyes watching (which can include your external community and programmatic listening platforms), a single place to report issues, a well-defined routing and escalation procedure, and a set of identified responders, depending on the topic and the venue. We’re not in an ideal world yet, but we have pretty good antennae and reflexes.

7. Analysis & Metrics. We’ll have an argument about both metrics and ROI some other time. In any case, somebody needs to be measuring some baseline metrics just as a health check – things like fans, followers, traffic. If your business goals include it, campaign traffic, conversions, and revenue get measured. Although I’m all about the relationship benefits of our social media programs, we are starting to track some campaign-oriented results – mostly a matter of always attaching our Omniture tracking codes inside the links we share online. In our organization, the existing web analytics team tracks metrics.

8. Central Corporate Channel and Community Management. I’m listing this as separate from #2, although the activities are similar, because for us it’s a different function and worried about by a different set of people. For us, the channels include our corporate blog(s), and some accompanying Facebook and Twitter accounts. A lot of time press releases get little respect in my technical community, but a modern corporation has all sorts of news and announcements streaming out in all directions beyond just their press releases – programs launched, products patched, and events scheduled. Social media channels, done right, enable people to receive just the announcements they want, in just the venues they want to receive them in. And as always, somebody’s got to run that, and then be there for the questions and feedback.

Again, you can slice your overall social media efforts in different ways than we do, and eventually this stuff gets smeared across the enterprise. A fully functional social media program should thinking about all these areas, and just as we quickly moved beyond the solo “webmaster” in 1999 to a full web team of marketing and production specialists, with this kind of breadth we’re quickly moving beyond the solo “social media expert” in 2009.

Gestalt IT, the Craigslist of new tech journalism

2009-11-28T22:58:39Z

Source: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis isn’t shy about his take on the future of journalism and the media business. One thing I like about his view of the future is that he describes an ecosystem of new voices, new business models and new channels. That certainly seems to be where we are, although I’d bet things will settle down from the current Cambrian explosion once we figure out what works and what doesn’t. In his recent post, The future of business is in ecosystems, Jeff posts the diagram on the right that lays out a future news ecosystem. He’s writing about general news outlets, but if we translate that to the tech press, “Hyperlocal sites” translate into specialty sites covering one technical topic, like storage or networking or even virtualization. “Local networks” aggregate and draw from those sites, something like Planet V12n or Gestalt IT. Just to be complete, we can stick academics and standards bodies in the “Publicly supported journalism” slot.

Gestalt IT is one of the new species in this ecosystem. Pulled together by Stephen Foskett, Rich Brambley, and Chris Evans, Gestalt IT aggregates and publishes independent voices in the tech blogosophere. From their “About” page, What is the Gestalt:

What is the best practice for modern IT infrastructure? That can be difficult to decide, especially when the interests of vendors of hardware, software, and services are involved. IT professionals are constantly bombarded by messages and products, so it can be tough to know who to trust.

The best move is to rely on the gestalt: the sum of the best sources of independent input.

Sites like Gestalt IT are bringing to the table something that’s gone missing from the tech press – real technical voices. I was recently talking with the VP of Marketing of a tech startup, who was observing that even 10 years ago the technical trade press had extensive testing labs and smart technologists on staff. They could take hardware and software and, while not exactly replicating a real world test, at least put it through its paces and get some objective validation of vendor claims. Times have changed, and ad revenues have dropped for the tech press just as they’ve dropped for the mainstream press. Those publication labs and those technologists have been let go. There are a few labs left out there, and there are lots of journalists who understand technology. But even those writers don’t have access to lab facilities and basically need to pull together stories from press releases and a few quick phone calls with customers. They’re not printing fiction — I’ll gladly read honest evaluations from customers any day — but they’re not digging deep into the technology to tell us what hands-on testing would reveal.

Who steps into this gap? I think there will be multiple entrants, including a new generation of analysts. But one of the obvious groups that are picking up the slack are bloggers, and the emergence of aggregation/publishing platforms like GestaltIT and SiliconANGLE. There are examples in other domains, like another site I’ve been enjoying recently, Social Media Today.

At Gestalt IT, the contributors are hands on technologists – they have 11 authors so far. Each contribution links back to the originating blog. The site is really shaping up nicely as a one-stop shop for commentary on enterprise technology and best practices, and I hope that their traffic is reflecting that, both to the home site and the sites of its contributors. Of course, since everybody has a day job, questions about bias and objectivity must be asked, but they answer them in the normal way we’ve learned in the blogosphere — complete disclosure. Gestalt IT combines that with a soupçon of editorial review just to keep everybody honest.

Why did they start Gestalt IT? The technology trade publications stopped paying them. There were no longer enough ads to support paying these highly-experienced technologists enough to make it worth their while.

So what makes moving to a model like Gestalt IT worth it for these experts? The answer is about changing the game and shrinking the market – call it the Craigslist Effect. At a recent event (more on that in Part 2 about the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day), I was talking with Gestalt IT co-founder Stephen Foskett about ads and ad networks. Would Gestalt IT be interested in taking some ad dollars from VMware?

Most enterprise technology blogs have minuscule traffic compared to the big sites. That translates to ad dollars corresponding to not even beer money, but in the words of Rod Haywood, enough revenue for a cup of coffee once or twice a month. The return on investment for most tech bloggers is much more about learning, fun, and career visibility — because they’re certainly not bringing in the cash. Currently virtualization blog sponsorships are in the hundreds of dollars per month, and it takes a lot of those kind of checks each month to bring you up to a technologist salary.

Stephen told me they weren’t interested in taking sponsorships at this time. Considering how much money we were talking about, giving up ads on Gestalt IT isn’t taking food out of anybody’s mouth. The lack of ads also means (1) less work for the publisher, Stephen; (2) a cleaner, faster-loading interface for the readers; and (3) a lack of editorial interference from any sponsoring vendors. Gestalt IT is all about the indirect benefits of blogging. If you want to just focus on the money part of Gestalt IT — since eventually we all do have to put food on the table — the business opportunities and career benefits coming out of a good technical blog can be striking. The benefits of having a higher profile voice in the online media technology conversation accrues to both the individual and his or her employer. Gestalt IT is meant to be a multiplier of this kind of influence.

Gestalt IT is in many ways very similar to Craigslist, and in fact Stephan mentioned them explicitly in our conversation. Craigslist has effectively shrunk the newspaper classified market by 90%. They are often criticized — both by MBA types and by the newspapers that are losing revenue — for not charging for most services and for not even showing ads. They are crtiticized for “leaving money on the table,” for not maximizing their revenue and shareholder value. But CEO Jim Buckmaster has been quoted as saying that “users haven’t expressed an interest [in ads].” End of discussion.

For the Gestalt IT authors, remember, the freelance technology writing market was shrinking. If the market is going to zero no matter what, acknowledge that, charge zero, and create value in a complementary market. Gestalt IT isn’t in the business of competing for a shrinking pool of online ad dollars. The authors are no longer in the business of competing for a shrinking pool of freelance writing gigs. Instead, they’re participating in the growth of this new media ecosystem, and creating more for their themselves than they would be earning coffee or beer money.

Short takes: recent social media reading

2009-11-12T06:47:09Z

Tabs I have open in Firefox. I can never find anything that I put in my bookmarks, so let’s put these here.

You should follow me on Twitter from Dustin Curtis. I am totally stealing this.
Do Twitter’s Trending Topics Signify What’s Important To You? from Brian Solis. No. I am very interested, however, in trending topics from my community – the people I follow and the people that follow me.
Half of us search for brands after seeing them on Twitter Good. Storing this in my warehouse of factoids to impress executives in presentations.
As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter. More infopr0n.
How to Integrate Social Media into your Marketing. from Jay Baer. This is good. We’ve done some early steps integrating our really healthy social media activities with our very robust direct marketing programs, but I wouldn’t say we do it in a programmatic and repeatable way yet. I like the jazz combo metaphor. I also like Jay’s website.
Corporate social media policies ebook. from Dave Fleet. We have one. Probably time to update it, so saving this link.
Getting a Group Blog Going. Good Luck. from Doug Haslam. Echoes my experience with some nice tips. Fodder for a future post.
Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side from Amber Naslund. Yow. Hiring for a tactical/tools/jr position and giving it strategic/sr responsibilities.
Curating the Signal:Noise Ratio in the Social Graph and The Future of Marketing from Todd Defren. Both great articles on how we’re going to manage our many connections and our conversations. I just went back and re-read my comments on each of these posts, and I sound pretty one-note. Facebook is doomed! Niche communities are the future! Not sure it’s that simple.
What IF We Redefined Influence? The New Influence Factor in Social Media from Brian Solis. I’m actually not sure what the IF is about, because this world of a mishmash of specialized influencers is the world I live in, but it’s a good description of where we are.

Will you please pull this post?

2009-11-30T08:59:27Z

Today I had to ask an employee of a partner to pull a post on their personal blog.

At our company, we have a clear policy on community terms of use. In general, you’re allowed to say anything you want, as long as it isn’t illegal, defamatory, or disruptive. (There were lawyers involved, so Section 3 of that document goes all the way from from “a” to “q”. There’s quite a bit of fine print to the conduct guidelines, but it’s very readable in my opinion.)

Our community team will sometimes get marketing managers coming in asking for certain forum threads to be pulled where somebody says something bad about the company or the product. But our rule is that you can say bad things about us all day long as long as you don’t get personal, so the threads stay. We try to direct bug reports to the appropriate channel, but you’re welcome to tell us our products suck or we screwed up in some way. The tone on our communities is very professional and clean, so when somebody goes over the line it’s usually pretty clear.

Posting something illegal is different – license keys or links to warez or keygen sites get pulled immediately. Certification exam questions likewise.

We also realize that when you publish something off our site — on another forum or your own blog — it’s out of our control. We do issue takedown notices, but I’m quite sure we don’t catch every cracked version of our software. If you complain about us and we see it, we’ll try to answer you nicely, but we don’t try to censor.

Occasionally we do ask bloggers to pull a post. We’ve done it for people who are participating in a private beta testing program and then publish information about the beta. For our private beta programs, participants agree to a strict nondisclosure agreement — if read strictly, you’re not even supposed to mention you’re participating in the beta at all, but in this Age of Social Media, we usually don’t enforce that. We do come down on you quickly if you go beyond mentioning the beta to actually posting information about the product that hasn’t been released yet.

Normally the offender in question is a fan of our company – a super fan, after all, since they’re posting information about our product on their blog! They just weren’t thinking about the legal and disclosure implications of posting some cool new news they just found out in the private beta. So all that’s normally needed is a quick note, very polite, and the person usually pulls the offending material immediately and apologizes. So far I don’t believe I’ve ever had to go to stage 2 for a blog.

Recently it wasn’t a beta leak, but it was a way to workaround our license. Our main product comes in several levels of licensing, with each level up the chain having a bigger bundle of features. This gentleman figured out a way to get at part of a licensed feature by switching an evaluation license on and then off again. He works for a partner, so he especially shouldn’t be doing this or telling his customers to do this.

Well, a product marketing manager noticed, people were emailed, and lawyers were cc’d. After reaching out to the blogger, we explained the situation and the post was pulled. Once again, just reaching out in a friendly way did the job.