Here are the pieces we’ve published so far in 2012:

• Stick a pin in Pinterest – it has business potential – January 13, 2012

• A sweepstakes promotion can make your social media a winner – January 27, 2012

• Soak up these smart lessons in the use of social media – February 10, 2012

• Email marketing offers many possibilities in social media – February 24, 2012

• Here’s a new post: Facebook changes its business pages – March 9, 2012

• How can social media affect employee ethics? – March 23, 2012

• How can your company make use of Pinterest? – April 11, 2012 (quoted in article by Brenna Hawley)

• Here’s how to handle wrong social media reviews the right way – April 13, 2012

• Social media and SEO can go hand in hand – April 27, 2012

• Going viral is great, but you’d better be prepared – May 11, 2012

• Facebook’s Timeline format still lets business keep tabs on fans – May 25, 2012

• New Facebook features make it easier for small businesses – June 8, 2012

• Don’t ignore the potent power of YouTube for social media marketing – June 22, 2012

• Learn to run online efforts like an all-star – July 14, 2012

The post Recent K2Media Columns in the Kansas City Business Journal appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

We’ve had an amazing year here at K2Media. We were lucky enough to continue relationships with several clients who have been with us from the beginning – clients that we’ve come to know and consider friends. And we were blessed with the appearance of over a dozen new clients on the roster in 2011 – many of whom have just begun to dip their toes into the social media waters. We’re excited to help them continue to expand their social media thinking in 2012.

After manning a “virtual” office for several years, K2Media took office space for the first time in 2011 – at College and Metcalf for a few months, we’re now settling into our new office home at College and Nall.

KCKidsFun continues to grow and grow – partnering with more advertisers than ever before, attracting more unique visitors than ever before. We are thankful to still love the little web property than spawned our business – and that Kansas City’s parents seem to love it too.

Big, big thanks this year to the Kansas City Business Journal and its managing editor Russell Gray (and to our friends who originally suggested us to Russell). Our Social Media Matters columns have run twice a month in the Business Journal since April 2011. We hope that they are helpful to Kansas City’s small businesses. We appreciate the chance Russell gave us to reach out to the community in this way. The partnership has been fulfilling in many different ways and we’re looking forward to continuing it into 2012.

Thanks to the Social Media Club of Kansas City, the Enterprise Center of Johnson County, the Webster University Executive MBA program and the Kansas City chapter of CCIM (which is a bunch of very cool commercial real estate folks with fancy credentials) for asking us to present to your groups this year. (And to those who called us afterwards to talk business!)

Thank you to YouTube, Spotify and Hulu – which keep me company on many a late work night.

I didn’t tell Kiran I was writing this (how’s that for good business partner communication?!) but I’m sure I speak for her when I say that we are collectively thankful to have been blessed with amazing families. The McKinneys, Rosses, Bohons and Chandras – and the various extended outposts of each – are the best anyone could hope for. Our kids – George, Henry, Maggie, Charlie, Harry and Rekha – are challenging, crazy and so, so awesome. Our husbands – Jason and Ryan – are, well, challenging, crazy and so, so awesome.

And, finally, I’ll speak only for myself this time, I’m thankful to have a kick-ass business partner and friend in Kiran. Our friendship is well over a decade old. Our business partnership is newer, was almost accidental at the beginning and is a terrific balance. I lucked out.

Humbled by a multitude of blessings in 2011. Can’t wait to see what 2012 has in store for us. (Assuming, of course, we can make it through the holiday madness in one piece…)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

~ Kate

*photo courtesy of flickr/bbaltimore

The post Giving Thanks: 2011 Style appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

Google+ is certainly in its infancy and can make many, many changes as it evolves (as Facebook does). So to pronounce it the winner or, conversely, DOA at this point seems premature. I can say that it takes a bit more thinking that most current Facebook users probably have any interest in doing. Its differentiators (namely, the ability to sort contacts into Circles and to share messages with the public or any single or combination of Circles) aren’t the things that I see most current Facebook users clamoring for.

For me, Google+’s stream is a bit much. A mix of Twitter (with public messaging by some and the ability to follow without being followed back) and Facebook (where there are more private messages and people I know in “real life”). It’s all sortable, by Circle. Right now, though, that feels like a lot of work. Especially when all of the people on Google+ are already people I follow on Twitter or am friends with on Facebook.

I’ll reserve final judgment though. Google has plenty of time to tweak and revamp its service. I’m not convinced yet – but I’ll keep an open mind.

I ran across this video with an interesting perspective on Google vs. Facebook and the involvement of search. Something to watch for:

The post Google+: Initial Thoughts appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

Our column, Social Media Matters, is written for the small- to medium-sized business owner or manager, looking for practical insight into the emerging world of social business. We hope to answer some questions readers might have (or might not know to ask), provide real world examples of social media success and failure and give readers something to implement in their own businesses.

In keeping with the spirit of social media, we’re hoping to be guided somewhat by questions that readers share with us along the way.

Here’s our very first column: How, What, When, Where and Why of Social Media. The column appears in the print edition of the Business Journal and is available online (to subscribers only for the first four weeks after publication; to non-subscribers after those four weeks).

Big thanks to everyone at the Business Journal for welcoming us and to those who championed us along the way!

The post Kate & Kiran in the Kansas City Business Journal appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

True confession time. We – K2Media, Kiran and I – do it. We blog for some of our clients. We tweet for some of our clients. We post on Facebook for some of our clients. We produce photos and video. We monitor those properties and we respond to comments and questions. All on behalf of our clients.

It’s really not that big of a confession actually. We’ve always listed outsourced management as one of our services. But we’ve never chosen to jump into the fray to defend our position on it. Because we really don’t need to. We do a damn good job at community management and our clients agree.

But this morning, I read a terrific answer on Quora (the subject of a whole ‘nother post entirely…) that made me realize that our position on outsourced community management wasn’t so contrary to what others in our industry really think. They just don’t make the headlines.

The question: Can the role of Community Manager be outsourced or off-shored effectively? Why or why not?

David Armano from Edelman answered,

“It really comes down to the business model and what the business can support. Outsourcing may not be the best description to detail leveraging partners to help with community management. We know that many businesses work with partners to help with areas such as customer service in order to scale. Some are more successful than others. One could argue that customer service should never be outsourced, yet it remains a standard business practice.”

Rick Liebling of Coyne PR said,

“The key is setting up the relationship between the brand and the agency. Even if they are not directly involved, the brand still needs to commit resources (time, money). The community manager will need to be in ongoing, regular contact with the client, reporting on what’s happening, double-checking facts, taking sensitive issues up the chain of command, etc. . . Building (and maintaining) a community requires the brand be socially focused – nimble, responsive and open to listening. These count even if the community management role is outsourced.”

And I totally agree. The reason it works for us and our clients is that we at K2Media become integrated into the client’s team. We are mature and business-savvy professionals who can just as easily identify and adopt a client’s “voice” online as any new in-house hire (actually, I think we often do it better). We talk with clients about communication channels, crisis plans and overall corporate goals and objectives. We request introductions to key personnel across departments and talk with them about our plans – so that we’re not just seen as an arm of the marketing department. We call, email and spend time in the client’s workspace often (which is why, by the way, I think “offshoring” community management probably doesn’t work).

Two final comments and I’ll get out of your hair: First, we don’t create content/Tweet/Facebook post/whatever while pretending to be another individual. We don’t disclose our identities but we don’t pretend to be the CEO of the company or even the Customer Care manager. If one of those people needs to be involved, we respond appropriately and take the communication offline so that the right personnel can join the conversation.

Second, we recognize that outsourced management won’t work for every client. If your company is enormous or a one-man shop, outsourced probably isn’t the way to go. (See previous reference to clear communication channels and not impersonating another person online.) If your company isn’t interested in having VERY open communication lines with your partner managers (i.e., us), it won’t work. If we can’t email or call and get an answer to a question or get customer care to talk with a Facebook fan or Twitter follower offline QUICKLY, you’re wasting your money on us and you’re wasting your money on social business. We HAVE to be integrated into your team to make it work.

What we have found is that the reality of business (especially small- to medium-sized business) in 2011 is that many companies are better situated to outsource intelligently than to expend resources on starting from scratch in-house. Like David said in his Quora answer above, businesses make daily decisions about resource allocation and how to scale. We’re just glad to help.

*graphic courtesy of David Armano/flickr

The post Social Media True Confessions: Outsourced Community Management appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

Generally, they don’t actually say that. But they assume that social media for business = marketing. Some know or have an idea that social media can facilitate actual lead generation and/or sales. But that’s it. We remind them that social media is as much for retaining the customers you’ve got as it is for attracting new ones.

Our initial conversations then ALWAYS include discussion about customer service. And that can be a bit difficult for the marketing team in a compartmentalized company to grasp at times. And I don’t mean that in any judgmental or demeaning way at all. Until this point in history, those two departments – marketing and customer service – have been very separate.

Now, most companies we talk with understand, at some level, that entry into the world of social media “opens” the company to the potential for negative responses from the public-at-large. In fact, this is one of the biggest fears of the traditionalists in most companies – losing control of the message.

Once we get through to the naysayers the idea that the negative comments will exist whether the company participates or not – and wouldn’t it be better if the company could actually engage the commenters and take part in the conversation? – we still have to put the appropriate mechanisms in place to handle any potential customer service issues that arise. And we have to do it BEFORE those issues do arise.

We ask questions (depending on the nature of the business) like:

• Does your company have an organized customer service process or protocol in place?
• Who are the players in your company and which personnel can handle which types of customer complaints?
• Should the salesperson be notified in addition to the logistics personnel or customer service personnel?
• Does the company use CRM (customer relationship management) or BPM (business process management) software to log and track customers, sales and complaints?

Whatever the practice, make sure everyone involved in your social media efforts understands it.

More questions:

• Does your company have a crisis communications protocol? Why not?
• Do we need to retain and collaborate with a PR professional to create such a plan?
• How do we identify a crisis?
• Who is involved in handling it and does everyone on the team know how to reach the necessary personnel in the event of a crisis?

You may not be able to envision what a crisis looks like now – but you don’t want to delay your corporate response when one happens trying to figure this all out.

After those discussions take place, we’re ready to begin. It starts, then, with effective monitoring (actually, it starts with quality customer service professionals at the company-level – but I’m not HR). Whether the company is large enough to warrant the expense of paid monitoring services (many of which are stellar and full of some amazingly robust features) or the company is small enough that a small grouping of free services can be used, anyone in the social media space must be monitoring it for direct engagement and indirect mentions.

On Facebook, this means looking at Wall posts, post comments, photo comments, Places comments and Community Page updates. On Twitter, this means finding not only posts with your company’s profile name but also posts mentioning the company with the “@” symbol (which posts won’t show up in your “Mentions”), posts mentioning your product and posts with other identified, relevant keywords. Across the web, several other services can track your company’s mentions on websites, consumer review sites, blogs and blog comments.

Some companies create their social media team with personnel from many departments, including customer service. Other companies leave social media in the hands of the marketing team. Others still may outsource community management and/or monitoring to an outside agency.

Whatever your company’s situation, everyone involved must collaborate on the back end to create a seamless process, a flowchart, for how to handle customer service issues. And everyone in the flowchart must be made aware of the expectations placed upon them with regard to the social media-generated complaints. And it must be prompt – because time and angry customers wait for no one in the world of social media.

The bottom line is this: social media for businesses is about marketing – and lead generation and sales and reputation management AND customer service. YOU can’t decide that it’s going to be about only one or two things in that list. Your customers will decide for you. So you’d better be ready.

We’ve got some terrific social media customer service stories to tell. They’re too long to include in this post – but stay tuned (spoiler: they all have happy endings…).

The post Social Media and Customer Service: Be Prepared appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

So, what does this have to do with Flickr? Well, we have a client which recently had their account deleted – photos and all – from Flickr without any prior warning – apparently for somehow violating the Flickr Terms of Use (and/or Community Guidelines ). Beyond that, I can’t be sure. (The Guidelines, of course, indicate that they give warnings and believe in second chances. Not apparently true here…)

A bit of background. This client sells product internationally, online and over the phone. Their Flickr account existed prior to our involvement with them but we continued to use it. It was not highly trafficked but did help SEO-wise. It probably hosted fewer than 150 images – product shots, office and staff photos, trade show snapshots, etc.

When we launched the company’s blog in May, we did use the Flickr account to embed a few photos in blog posts. Not many photos, probably fewer than 20. The Flickr photo captions (where they existed at all) were brief descriptors with no links. The one and only link to the company site was in the Flickr profile.

When we realized that the account had gone “missing”, we emailed Flickr customer service. Almost immediately, we received an automated response with a case number and a note indicating that it may take a few days for a meaningful response due to volume of emails.

Two days later, I received this:

Okay, fair enough (though I’m a bit curious as to who reported the “abuse”). I wanted to know a bit more about the specifics of the violation. So, I asked,

“Can you tell me specifically which photo(s) or usage was the problem? We’ve reviewed everything we’ve done with Flickr and cannot figure out what the problem is. While we would love for this account to be reinstated, we understand if it cannot but would like to know exactly what the problem was so that it is not repeated.”

Here’s where it started to go downhill. This is the response I received:

Note that it references this website and not our client’s website. None of the client’s Flickr images ever appeared on or were tied to this website. Which is what I told “Flickr staff” in my response.

Specifically, I said,

“The deleted account belonged to our client [redacted] – which, I agree, is a commercial entity. But their Flickr stream was not used to sell any product. For clarification purposes, is the existence of a Flickr account owned by a company a violation of the TOS? Or is the embedding of those images on a company blog a violation? Or both?

One last question: if the mere existence of a Flickr account owned by a company is a violation, is there some procedure in place to get approval for such an account (just asking because it seems like there are countless other company-related Flickr accounts and I’m wondering if we’ve missed an authorization procedure…)

Thanks very much for your attention – just trying to sort this out for our clients.”

And Flickr’s response:

Which links to a help topic on corporate use of Flickr groups. Not responsive to my simple inquiry.

So, I replied:

Thanks again for your follow-up response. The link you attached references commercial use of groups and not use of Flickr accounts by companies, which was my question.

Should I assume then that the problem with the [redacted] account was the mere existence of an account that was owned by a company? And not something else such as a particular image or the embedding of any images in a blog?

Thanks in advance for the clarification.

And then again about four days later after I had received no response:

Just wanted to follow up to see if you might be able to clarify these items for future purposes. Not trying to be argumentative at all – just want to understand the TOS/guidelines so that we don’t violate them in the same way again in the future with this client or any other clients.

Our questions:

Is it a violation for any company to have and use a Flickr account?

If not, is it a violation for that company to embed any of those images in a blog post in the company’s blog?

Thanks for your help on this,

Flickr’s response:

And me:

Thanks for your quick reply. I’m still not sure what the answers to my questions are though.

Can companies have Flickr accounts without violating the TOS or community guidelines?

If they can, can the images they upload be embedded anywhere else, like in a company blog?

We’re still trying to figure out exactly why the account was deleted. Not trying to argue with you at all – just looking to understand exactly what the violation was.

Thanks,

That was a month ago and I’ve not heard back.

I don’t think my questions were argumentative or difficult. In fact, they really just required “yes” or “no” answers. Very, very disappointed in the level of customer service from Flickr. No names, just “Flickr staff”. No answers beyond links and cut/paste from their Terms of Use.

In my quest to figure out the specific problem, I read a lot of social media marketing blog posts recommending Flickr for client use. At this point, I guess, I would caution those who use Flickr in any even remotely commercial way from continuing to do so. Keep back-up files with all images and don’t bother embedding any Flickr-hosted images in your blog or website.

Was it product photos that got our client in trouble? Was it embedding those photos in a brand-new, still-relatively-low-trafficked blog? Was it a company logo in the profile pic? Was it the mere existence of the account, set up by a company?  Who knows? We certainly don’t.

Why are there so many other commercial entities (including professional photographers and income-producing blogs) with Flickr accounts which have not been deleted? Go to Flickr and search “store”, “boutique”, “books”, “shoes” or “jewelry” to see how many Flickr accounts are being used for commercial purposes. (And, no, there is no indication that a Flickr Pro account would change this commercial purposes prohibition.)

Contrast this to the outstanding service we’ve received from Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare in the past two months. All growing and probably overwhelmed with voluminous email inboxes. All of which responded to simple, specific questions or requests from us on behalf of clients in a quick, efficient and pleasant manner.

After all that rambling – what has your experience been with Flickr for your company and/or clients?

The post Commercial Use of Flickr (and a Rant about Customer Service) appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

The FDA told Novartis that its use of Facebook Share to promote the med Tasigna is incomplete and misleading, asking the company to discontinue use of Facebook Share to promote the drug.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed in pharmaceutical brochures and magazine ads (or in their television spots), the drug companies are required by FDA rules to include information about risks associated with taking the drug in those materials. In this case, readers could click the Facebook Share button on any page of the Tasigna website to generate a link and comment on those readers’ Facebook profiles.

The problem was that Facebook includes a brief descriptor of the linked page. And that descriptor failed to include risk information.

In the Novartis/Tasigna case, the posted shared content from the “Facebook Share” widget on the healthcare professional home page for Tasigna consisted of the following claims:

• Home – Tasigna (nilotinib) 200 mg capsules
http://www.us.tasigna.com
Tasigna (nilotinib) is used to treat a type of leukemia called Philadelphia chromosome positive chronic myeloid leukemia (Ph+ CML)

Similarly, the posted shared content from the “Facebook Share” widget on one of the consumer-directed web pages consisted of the following claims:

• Treating Your Ph+ CML with Tasigna | Tasigna (nilotinib) 200-mg capsules
www.us.tasigna.com
In addition to taking Tasigna (nilotinib) 200-mg capsules, talking to your doctor and receiving health tips can help you treat your CML.

In the FDA’s letter, it notes that the shared content contained a hyperlink to various Tasigna product websites, which do contain risk information. However, the inclusion of such a hyperlink is insufficient, according to the FDA, to mitigate the omission of risk information.

Huge wake-up call to pharmaceutical companies looking to heighten their social media engagement. And a great reminder to all of our clients and potential clients to be mindful of legal issues which might be implicated with social media use.

We are currently working with a highly-respected health care clinic here in Kansas City (more details on this project very soon!) on the creation and implementation of a social media strategy. This client has the possibility of creating a social media audience with a high level of engagement – and yet we must consider, at times, tempering that engagement where privacy requirements of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) are triggered.

The creation of a very detailed Terms of Use document for inclusion in the client’s blog and Facebook page was both appropriate and necessary because of HIPAA’s requirements. And still, we must be vigilant in monitoring comments and wall posts, counseling the client to respond in a way that is meaningful to the community but appropriate in light of various legal and ethical restrictions.

Corporate social media proponents cannot operate in a marketing vacuum for a lot of reasons – and we’re unfortunately seeing this play out in the health care realm.

As the health care industry continues to explore social media, we will continue to read stories like the FDA/Novartis article. It underscores the importance of including personnel from across departments in social media discussions. And, despite the groans this may inspire, legal is one of those departments that must be at the table in health care.*

*It’s obviously going to be helpful if the representative from legal “gets” social media and wants to help find a way to get it done instead of throwing up legal and bureaucratic roadblocks.

The post FDA and HIPAA: More Than Alphabet Soup for Those Using Social Media appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

And that’s when we pull out the statistics. Followed by the case studies. Followed by the anecdotes. That combination generally stuns, then intrigues, then convinces them that this medium is worth exploring. (And then, of course, the real work of investigating, researching, talking, strategizing, revising, integrating, implementing, monitoring and measuring begins…)

As soon as we find a business lead with just the right sense of humor, I want to use this slide deck for the stats portion of that conversation:

*Thanks to Marta Kagan for creating and updating this. Love it.

The post Can’t Wait to Find the Right Potential Client to Show This To… appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.

We have been working on blogs though. In fact, three of our clients have either launched a corporate blog or are getting ready to launch a corporate blog very soon. And, while we love social media in general, we really love blogs.

Kiran and I aren’t coders or programmers or developers. But we know our way around a blog – we know how we want it to look and function, we know what’s important to readers in terms of usability, we understand search engine optimization and the huge potential SEO benefit created by a good blog.

So, we work with designers and developers to make blogs happen for our clients. And then we work with our clients to integrate the blog into the greater marketing plan of the company and craft detailed editorial calendars to guide the blogging efforts. Sometimes, our role is to nag gently remind the client to follow the calendar and post a new piece on the blog. Heck, sometimes we even craft some content.

All of this is to say – we’ve got a whole bunch of things cooking here. We hope to share some of those things with you by the end of the month, so stay tuned!

The post The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes appeared first on Kansas City Social Media: K2Media.