Mindjumpers

What To Include In a Social Media Policy

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:40:06 +0000

Blog post written by Georgina Coates who is Social Media Manager at UK based, integrated communications agency Kindred. Follow George on Twitter @GeorgieC and catch her own social media thoughts at: What’s a Girl to Do?

Building on my last blog post the Social Media Policy – not just for the big players I felt it was worth sharing some pointers on what should be included if you are drafting this document on behalf of your business or client.

Not one for the bottom drawer

Remember that you want your policy to empower the reader to embrace social media rather than scare them off. This means ensuring that there is no complicated, technical jargon (if this needs to be included then make sure there is a glossary of terms at the back of the document) and that it is presented in easily digestible format (clearly defined sections, bite-sized paragraphs, tables for stats etc…)

INTRO/REMIT – THE IMPORTANT BIT

Clearly describe the purpose of the document up front and how you would like it’s recipients to use it. This will of course vary from business to business so have a think about these following questions to help determine how you can set the scene and what areas your policy should be covering:

1. Do your employees have a basic understanding of what social media is? If not, I would recommend a section on the importance of social media and what it means for your business. This could include topline stats on the reach of different channels, user profiles and even case studies to show how other companies are using said channels.

2. Do your employees blog on behalf of your company? If yes, then it may be that as part of the document you lay down some editorial guidelines (how the company name should be presented, tone of voice, imagery).

3. Are your employees in charge of company communities ie: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? If yes, then your policy will need to include a section on community management and moderation – when to respond to issues and when to take a step back.

4. Do the majority of your employees have existing social media profiles? In many cases the answer will be yes and it is for this reason that the majority of social media policies are created – company protection. Rather then being negative about employees private networks this policy should simply be positioned to encourage them to take responsibility for what they write and be mindful or who may be reading their comments.

PERSONAL VS. PRIVATE

It is important to convey to employees that there no longer exists a line between public and private profiles online especially with the visibility of social network information in search results. The policy should clearly state that the company reserves the right to request that certain content/copy be avoided/removed. This section should also include details on:

- Potential Audiences: There could be multiple different audiences reading what employees write. These could include clients, suppliers, other work colleagues and media – all with their own agendas when searching for information online. Even on personal profiles employees should include the disclaimer which states that their views are their own and not of the company or clients they represent.

- Getting those privacy settings ON: It sounds straight forward but it is essential that all employees are taken through how to get their privacy settings set correctly. Alongside including this as a section within your social media policy, also consider this as part of a company workshop.

- Taking Responsibility: As mentioned above, employees represent their company at all times and so should be respectful to other colleagues and not write anything that should put their company’s reputation at risk. They should not be disclosing anything that is confidential or proprietary.

COMPANY BRAND IN A COMPANY ENVIRONMENT
(only necessary if you require your employees to blog on behalf of your business or manage an online community)

- Be Transparent: When conversing in a community employees need to state clearly who they are and who they represent. Creating fake personas will only lead to a lack of trust

- Editorial Guidelines/Policies: These need to be clearly referred to so that all employees are aware of how they present their company online. This includes using company logos/trademarks. It is worth noting that already established ‘Tone of Voice’ guidelines may need adapting for the social media environment to make them more conversational and engaging.

-Knowing when to Engage: The key to good community management is knowing when to engage and when to sit back and allow the community converse organically.

-Approval Process: It may be that you have a core group of individuals who approve content that gets published online. If this is the case then make sure that any processes are clearly defined.

All the sections above I recommend thinking about when putting together your social media policy however it may be the case that other sections will apply such as legal considerations and/or an issue escalation process. Setting the scene (the Intro and Remit) will determine exactly what you need to cover, so think long and hard about the objectives of this document and how extensive it needs to be to cover your business’ digital footprint (which includes that of every single one of your employees).

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An Interactive YouTube Campaign By Tipp-Ex

Sara Hansson — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:44:32 +0000

YouTube advertising. We can’t get enough of it. There are a huge amount of creative videos out there – like for instance An Interactive YouTube Adventure (by Hells Pizza) and The Most Badass YouTube Video Ever (movie trailer for The Expendables). The first one lets the audience choose the ending – and the next step– of the video story by choosing different options. The second one gives you a great surprise when the characters take over the entire YouTube interface. Let me introduce another example of successful use of YouTube advertising that combines these two experiences…

Tipp-ex, leader on the European market of correcting products, has created a fun interactive YouTube campaign featuring a hunter and a bear, offering the viewers to choose what ending they want to see by changing the title of the video – thanks to Tipp-ex of course!

You decide what will happen
The video is called ”A hunter shoots a bear” in which the hunter yells that he doesn’t want to shoot the bear and thereby reaches out of the video to grab a Tipp-Ex to wipe out the word ”shoots” from the title. After this it’s up to you to tell the hunter what to do with the bear instead. I promise you’ll get surprised by all the videos they have done to please your imagination. I tried words like ”eats”, ”hugs” and ”rides”- and saw how my title was played out! You can even try the f*** word and see what happens.

It’s a fun campaign that demonstrates the benefits of the the product as it activates the audience – and believe me when I say you’ll grow a bit addicted to coming up with a new titles. Tipp-Ex is one of those not-that-sexy-products, but this is definitely one way to get people to see a Tipp-Ex as something more than just a product used for correcting.

Try it out yourself and tell me which words you tried and what you think about the campaign:

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Watch out for Danish start-up – bringing you a social work platform

Jonas Klit Nielsen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:55:08 +0000

Social network, working and communication platform, Facebook for business, new CEO, former founder of Zyb – this seems like an interesting mixture right? Well read on!

Later today in Copenhagen, the tech start-up formerly known as Hoist, now Podio, is throwing a big party in relation to the announcement of the next big stage for the start-up. During the last few weeks, I’ve been talking to one of the founders Kasper Hulthin and closely following the new developments.

Basically the start-up is moving from the basement establishment, with primarily the founders working on the product to a 12 person organisation with international experience.

The most significant upgrade on the staff is getting Tommy Ahlers onboard as the new CEO. Tommy Ahlers is the Danish entrepreneur behind Zyb which he sold to Vodafone in 2008 for €31 million. Bringing Tommy Ahlers on board will undoubtedly increase the potential of making Podio into an international success.

Working with Podio

At Mindjumpers, we have been using the platform for the last 10 months. In the beginning we sort of just played around with it trying to figure out if we could use it for our workflow and in general internal communication. Overtime we have started to use the platform for almost all our internal communication and we use the platform more and more in our workflow.

One of the interesting values is the fact that it kills of all the different applications we use for different sorts of communication and through time, it seems that instead of using different applications and tools, we only need one platform.

In the process of finding the right tool for us, we tried out Yammer and the products for 37signals. The reason why we choose Podio were primarily because the platform have an easy user interface and makes it possible to build and form the platform around our internal communication and internal work flow – not the other way around.

We are looking forward to visiting Podio this afternoon and will next week bring some interviews and updates on the future plans of Podio.

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Will iTunes’ Ping Be a Success?

Anne Herngaard — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:34:01 +0000

Yesterday Apple announced a line of updated products along with the social network called Ping. The music network runs within Apple’s latest iTunes 10 version – also in iPhone and iPod Touch.

On Ping you can follow friends to see what music they like and what they post will appear in your feed, just like we already know from Facebook and Twitter. You can also follow artists to follow new releases, photos, videos, updates and uploads. Right now, the number of users and artists with a profile is limited, but I expect the network to grow rather big.

The potential of making something powerful is already there since Ping is an add-on to a programme already used by the millions of people already using iTunes. Then it’s real easy and fast to setup a Ping profile. However, even though the potential is definitely there, this is not a guarantee of success. Take for instance Google Wave whose potential hasn’t really struck.

Smart move

It’s easy to be critical of this first attempt whether it is a matter of options and functionalities, navigation, design and so on. Having this said, I still think it’s a smart move of Apple to enter to social scene to diminish the competition from other music networks and sharing sites like Spotify, Myspace, Last.fm etc.

Furthermore, making iTunes a social experience will boost the possibilities of sales. When people can see what is popular among their friends, it will work as a recommendation and with just one click you can purchase the album or the song. This of course requires that people, both users and artists, will use Ping. Especially different artists benefit from having a presence there, as they will automatically be promoted by people who own their music.

Ping could probably need some improvements regarding sharing options and the posibility for private profiles to make updates and share music as well. But I will still check Ping out to see if I can find my friends and get inspired by their favourite music.

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Urban Outfitters Likes Facebook

Anne Herngaard — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:09:00 +0000

Urban Outfitters is making the most of their Like buttons as the official US website now invite visitors on the from page of the website to see the most Liked products. This way, Facebook is central to the company’s marketing of online products.

As with many other companies and websites, Urban Outfitters has implemented Facebook’s social plugins to their website, so that the visitors can ‘Like’ the products they see. Under each product, you can see the number of likes the item has got, which gives a really good indicator of what is more popular.

The most liked items are collected on to a page where you can browse the items according to Women’s wear, Men’s wear or Apartment.

Furthermore, the website also promotes themselves with a large Like image that makes you a Liker of the Urban Outfitters page on Facebook. The Facebook page now has about 315,000 Likers where the company shares their blog content of stuff they find cool.

The company is in general really good at integrating their social marketing efforts together with their main corporate website and using the Like-feature as a marketing tool. Also, they are good at creating content that attract their tribe rather than only featuring products and offers.

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The Most Badass YouTube Video Ever?

Anders Justesen Jensen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:13:43 +0000

Sylvester Stallone’s new uber-action packed movie, The Expendables, features the crème de la crème of past and present action stars including Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Jason Stratham, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and of course Sly himself.

With such a star studded cast one would only expect a promotional campaign to match and the marketing team behind The Expendables doesn’t let you down:

A newly published YouTube video features Stallone promoting the video with an ‘Insider Hollywood’ reporter when all of the sudden bad guys from the recommended videos on the right start pointing their guns at him and soon all hell breaks lose.

Confused? Below is a video of the video – but just go to Youtube to see for yourself: Youtube.com/expendables

The video is tailor made for viral use and the integration with Twitter and Facebook eases this process for viewers. Another more humorous detail is the highly biased and all positive comments indicating that this is not a normal YouTube-video.

Indeed, this is a very extraordinary and innovative way of using the YouTube-platform and probably not cheap either. However, it is not the first of its kind as we have previously described a similar case here on this blog.

Having said that, I can’t wait to check out the movie myself later this week and this video hasn’t made my expectations any smaller!

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Flowtown – an Interesting Social Marketing Tool

Jonas Klit Nielsen — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:00:27 +0000

What if you could take your e-mail customer or lead list, and very easy get their social profile and get to know them? Imagine you could segment them in how influential they are on the social web. That is what is possible with the tools provided by Flowtown!

The following part about the essence of Flowtown is from their website, as they explain it perfectly.

Get to Know Your Customers

Discover who your customers really are and what they’re doing and saying on social networks. Wouldn’t you love a way to enter an e-mail address—or 10,000 at once—and get the whole picture of anyone or everyone on your list? Know where and how to grab their attention and start some buzz about your biz. Get the info that builds mutually beneficial, lasting customer relationships.

Learn where your customers live on key social networks. Be empowered to go there to start the “conversation”; to focus your marketing on what your customers will LOVE to hear, learn, enjoy, and buy. Your Customer Insight Report gives you the macro view of your customer list, and then digs in to reveal gems of useful info. Suddenly you grasp where to spend your marketing time and money. You’ll know the 20% of people who deliver 80% of your results. And, you’ll know them by name.

Identify the Influencers

Flowtown identifies the influencers for you. They’re the folks on your list who take joy in discovering great things and sharing that news with everyone. And when they speak, people listen. If you have only 10 spare minutes a day, spend it giving special attention to these smart, sincere and enthusiastic trendsetters.

Integration With Your Other Tools

E-mail campaign apps, CRMs, contact forms, landing pages: integrate and enhance them with Flowtown and they become infinitely smarter and more powerful.

Flowtown has received great reviews in Fast Company and The NY Times, amongst others. I think it’s a very interesting tactical tool to explore further. We will definitely try it out here at Mindjumpers.

If you have tried Flowtown or know of similar tools, please share it with us all in the comments.

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Facebook Places Explained

Anne Herngaard — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:39:35 +0000

Are you wondering what all the talk with Facebook Places is about? Here’s an explanation by the people at Facebook.

According to Facebook, Places is basically about knowing where you friends hang out. From our profiles on Facebook, we all know and share all other sorts of things about each other. But a fundamental thing we would often like to know about other people is “where are you right now?”

Part of the idea behind Facebook Places is the same as with other geolocation services like Gowalla and Foursquare: to create spontaneous meetings. Facebook wants to tear down the walls between getting in touch with each other when you hang out in the park, go to a café or go to an event. By using places, you can get to know what people in your network that are near you and get together.

Another aspect is the fact that when you share your location, you leave a trail of experiences to your digital identity and to the places you have checked in at. Digital and real life experiences will become intertwined in the sense that others who visit the same places as you have been, can become inspired or add something to their experiences, making places more social.

It all sounds very promising, but it will probably still take a while before the effect of Facebook Places will be really powerful. I am not sure whether or not Facebook Places will eventually overrule other services like Foursquare and Gowalla or how powerful geolocation will be. Also Places will become an interesting platform for marketing efforts, like for instance location specific ads. With more than 500 million users on Facebook and 4.6 billion mobile phones on the planet, it will be interesting to see where it will bring us in the future. Within the coming years, geosocial functions will likely become an integral part of our lives, as more and more people get smart phones, tablets and cameras with in-built GPS data to track our lives.

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Spacebook and Danceroulette Music Video

Anne Herngaard — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:25:07 +0000

If you are a tech, social media, augmented reality freak, you may fancy the video for the single N’importe Comment by French electronic duo The Toxic Avenger.

The video both features some augmented reality as well as some familiar features from Facebook, taking the social network experience to “real life” surroundings. Or maybe this world seems a bit more appealing for those of us who live out our “real lives” on Facebook.

In the video, The Toxic Avenger are growingly getting more likes and add friends as they go along – of course the really good looking people – and “poke” the hot butts. At a point, the scenery moves from ‘Spacebook’ to ‘Danceroulette’ where they take in dancefloor and switch to different dancers.

And hey it’s Friday afternoon, so just turn up the volume to some French house! Yeah.

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Using Social Media Monitoring to Improve Your Search Engine Marketing Relevance

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:01:50 +0000

Written by J-P De Clerck, who is an experienced content, conversion and social media consultant. Like Mindjumpers, he is associated with Social Marketing Forum. You can connect with him on Twitter @Conversionation

Alterian has launched a series of white papers earlier this year under the name ‘social Media ROI’. I downloaded them and thought they provide useful insights and tips, so I decided to tackle some of them. The first one is called “Four ways to take your Search Marketing to a new level with Social Media Monitoring”.

Social media monitoring (SMM) can drastically improve your website rank and visibility. Maximizing effectiveness for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite costly and rather time consuming. The basic idea behind social media monitoring is that it can provide a cost efficient means to find out, just what exactly are the consumers’ needs and wants.

Social media monitoring: the keyword viewpoint

“The most important element to having your website found is using the proper keywords.”

For example, are you sure that the keywords you are using are the most commonly searched keywords that pertain to your industry?

There are tools available that allow for you to find out the most commonly used keywords when people search for products that you sell down to the brand and even when people search for your competitors. The process for using SEO keywords through social media monitoring is simple.

- Conduct searches for terms that correlate with your industry; search your competitors and the brands that you offer.
- Create clouds of theme words, which will help you identify the most commonly used words.
- Author Tag clouds will show you a general overview of what keywords other people have selected. These words are their content tag words. These were selected to draw from the search engines. They are true indicators of your search topic.

The word clouds is essential here and has three purposes, according to the paper. Clouds are connected with industry used terms. This gives you the data for what people are searching for in relation to your industry.

With this information, you can describe your products using keywords to attract that audience.

Return on investment (ROI) is quite simple.

The more effective your SEO is, the more people will see your content or rather find it. The more valuable hits your online properties get, the more revenue you will create.

Link building strategies

“Social media monitoring tools can assist you in meeting two objectives of link building.”

Major search engines want to see a wide array of link topics in your websites yet people want to see links that are relevant for them.

Social media monitoring can help you link to the most popular sites and blogs that have the highest amount of influence. SMM tools assist in linking the most suitable content pages along with their influence level taken into consideration. This link building strategy is much more effective than going about the paid linking strategy.

Pay per click

“An effective way to lower your pay per click costs is to create landing pages. An effective SMM tool will help you select cheaper keywords to bid on and use landing pages to lower your pay per click costs.”

Search engines such as Google, use a landing page analysis to determine your pay per click cost. Another effective feature of SMM is geo-targeting. This allows you not only to find out how many people are targeting your keywords; it also allows you to find their physical locations.

This can greatly improve your marketing strategies as you can cater to opportunities in new markets. It also helps you locate your competitors.

Organic SEO

“Social media monitoring helps build organic search engine optimization. By this, incorporating an interactive media into your website where consumers can contribute does wonders.”

This improves the pathways for inbound as well as outbound links. The opportunity for social interaction improves content and adds value. Not to mention, it also builds trust within your consumer base.

Inbound links are what you are looking for. The optimization of your organic SEO should be geared towards your content. The content should be arranged to influence other people, blogs and sites to link to your particular website. An SMM tool can help tremendously with building the most effective organic SEO.

Social media monitoring tools help you to ensure the most efficiency within your SEO efforts.

You have to listen to your customers. The keywords and information they are primarily using are there, are you marketing to that need?

“Social media monitoring and using tools to feed off of that information is the key element to successful search engine optimization.”

You can download the white paper here.

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