Great post Jay! For more and to see Jay’s SlideShare on this topic go to Jay’s blog post at Convince and Convert.

The 7 Steps to Creating a Social Media Strategy

Before you begin, commit to worrying about social media tools last, not first. Why? Because tools will change. They always do. There was a time when Netscape seemed invincible. Yahoo, too. Myspace also. If you fall in love with tools, you’ll constantly be changing directions, with no real plan to guide your way.

1. What’s Your Pitch?
The elevator pitch is dead. Can you describe what your company does in 120 characters or less?

2. What’s the Point?
What type of program is this? Awareness, Sales, or Loyalty? Pick one.

3. What’s Your Relationship with Your Audience?
What does your audience know about you today?

* Nothing
* Aware of you, but never acted
* Acted once
* Repeat actions/enthusiasts
* Advocates

Pick up to two of these segments to focus upon, but make sure they are adjacent on this scale. It’s too confusing to have a strategy that targets advocates AND people that have never heard of you. That would be two strategies, not one.

4. How Does Your Audience Use Social Media?
Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. If your audience skews older, you may not want to engage in a lot of “make a video” contests, since that segment indexes low on the “Creator” scale.

You can play with the Social Technographics Ladder data right here:

5. What’s Your One Thing?
What’s the soul of your brand. What’s the one thing that defines you – and it’s not features and benefits. Volvo = Safety. Apple = Innovation. Disney = Magic. What’s on the other side of your = sign?

Note: This is not easy to figure out. You may need to engage in some brand anthropology, and have an agency help you find your one thing.

6. How Will You Be Human?
Social media is about people, not logos. How will you let down your guard? If you’re a small company, congratulations, this should be pretty easy. If you’re a big company, how can you act small again?

7. How Will You Measure Success?
Lots of ways to measure social media success, so make sure you determine your key metrics BEFORE you get started. I recommend picking three solid metrics to track. Appropriate metrics differ based on what your objective is for the program. See Jay’s slide deck for details.

Now, you can worry about tools, and outposts, and social media tactics.

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Be sure to understand the implications of these changes before pitching your next Facebook project.

1. Email is now a supported channel
Facebook has long hidden user emails, but soon Facebook will provide developers access to a user’s verified email address. For brands that are serious about engaging in an ongoing dialogue with their fans, email becomes a powerful communication method. Email will allow brands to better reconnect with users who have interacted with them on Facebook. This becomes important given that…

2. Status updates are no longer guaranteed
Previously users’ streams included everything their friends and pages (including brand pages) published. Now the news feed has returned to a default view showing select highlights that Facebook’s algorithm thinks are most relevant to the user, which may or may not contain your brand’s message. There’s still a live feed view, but it’s no longer default, so only brand posts that fans interact with will appear in most users’ streams.

3. Other communication channels are consolidating
Many brands rely on application-to-user and user-to-user notifications to reconnect with users, and this communication channel is disappearing. That means in order to remarket to users to let them know about new product launches, sales, events, or promotions, you’ll need to acquire users’ email addresses or send popular posts (per above).

Source: iMedia Connection. Click here for full post.

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Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your start-up. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Enter Monitter, a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

Pro Tip: By default, the Monitter interface is gray on black, which can be hard on the eyes. You can switch to a more typical color scheme by selecting the “light” theme in the menu at the upper right.

9. YouTube

You already know about YouTube, but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walkthrough? Could your marketing strategy include a viral video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost?

And now with Promoted Videos getting placement in AdSense units around the web, there’s even more incentive to think about leveraging social video as a brand exposure tool. If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, and give back significant brand dividends over time.

Pro Tip: The most obvious and frequent business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising, but don’t overlook other ways in which your company can leverage YouTube. Visual walkthroughs and FAQs can be a great boon to customer service. Videos of you and your team giving public presentations, speaking at conferences or engaging with the media can establish and enhance your company’s reputation as a thought leader. And don’t forget the utility of private videos for use in executive and new employee trainings and recording company events; access can be shared with only the people who should be able to see each item.

8. UserVoice

As a small business, it’s hard to juggle building and improving your products with supporting what’s already out there. That’s where UserVoice can help.

From bug reports to feature requests, UserVoice can help track and manage the feedback of your users and customers. Not only does it assure your userbase that you care about what they have to say, but it can potentially leverage the best suggestions from the people who are actually using your tool or service. Since users can vote on the ideas of other users, you can start to get a picture of the most-requested features and fixes for your app or service to feed back into your products’ lifecycles.

Pro Tip: You can also use UserVoice to get feedback on a limited release or beta version of a product by setting up a private forum or forums. You can send invites to specific email addresses, or limit your feedback to company-wide participants by restricting access by email domain.

7. MailChimp

Most reports and punditry on the death of email are a bit premature. The good old-fashioned mailing list is still a good way to maintain relationships with customers, especially when done well.

The web-based mailing list manager MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month for free. Paid plans kick in at larger subscriber numbers. Featuring integration with WordPress, Twitter, Salesforce and more, MailChimp is the list manager of choice for an impressive list of heavyweights including Mozilla, Intel, Canon, Fujitsu, Staples and more.

Pro Tip: MailChimp has a well-documented API that allows you to integrate the service with your own existing applications, tools, content management system or CRM solution. There’s a growing list of plug-ins already created for a number of platforms.

6. Get Satisfaction

Great customer support is important, but it can also be time-consuming and costly. Get Satisfaction aims to help by leveraging the strength of your user community and cutting down on repetitive support costs.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum where your customers can get answers to questions, solutions to problems, and submit feature and new product requests. Those answers and solutions are stored and searchable over time, cutting down on support costs and building trust with your userbase.

Used by small businesses and large popular brands alike, Get Satisfaction gets rave reviews for human customer service and helping to build communities around brands and products.

Pro Tip: Embeddable widgets allow you to bring the conversation back to your own company’s site or even within your products themselves. Drop a searchable FAQ or a feedback tab or page right into your website or service to integrate the customer service experience right where your users need it.

5. Twitter

What would this list be without our favorite microblogging service? From best practices for brands to tips for executives to using Twitter for customer service, there’s no shortage of creative ideas for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Even if you’re not in a technically-oriented industry, you’ll want to know which influencers in your domain are on Twitter and which of your potential clients and customers are there (hint: probably a bunch). You’ll want to wrap your head around hashtags for business, and more certainly check out Twitter’s own guidebook for businesses (as well as our own guidebook, of course!).

Pro Tip: Try not to use Twitter as a purely broadcast medium; whether one person or several posts to your official account, make sure your company is listening and interacting as well as simply posting. Strive for authenticity in your company’s tweets and try to think of it as taking part in a conversation, not just another soapbox platform.

4. Facebook

Facebook is the other social networking giant you’ll want to be sure your business has a presence on. It’s another powerful tool for building relationships, raising visibility for your brand, and targeting your customer niche.

With a robust and relatively low-cost advertising platform, you can connect directly to the potential customers or clients who might want to know about you. Optimization tools help you fine-tune and target your ads more intelligently, and get detailed insight into who is responding to your ads.

Pro Tip: Authenticity is key here too for maximum impact. With changes that made Facebook Pages more like personal pages, your brand’s home on Facebook is no longer relegated to fairly static profile information. Since the Wall Feed is usually the main point of entry for your fans and visitors, think of it as an opportunity to provide some sort of utility to your visitors, whether it be information, entertainment, or relevant expressions of your company’s culture and mission.

3. Basecamp

If you’re like most startups, you’ve got a heck of a lot going on. You need to keep on top of your projects and open loops, not just internally but with your clients, partners, and customers as well. That’s where a good project management tool comes in.

Basecamp from 37signals is a great and cost-effective web-based tool for project management and collaboration. Featuring to-do lists, milestones for important due-dates, file sharing, blog-style messaging, wiki-style writeboards, time tracking, and integration with the excellent group chat product Campfire, basic plans for small businesses start at $24 a month.

Pro Tip: Add extra functionality to your Basecamp environment or integrate it with your existing systems in the extras and add-ons department. For example if you use Freshbooks, you can even invoice your Basecamp projects via Freshbooks.

2. LinkedIn

From hiring to networking with cohorts and potential clients to participating in groups and question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs and business professionals of all stripes. It’s a great place to both discover and research potential job candidates (with a reported 75% of hiring managers using it over Facebook and Twitter), as well as both keeping up with and extending your network.

Pro Tip: Although it’s not an overnight success solution, positioning yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domain(s) relevant to your business can be a great way to increase your authority and drive new interest to your business. Don’t underestimate the power of asking for advice here as well.

1. Google Apps for Domains

Start-up costs for outfitting an office with networking and computing equipment are staggering enough as it is without even taking into account the software and maintenance components. One area for adventurous entrepreneurs to cut costs in the latter department lies in the realm of typical office staples: email, calendaring and the office suites businesses typically need to use to prepare documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Instead of paying an IT staff to set up, host and maintain your own mail servers, Google Apps for Domains can handle custom email addresses at your own company’s URL. As an alternative to Microsoft Outlook worth considering, Gmail also integrates nicely with Google Calendar for your group calendaring needs.

And whereas once Microsoft Office was one of your only choices in the office suites department, Google Documents now handles document, spreadsheet and presentation preparation with aplomb — all the while making it easy to share and collaborate with colleagues without having to email documents around or check items out of a central repository.

Pro Tip: For the truly frugal, you can even opt for the totally free Standard Edition which includes basic Gmail, calendaring, Google Docs and Google Sites. Premier Edition will run you $50 per user per year, but increases user email storage to 25GB, adds more security features and guarantees you up-time and support.

Posted by Mashable Blog on October 26th, 2009

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Two words: “reputational triangulation.”

That’s our new reality in managing brands. This became obvious to me after spending countless hours talking about the implications of Google Sidewiki, the easy-to-install browser add-on that wraps consumer commentary and feedback commentary — even the harsh, unsettling stuff — around webpages, including branded ones.

Just when brands thought they might muster a passable social-media “sense and respond” defense against the brutal realities of consumer nastygrams or Google search-result hogging, or just when they figured out a few tricks for managing Wikipedia and all those activists and product recalls that make their way onto your entry, brands must now contend with yet another trust broker that wraps candid conversation around their cherished homefront, whether they like it or not.

Triangulation, in addition to being a way to locate one’s position, is also a tactic used in chess. To use triangulation is, as Wikipedia tells us, “to put one’s opponent in a zugzwang,” meaning you force your opponent to make a move he would prefer not to make. Too much triangulation, and the escape doors start to permanently close. Either that, or your brand starts to look sideways.

Which leads us to back to Sidewiki: What’s the big deal? According to Google, Sidewiki “allows you to contribute helpful information next to any web page. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.” A Sidewiki post can be started by anyone with a Google account. There is no moderator, and only the entry author (or Google) can remove an entry. Interestingly, entries are not sequential and appear instead based on Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm, which takes into account ratings, previous user entries and other factors known only to Google. In theory, it’s supposed to keep less-relevant or less-useful entries from being seen (which could, of course, include company rebuttals or clarifications).

I’ve played with it a bit, and with enough user participation, it promises a steady stream of headaches for brands already playing “whack a mole” in this social media “age of expression.” For many brands, including those in pharma and health care, it may drive uncomfortable levels of transparency. On the flip side, for new product launches, it might actually provide doses of early love that brands need to reinforce “reason to believe.”

Overall, Sidewiki has all the trappings of yet another — to borrow a piece of Chris Brogan’s new book title — “trust agent.” This is hardly inconsequential. Thanks to the explosion of consumer commentary, Wikipedia, search results, blogs, Twitter and now Sidewiki, positive, negative and sometimes toxic reference points are circling brands in unsettling, if not destabilizing, ways. From a pure ROI perspective, these vehicles invade both the consumer purchase funnel and the mind-set of other influencers who almost seamlessly stumble into these issues.

Unfortunately for brands, the perceived or accepted truth (in the eyes of consumers) is often in conflict with what brands posit on their websites, press releases and executive speeches.

But is Google the enemy, frenemy or whatever evil culprit we want to call it today? Not really. Google’s just surfing the wave we’ve — dare I say — “co-created” with consumers. Isn’t everyone embracing “participation” at full throttle? In the last few months, we’ve seen thousands of brands and marketers hang up “talk to us” shingles on Twitter. Frito-Lay is about to designate not one but four Super Bowl ads for user-generated content. Forrester just cranked out another report that put “participation” in the pantheon of next-generation marketing “P’s.”

Folks, we’ve bought into this reality, and reputational triangulation is one of many potential side-effects of embracing and funding conversation.

So how do brands fight reputational triangulation? Or is “fight” even the right word?

First and foremost — and please write this down — social media is not a life raft or cure-all. Social media’s echo chamber merely reflects current realities, so unfortunately, if you have serious weak points, no tweet or blog entry or CEO video clip will help.

Indeed, the issues that search, Wikipedia and now Sidewiki kick up are much more foundational to brand standing. Front-page Google search tends to remind us of product failures and service performance. Wikipedia rubs brand history — including any skirmish with activists — in our noses. Bloggers and Twitterites thrive by finding disconnects between what brands say and do, especially via advertising claims.

Those are more foundational issues, which means the rapid-fire interventions of a social-media manager is no replacement for a forward-thinking brand strategy. Rethinking business processes or the core brand-value proposition may get you out of the hole faster than a witty and timely tweet.

That’s not to suggest you can’t do anything now. The chance of persuading management to do anything is nil if you don’t listen smartly and parlay the blemishes into a focused call-to-action. So keep building a really smart listening infrastructure, inclusive of all expression sources and wired to your existing ones. And makes sure all brand stakeholders who have any level of external influence are wired to the pulse.

Oh, and if you really want to kick the first tire on living in a world of “reputational triangulation,” you might set aside some time to ponder Sidewiki. Trust me, your management will take notice on this one.

by Pete Blackshaw
Exec VP of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000” (DoubleDay).

The post Don’t Blame Google Sidewiki if Your Brand Takes Another Hit appeared first on StoryFirst Media Website.

The study, which included interviews with 76 executives at America’s largest charities as defined by Forbes, compares organizational adoption of social media tools – including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis – in 2007 and 2008.

For key findings, check out this link …

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Well clearly it appears I do after recognizing nearly all of the top 100 greatest hits of YouTube cleverly packed into 4 Minutes:

Which one puts the biggest smile on your face?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudhFVnN2o0

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At the end of the day, however, which ones do we really remember? Which ones won the coveted space in our brains so that we could reflect on them later?

More often than not, it’s the papers that painted a compelling story. It’s the ones we can relate to, the ones that remind us we are not alone or that a solution exists to our painful problem.

People love stories. Since we were very young, some of the first words out of many of our mouths were “tell me a story”. Just because we have become adults doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to appreciate a really good story.

Think about it. You can read all of the reports on the current health care debates. You can look at the number you expect to see.

Effective? Perhaps, but boring and also quite frankly forgettable.

Or you can present the story of a little disabled girl who because of health care budget cuts might not be able to be cared for at her home anymore. If you have a beating heart, it’s that story not the numbers that is going to bring it all home. That’s the story that will get you to move off that couch and into action.

I’m not saying that all of your writing has to be sensationalistic or hyperbole, in fact, that type of writing will be nothing but quickly dismissed. What I’m saying is that your paper needs a human hook. A reason with which I can connect amidst the graphs and tables.

And nothing reminds us more of our primal need to connect than cuddling up and being told a story.

Credit: Wendy Thomas, Savvy B2B Marketing

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