Social Media Policy, laying the groundwork for the global market.

It is great to see some big players making concerted efforts for cultivating a collaborative culture that supports their strategy through establishing effective social media policy. Here are a few examples that stand out. Here is Adam Brown, Head Of Social Media at Coca-Cola as interviewed by Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing.

IBM-s policy can be seen here: IBM Social Computing Guidelines or heard here: IBM Social Computing Guidelines video
Social Media Governance has created an online database of Social Media policies
Interestingly enough many organizations still have no fixed guidelines or policies on a global scale. These are simple and necessary to improve effectiveness and to avoid major mistakes. The details can come at a market to market level. Kudos to those who recognize this as a top priority. Please feel free to add to the list. I am sure there are many more, although some do not share links to the greater Internet community.

Cultivating Social Business Success

Cultivating social business success requires renovating your communications to find value in your human and social capital. 2BalanceU's methodology of cultivating a landscape for maximum added value of social communications tools (dialog not broadcast based) implementation. Achieve balance between listening and broadcasting for success in the new marketplace.

Hewlett Packard fails in Social Media

It is always interesting working in social media how cases sometimes just fall into your lap. I have made it a policy with my own work to try to focus on the positive side of things. The positive side of this is that I get an active case study to use with my clients of what NOT to do. To start with, we must remember the range of what social media entails, we are not talking just Facebook here. Communities and dialogs of all sorts, blogs, microblogs, social network sites, intranets, are only effective if we partake in the dialog with which they are designed for. When we invite dialog, we must take part in listening and responding, not just setting up a forum.

We have all had moments of frustration that involve the hardware and drivers of various gadgets and connections. This time, it was my HP printer, yet again. When it works, I love it. Unfortunately, more often than not, it doesn't agree with me. I think I have removed and re-installed the printer drivers and software more times that I care to name. This time it was the printer cartridges, which is clearly where they make their money. After the printer demanded, yet again, to replace the ink cartridge that I recently replaced. Despite replacing it yet again, it continued to refuse printing for lack of yellow. The natural solution was go to the HP support site. To my grave disappointment I discovered a years worth of similar customer complaints over eight pages, without one single response from a HP support representative. The solution presented, by several of the customers, never buy another HP product and switch to Canon. Very sad indeed. This is exactly what NOT to do when your company decides to enter the dialog, be-it a forum, or other forms of social media.

Out of curiosity, I checked their Facebook presence. Many official sites, not so much activity and all employees (ie. no trust). I must say that I am not surprised given the start. So I shall tweet and maybe if I am feeling adequately irritated, I will start a Facebook fan page for fans of "HP doesn't listen". I could even invite all the poor victims of the support forum that had the same complain, after all united voices have greater impact.

I have now replaced my printer with a Canon, as I need to continue working, and the printing job cannot wait. My HP printer at home has been acting up too, so we shall see how long it takes to get to "adequately irritated" even for a patient person like myself. I am just one of many. Shall we practice a ferocious roar for disturbing our workflow, wasting our time and our money.

Don't Waste Your Time on Social Media

Don't waste your time on Social Media. Make your interactions count. Having a clear Social Strategy and policy for your employees (and yourself) means the difference between return on your investment and sunken cost and time. Before opening the floodgates consider these steps:

Create a clear policy on what type of social media interactions are within the professional area of your employees. For example, human resources, should be using Linkedin and Facebook to review potential new candidates. They should also ensure that the company listings are current and appropriate. A great example is Boston based recruiting company Hollister staffing, where they are also active in groups for seeking new candidates from the experts.

Divide time between monitoring, replying and feeding. Some of this can be automated, and the tools are improving for monitoring. Be careful to keep it authentic. Too much automation in reply and feeding can have a reverse effect. One company to watch that is doing some interesting things here is Stockholm based Springtime. They do the filtering and deliver to the appropriate expert within your organization.

Keep it professional: When on the company twitter account, posts should be relevant and of interest. Share articles of interest to show your keeping current. When posting news, always link back to company blog or website. Provide time constraints. Keep the talk clean, limit slang and avoid swearing. Jeff Bullas in Sydney has written several great blog entries about the importance of linking back.

Learn how to use social media as a resource for new information both pre-existing and that which comes from requests. Teach your employees to do the same. The more clarity you have in your policy for social media use in the workplace, the more effective your team will be. They will thank you for it and you will see the results.

It is helpful to always remember that social media and networks are tools for knowledge sharing in a dialog, not simply new media channels. The sooner you create a clear policy for use, the better off you and your organization will be.

Clarity

There is something beautiful in the concept of "clarity." What I have semantically mistaken for "simple" has been corrected to "clear." In the process I have found clarity. When we draw our stories for use in strategy sessions, the ultimate goal is to find the clarity in our voice and our vision. It is not about making things less complex, but rather about making complex concepts easier to understand. Coming from the perspective of keeping things positive, I really like this approach and better way of expressing it. (Thanks for fixing my semantics, GK Van Patter, Humantific)

Applying my new semantics, my presentation on Social Business Strategy had greater resonance. For after all what we are trying to achieve in workshops is create a greater understanding of complex concepts in a short period of time. I like to refer to it as teaching us what we already know with a new approach to applying them. It is not as if we don't already know that if we express ourselves more clearly people will understand our message or our intention. "Get to the point.","K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid)", "Elevator pitch", "vision statement", they all have something critical in common - clarity. For communications professionals, Clarity, is where they excel and where their skills are overwhelmingly needed. The channels and audiences can vary as long as you have a clarity in your story and vision for your strategy.

Social Optimization as part of Social Business Strategy

Social Optimization

View more presentations from Heidi Forbes Öste.

This presentation is a summary of slides from a three part class on social media strategy. It was designed for the particular audience, which was business school students and entrepreneurs. The last slide provides a basic exercise for getting started on building a stronger foundation for your social strategy. I am revising the second two parts (Social Media & Implementation) for a more general audience to upload shortly. The class name has since been updated to "Social Business Strategy." Please feel free to contact me should you be interested in learning more about this class and supporting materials.

Google Wave, starting up

I just started two waves on Google Wave about "Social Business Strategy" and "Collaborative Culture". As the invites to the Google Wave beta only went out today, we will see if this wave grows. So far, no response and only four of my contacts are on there, but they are 10 time zones away. So, I invite you to join the wave if you are there and let me know who else is out there. I like the concept, but sure is hard to test when limited the invited test group.

Here's the waves...

SOCIAL BUSINESS STRATEGY: Let's define it together.

Applying social technologies to add value to your organisation requires cultural shifts for implementation to succeed. Leadership needs to be 100% committed and engaged in the process for it to succeed. Trust is critical. Monitoring and Measuring is important to get commited engagement and verify results for ROI both in time and money. The technologies are the tools, the people are what make social business strategy effective.

COLLABORATIVE CULTURE Currently working with the challenges in adapting hierarchical corporate cultures to one that is more collaborative to prepare for implementing social business strategy. Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this topic.