Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; 

Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, 

People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. 

More information, including a video highlighting the changes can be found on Google’s blog post Search, plus Your World.

Beyond Klout scores, Kred (by PeopleBrowser) assigns influence and outreach scores to Twitter users. An interesting approach, and another means to measure, but one of the things I don’t like about it is that the permissions include tweeting on your behalf. Find the Kred Guide here… http://kred.ly/components/com_pages/views/pdf/Kred%20Guide.pdf

UPDATE 09-Jan-2011: I just spoke with Shawn Roberts, Director of MarComm at PeopleBrowser and he assures me that although the permissions include tweeting on your behalf, the only time Kred will tweet on your behalf is when you instruct it to do so – as  in tweeting or retweeting directly from Kred.

S

8 Components for SM Success: #3 Content Plan / Programming Schedule

People need a reason not only to initially come to your community, but also to stay and engage with other community members (and your company, if applicable).  Having the right content, in context, will go a long way to giving members of your community reasons to stay and participate.

Depending on the scope and needs of community, content creation and a acquisition may be a primary focus of the community staff.  In smaller communities, the community manager may be responsible for content creation and aggregation, but in very large communities or in enterprise-wide social media initiatives, content creation aggregation, management and scheduling may be performed by very distinct community staff roles.  I will get into these roles in a subsequent post, but today let’s talk about some of the Content Plan / Programming Schedule component, which includes the following activities:

• Programming Schedule.  The programming schedule provides a roadmap for the overall editorial focus, direction and timing of content for the site.  The community programming schedule may include traditional as well as new media content.  The programming schedule should map the content to the appropriate context, be reviewed regularly in regard to the activities (and needs) of the community, and modified accordingly.
• Content Acquisition/Development. The inventory of existing content, analysis of the content needs / wants of the community, identification of content gaps, and recommendation and plans for new content.  May also include the management of internal and external authors, bloggers, services, and other content providers.
• Content Facilitation. Includes the editing of content and grafting and pruning topics within forums or discussions to maintain on-topic, productive conversations.
• What I call Cross-utilization. One of the best ways to leverage not only digital content, but also “traditional” content, within social media is cross-utilization.  Although content reuse is nothing new, social media has provided a world of new places to utilize content.  Because each type of content is different, and each may have to be “adopted” (see Content Chunking, below) for proper cross-utilization.
• Content Chunking. Quite often the best way to cross utilize content is by breaking content into smaller it usable bites or reformatting it for use in different social media functional areas (blogs, vBlogs, podcasts, webinars,…).  This is especially true when cross-utilizing traditional content for social media purposes.

(Depending on the amount of content reuse via Cross-Utilization and Content Chunking, these activities may be one of the more time consuming responsibilities of the community manager.)

This post does not include a discussion of the various types of content, which I will examine a letter post.  However, it should give you some idea of the activities associated with developing and defining the plans within the Content Plan / Programming Schedule component.

(Please keep in mind that these are the components for social media success, not the methodology or processes used to map out the strategy and plan.  My methodology is a four step iterative step iterative process that will be presented in a future blog.)

As always, comments and sharing welcome!

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(For an overview of my eight components for social media success, please see Strategy and Planning for Online Community and The Missing 8th Component of the Seven Components of Successful Community).

Too often companies launch into social media initiatives knowing what they want to get out of it, but not taking a look at the targeted membership and what the target membership wants to get out of it.  Closely related to the Strategy and Business Objectives component, the Membership Identification and Acquisition Plan identifies and clearly defines the target membership for the social media initiative.

Some of the entities to be considered in Membership Identification and Acquisition Planning are…

• Target Membership: This where you define the demographics of your target audience.  Is your target membership prospects, customers, employees, suppliers, partner, or a combination?   Is it defined by other criteria such as interest, education, life challenge, family status?  Understand who your community is targeting.

• Desired Interaction: You’ve identified your target membership, but what is your preferred interaction with them?  How do you want to engage your membership?  The answer better not be, “to tell them about..”, or “to sell…”.  We’re talking about the interaction between you and the membership that’s going to lead to furthering the relationship between you and them.
• Membership Acquisition (Marketing) and Retention: The membership acquisition and retention plan will vary depending on the scenario of community being launched.  Here are three examples of what I call community scenarios – each requiring a different approach to acquisition…
  • A new community, where the membership might come from the public in general, or a population with like interests.
  • A continuing community, perhaps already established on another platform, which indicates a migration of the membership.
  • An aggregated community, where target members would be acquired from existing communities.

… or a combination of the three.

The retention plan is dedicated to asking the question, “How will we retain them as members?”  A preliminary retention plan needs to be defined during early stages of planning, as it will be used as input to the closely related Content/Programming Schedule and Community Management Plans components.  The simple answer is: if you provide Member ROI, retention should be fairly easy.

• Member ROI: More important than Desired Interaction, member ROI can also be stated as “What’s in it for them?”.   Determine why the members should care about the community and what they are going to get out of it.  The key is to engage and build relationships, and to that end, you need to provide a community that is of value to the members. I can’t state this strongly enough because many companies completely miss this and wonder why their communities are failing.  If you don’t know what the members perceive as value, you can’t provide it.
• Competition: Research and analysis on what your competition is doing to gain target membership attention and engagement.  This may include include taking a look at competitors’ hosted communities as well as their activity on external social media networks, including niche communities.  The end goal is to determine how can you compete with other similar communities.

Of course, this is a very high-level list and there is much that goes into each.  But, it should provide some guidance around the types of definition and planning required for the Membership Identification and Acquisition Planning component.

(Please keep in mind that these are the components for social media success, not the methodology or processes used to map out the strategy and plan.  My methodology is a four step iterative process that will be presented in a future blog.)

As always, comments and sharing welcome!

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(For an overview of my eight components for social media success, please see Strategy and Planning for Online Community and The Missing 8th Component of the Seven Components of Successful Community).

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Downloading the attachment may do some significant damage to your computer and  can do some   Downloading the attachment to your computer could do serious damage also result in a hacked Facebook account. If you have downloaded the zip file, update your virus software with the latest updates, and change your Facebook password.

If your Facebook account gets hacked, Facebook has a reclaim process which can be found at Facebook Help: My Account Has Been Compromised.  Please spread the word about this email scam.

Some will say there are five components, some will say there are eleven, but the consensus is that regardless of how many components and how they are organized, the appropriate strategy and planning greatly increases the probability of success.  My Eight Components for Social Media Success are:

1)      Strategy and Business Objectives
2)      Membership Identification and Acquisition Plan
3)      Content / Programming Plan
4)      Community Management Plan
5)      Communication Plan
6)      Moderation Plan
7)      Tools and Rollout Plan
8)      Social Media Knowledge and Expertise

In the graphic below you will notice that Strategy and Business Objectives, and Membership Identification and Acquisition Plan are grouped above the rest of the components.  This is because these two components need to be completed before you can start working on the rest.  Similarly, Tools & Rollout Plan is below the rest because the others must be completed (or close to it) before you can determine what tools  and functionality are required to support the initiative.

Today I’ll dive into more detail of the Strategy and Business Objectives component.

The Eight Components for Social Media Success

Strategy & Business Objectives

Usually done iteratively and in parallel with Membership Identification and Acquisition Plan, the Strategy and Business Objectives component is the foundation for the social media initiative.  The following items need to be identified and documented (as applicable):

• Vision: An overview of the social media initiative and how it aligns with corporate or departmental strategy.  In effect, a social media initiative charter statement.
• Goals and Objectives: Statement of the business and financial goals and objectives.  It is extremely important to make sure that the goals and objectives of different stakeholders align.  Although each may have their own valid goals and objectives for the social media initiative, their goals and objectives may not align with the goals and objectives of other stakeholders.  In identifying each stakeholder’s goals and objectives, it will become apparent if they are miss-aligned.  Make sure all stakeholders understand and agree to the goals and objectives of the initiative.
• Return on Investment (ROI): ROI is included in this component, including hard ROI (if measurable based on the scope of the initiative and available data), measurement (typical web and social media measurements), as well as soft  (such as like reputation, voice of the conversation).
• Documentation: Documentation applicable to the social media initiative.  This may include existing social media guidelines or policies, communications policies, or published web practices and security procedures.
• Ownership & Roles: Identification stakeholders, owners (of content, web properties, this social media initiative, existing social media activities,…).  Also includes current roles and responsibilities as related to community initiative.
• Procedures and Processes: What is the change management process for getting changes to the web properties?  What are the procedures for getting approval of content?  Definition of the change management process for modifications for this social media initiative.  (May require initial identification of possible internal and external content sources and repositories.  Deep identification of possible internal and external content sources is done in the Content / Programming Plan component.)
• Decision Making: Who is responsible for decisions regarding the social media initiative?  Includes decision makers not just for the initial phases, but also the decision makers ongoing.  If applicable, internal processes such as content approval need to be identified documented, and modified if necessary to meet the needs of the social media initiative.

Conduct an Analysis

After the items above have been identified and documented, analysis to determine if the current state will support the social media initiative as it is, or (more likely) what changes are required.  This is an important step that many organizations bypass as they charge down the path to launching their social media project – however, doing so is a step towards failure of the social media initiative.  There are many reasons why, but I will give you just one example…

Content Process Example

Let’s look at an example of a company’s current content approval process.  The current process for internally created content to be approved for external use starts with 1) content created by the author, which is 2) passed to an editor or manager for modification and approval, then forwarded to 3) HR for compliance approval, which is then passed to 4) legal for approval, and is finally provided to 5) whoever publishes on whatever medium.  The process from start to finish takes three to four weeks and has to be completed before any content can be released.

When responding to a hot topic within an online community (such as a product issue), communication has to be almost instantaneous.  Given the current content approval process of the example company, three to four weeks to respond is unacceptable.  This indicates that the content approval process needs to be modified to support the social media initiative, or a process specific to social media content needs to be defined.

A Good Social Media Initiative Foundation

In a software development project, where time spent flushing out the business and functional requirements before beginning development greatly reduces code rework and testing time, and increases the probability that the software will meet the business need.  Likewise, spending time and resources on Strategy and Business Objectives will lay a good foundation for your social media initiative, and increase the probability that the initiative will meet your business need.

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PCB5 logo property of Podcamp Boston

The theme for this year’s Podcast Boston is “Preparing for the Future”, and will take place September 25-26, 2010 at the Microsoft New England Research and Development (N.E.R.D.) Center in Cambridge, MA. The session topics are still being defined.

For those of you unfamiliar with Podcamp Boston, it was co-founded by Christopher Penn and Chris Brogan in 2006. They wanted to learn more and share what they knew about podcasting without traveling over to the west coast to do it, so they came up with the idea to host an annual unconference in the Boston area. The first Podcamp took place in September 2006 at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown. Since then, Podcamp Boston has been hosted at BCEC, Harvard Medical School Conference Center and the University of Massachusetts. Each year PCB has been different sizes but always full of people ready to share their knowledge to those eager to learn more about this crazy space in podcasting and new media.

If you would like to attend, you can sign-up at the Podcast Boston 5 Eventbrite Registration Page. If you are attending and have a suggestion for any topic related to social media and podcasting – or would like to , please let them know podcampboston.org. This year they are planning a podcasting specific track so anyone that can talk about that subject on different levels.

(This article can also be found at my Examiner.com – Boston Social Media Examiner Page)

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Yes, if you utilize social media correctly, your brand, your logo, your product, or your company can benefit greatly from the relationships and interactions you have in the online – just as they do from your in-person relationships.   But before beginning your first social media marketing initiative, you may have to unlearn much you’ve come to understand about traditional marketing.

 1.    Listen, listen, listen.  This has to occur on a continuous basis.  Assuming that conversations are already occurring online about your brand and your area of interest (valid assumption), you need to listening to these conversations.  If you aren’t listening and one of those conversations could become very important – which can happen at any time – you need to know about it.  Listen, then engage. 

2.    Marketing in a social media world is about your prospect and customer, not about you and your message.  I can’t stress this enough.  If you go online using social media and begin  to try to sell, you may actually do more harm than good.  The most important question when planning to via social media:  what will THEY get out of this relationship?   You know what you want your company to get out of a new social media initiative or community, but you have to understand what your target market will gain from entering into a relationship with you and participating.  

Social Media Tip: Be sure to ask yourself “What am I (are we) offering that will attract and engage people in such a way that they will want to establish a relationship with me (us) and eventually become active members of our community?”

 3.    Social media is not outbound messaging.  Transforming your message into creative, engaging useful content (see #7 below) is important, but the conversations occurring online are what drives the relationships that will help you grow your business.    

4.    Credibility, authenticity and transparency are extremely important.   Some of the best intentioned social media initiatives were failures, or even negatively impacted the brand because companies were not up front about who they were, want they were doing, and who was doing it.  Want proof?  Read the following articles…

• Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061009_579137.htm
•  Whole Foods Devotees Lash Out at CEO:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/18/AR2009081803613.html?hpid=artslot

One of the best ways to establish credibility is to have an identity.  Determine who will be the spokesperson(s) for the company online (many times the community or social media manager), make sure they are front and center, and accessible.  People value relationships with particular people – even if on behalf of a company – more than they do a relationship with the company itself.  Engage as a person, not a marketer.  Just as with live sales calls, earning people’s trust is a prerequisite to getting them to listen to your marketing message.

5.    Listen and help.  Because social media is all about the relationships and helping others, you need to establish yourself first, gaining recognition as somebody active and knowledgeable.  Determine your target market and start talking to those people, but don’t try to sell them.  Make friends with them, and develop the relationship first. 

When people post questions or requests for help around your business (or any of your other keywords), offer help, but not a sales pitch.  See what people need and try to give it to them, but…  

6.    Participate at the right time.  As in real life, you have to know when the time is right to enter into a conversation.  Rule of thumb:  Use the same protocol you use in real life to guide your participation in online conversations.  And if you sense urgency, go with your urge.

7.    Your content should enlighten and educate, not just “tell”.   If your content is all about your products and services, nobody will care.  Remember that social media is about people.  Provide challenge / solutions information about the issues facing you customers.

8.    Social media requires a time investment.  Although many of the tools you will need for your initial foray into social media marketing are free to use, there’s a time investment not only to get up-to-speed (unless you hire an outside resource), but also to do the job of listening to and participating in the conversations, creating and aggregating content, and developing relationships.

This is by no means an inclusive list.  What else do you feel is different for social media marketing vs. traditional marketing?

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Just as employee self-service was the new methodology of the mid ’90s for communications during open enrollment, social media is the new methodology now. Here are just a few ways you can use social media and online community to support open enrollment:

• Use Blogs for important messages and for in-depth responses to common questions you’ve identified. Solicit comments to help engage employees in the conversation. Make sure to respond to these comments.

• Make documents available in Document Repositories. Utilize ranking functionality inherent in many social media platforms as another way to organize and present the documents. Including your traditional online publications within the online community, provides a holistic single point for information and discussion.

• Video can be used in a variety of ways. Engage employees by holding a video contest. A great example of this is Best Buy’s 401(k) Challenge – a video contest to promote enrollment in Best Buy’s 401(k). The buzz and impact of the contest resulted in a 30% increase in Best Buy’s 401(k) enrollments. Consider using video meetings or video presentations where you can’t do in-person meetings.

• Short Surveys or Polls can determine if you are answering your employees questions.

• Assume that if one employee has a question about benefits and open enrollment, others have the same questions. Let employees use Forums/Message Boards for posting questions. (Due to privacy and liability issues, I suggest using an “expert board” or Q and A” approach, where questions can be posted by any member, but are answered only by designated company representatives.)

• Ever important, Listening in the Forums/Message Boards and Blog comments can help you identify employee concerns you may have not addressed, as well give you an indication of the general sentiment of your employees.

• Pertinent Third-party content can be leveraged, either via Links or by integration into your online community (with the proper acknowledgments, of course).

• Calendar functionality keeps employees informed about important dates during the open enrollment cycle. As your company’s benefits package is considered proprietary, the community should be a closed community – one which requires registration and authentication.

Additionally, external social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can also be used to remind employees of important non-confidential events.  

Not just for open enrollment, going beyond traditional “push publishing” communication channels by properly using social media and online community will engage your employees and establish more open and timely communications, with the end result being a better employee understanding of your benefits plans and more employee trust of the company.

Do you have other suggestions for the use of social media in employee benefits communication?  Let’s hear them!

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