When you start your social media engagement you probably start on LinkedIn or Facebook. You explore Twitter and maybe have already an account on YoutTube or Flickr. As you get connected with people you hear about Foursquare, Yelp and Google+, maybe SlideShare and Quora. Others introduce you to LinkedIn Groups or Facebook groups, maybe Focus and Plancast, Tumblr and WordPress. Over time you play with social bookmark tools such as Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon. Then you get introduced to Klout, Posterous, PeerIndex and approximately 100 or more other tools.

Before you even started to make notes about all your profiles and accounts you have a bigger presence than you think. And now it's getting messy.

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I researched many Social Media policy documents in the last 2 years and what’s interesting is the different ways companies address and define social media guidelines. I have read policies where every paragraph started with "Thou Shalt Not….; and other polices looked like more like mystery books.

Great to see many enterprises guiding their team and their social engagements in a fun and encouraging way.

EMC released a brief training video for their team, which is designed to communicate the key points of proper social engagement while not losing sight of the 'fun' side of Social Media.

The Evolution of Communication: Social Media Engagement @ EMC

Meltwater Employee Social Media Guidelines

Social Media Guidelines Help UPS Employees Protect Their Reps

For me social media guidelines are telling a lot about company culture – not only as a workspace but also for the customers.

More Social Media Guidelines in our resource center and more video clips also on our YouTube Channel

Thanks to all participants in our webinar today. In case you could not attend or want to share the presentation with colleagues or just want to refresh your memory, we've made the presentation available her:

Presentation PDF also available via Slideshare

You may also want to read this page: "Selecting a social media strategist"

This is no easy task. Once you look under the hood what you need – you will have a hard time to find one. There is currently one capable social media strategist for approximately 1,000 open positions.

The Social Media Director should be able to do the following:

1) Making a thorough assessment

Hopefully using some proven audit or assessment methods

Coming back with a well structured report

Being able to make a good social media swot analysis from the findings

2) Creating a social media strategy

Having the ability and comprehension to go cross departmental with it

Knowing about the impact of social media on the sales team and how to leverage social engagement techniques to generate better customer relationships

Understanding the impact of social media on product management and how to leverage it for product requirements gathering, alleviating product design risk before it goes to production and leveraging the helping hand of early adopters in the product launch phase

Realizing the enormous impact on the support team and how service can leverage social media to improve service quality, customer experience level and advocacy

Haven a similar understanding of how social media improves HR, logistics, procurement and obviously marketing.

3) Strategy Alignment

Responsibility to bring the social media strategy in perfect alignment with the overall corporate strategy and possibly coach the executive team to make necessary alignments in the corporate strategy.

4) Overseeing the social engagement plans from the various departments

As such the Social Media Director has to be able to easily connect across department levels and support all department in their respective engagement which all has to serve the overall social media and business strategy.

Each of the departments will want and need to do their own programs to improve customer advocacy and drive public engagement. The social media director will be very busy to support all the departments with a cohesive engagement plan development.

5) Strategy Execution

Managing the executing of the social media strategy and ensuring that a clearly defined goal will be achieved at the decided point in time.

Now – there are some cute job descriptions out there where the social media director is also the one who does the "tweeting, blogging and commenting" all in one person. And the rest of the team does business as usual? That will obviously be a big failure.

What are you 'gonna do' – if you can't get the people?

Don't make a compromise and hire some mediocre social media people who may do their best – but that is still not the best for your company. Take your own team through a thorough education. They may take a bit longer to understand all the social media permutations and effects – but they know your business, your customers, your company culture and so much more that a social media super star has to learn if they join your organization. 

You may want to join our online business briefing Thursday this week

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Social media is great for 20 somethings, social media is a marketing responsibility and earth is a disk.

OK the older generation with managers above 40, have quite a challenge to get their arms around social media. But the business starters, college kids are not so much better off just because they are young, learn faster and are more agile. After reviewing the two years of Social Media education engagement I noticed that successful social media managers and successful social media consultants are between 35 and 50. I also noticed that none of the social media rock stars is less than 30. More so I noticed that high impact social media engagements – outside the fancy campaigns – but the ones who seriously improved customer experience, drove consumer engagement, helped to reduce cost or increase revenue were almost all driven, managed and executed by senior people.

This is NOT the end of your career – but you need to turn your assets into a new advantage!

Social media has an interesting surprise in store for the more established generation.

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Help Jackie get a scholarship

Do it the fun way: Play Empire Avenue and find 500 "investors" buying min 100 shares for SMACAD by May 16

Obviously it is a game and no real money is involved

Social Media Academy decided to give one scholarship for the Social Media Strategist Class in every trimester for one person who is highly engaged in the social web and we feel deserves a scholarship for a variety of reasons.

For this upcoming class Jackie Coughlan was nominated for a scholarship.

Now – the social web being the most competitive place for attention, recognition, engagement, connectivity and actually fun is a perfect place to connect a scholarship with a bit of all of the above.

Here is the fun part:
Help Jackie find 500 "investors" in Social Media Academy Shares on the latest game:
"Empire Avenue" and buy 100 shares here: http://www.empireavenue.com/smacad
Obviously it is a game and no real money is involved.

You can watch it grow on "Leaders | Share Price"

OK – Now – please help Jackie get her scholarship.

Short link to this page: http://bit.ly/smacadhjgs

April 28 – Online Management Briefing – recap

High Impact Enterprise Social Media Strategies with ROI above 100%

Presentation PDF also available via Slideshare

It's no longer the question whether or not there is a financial ROI on social media, but how high it can be.
Social Media Academy is introducing some "High Impact Strategies" to get ROI above 100% within a year.

- Enterprise level social media engagement models
- Social Media in the support department with ROI of 142%
- Social Media in the product management group creating an ROI of 167%
- Social Media in the sales organization creating an ROI of 337%
- Social Media in the marketing department creating an ROI of 525%
- Methods, models and frameworks to create high impact strategies
- Organization models that allow high impact ROI in enterprises
- Where to start – who to hire.

Audience: Business managers / Business consultants
Duration: 45 minutes plus Q+A
Takeaway: Get the big picture for high impact ROI on social media

Exploring how the Social Media Academy can enhance your business & your career – Intro Webinar

Summer class 2011  – Certified Social Media Strategist, Business Managers – Training & Certification

Thanks to all participants in our webinar yesterday. In case you could not attend or want to share the presentation with colleagues or just want to refresh your memory, we've made the presentation available her: Continue Reading →

I recently chatted with one of the LinkedIn co-founders about the evolution of LinkedIn. He asked my why I seem to use more and more Facebook's platform even on the business side. Last week my friend Mike Dubrall shared with me that he has completely changed his usage pattern from 90% LinkedIn and 10% all others together, to less than 10% LinkedIn, more than 50% Facebook and then the rest.

In accordance to a "ZimmPoll" Facebook seems to be the dominate leader of the social networks when it comes to usage. Facebook Twitter and YouTube owning over 80% of the "Mind Share".

Image source AgWired

Microsoft, Google, Facebook have one thing in common:

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There are quite some controversial discussions about the role of the social media strategist. Similar to social media itself, when people don't understand, their first reaction is to call it hype and reject the thought.

There is no difference to the role of a Social Media Strategist.

But once you stand in a campus with 26,000 employees, 1.2 Million customers and a few billion in revenue you know that social media is no longer just some chit chat with friends. Once you see companies like BP or Nestle struggle with their ability to respond to a globally discussed issue, you know that Joe Social Media Consultant is hopelessly overwhelmed with any kind of help. And once you are tasked to launch a new product that is forecasted to produce $250 Million in the first year and launch a new corporate brand initiative having a $20 Million budget while at the same time need to restructure a service organization to create a better customer experience and knowing that the customer experience is dominated by the experience through 20,000 business partners – you know that most social media consultants have not a faint of an idea where to start.

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